Page 1 of Down in Flames

CHAPTER ONE

No one cheered for him. Not for him.

In the rodeo world, West Owens was less than a ghost. He didn’t even exist. But the crowd went wild for Kade Keller, the mystery bronc-buster who’d been tearing up local rodeos for years without ever winning a buckle.

Everyone loved an underdog, but no news outlet wanted to run stories about the state’s most tenacious loser. The rodeo world was crammed with hard luck stories of has-been and never-was.

Kade Keller wasn’t anything special, and he liked it that way.

Winning was out of the question. One whisper of his secret life was all it would take to burn West’s world to the ground. No one suspected a simple good ol’ boy like him to be leading a double life, especially not in a town like Sweetwater where even the Sunday sermon took a backseat to the congregation's gossip. He was a second fiddle, a side note in other people’s lives. Nothing more than a helpful shadow.

It took an insane amount of skill to constantly throw his rides without drawing suspicion, but money and fame had never been his end game. He wasn’t like his friend, celebrity bull rider Calvin Craig, who lived like his hair was on fire and rode the same way. West wasn't after a buckle. When he sat a bronco, it was for a very different reason.

He rode to prove he could take as much punishment as his old man ever did.

Jasper Owens was old now, whittled down to a brittle echo of the man he'd once been. But West still remembered the whipcord tough rodeo man he used to be, back before he was forced to kill his dreams and get a real job or watch his family starve. He had no idea that his youngest son had followed in his footsteps. It never crossed his mind that West might be able to do blindfolded what he'd once done so long ago, and it never would. Not if West had any say in it.

It would break his heart if he ever found out.

He’d sacrificed everything just to keep West alive, working himself to the bone to pay the medical bills for West’s congenital heart condition until all that was left was meanness and brittle edges. West had survived to adulthood on the broken backs of his family, so he couldn't blame them for not wanting to risk their investment. They would always think of him as a fragile, sickly boy. But he wasn’t a boy anymore, and there was no stopping a man and his foolish pride.

Even if he'd never prove it to anyone else, he needed to know his own worth.

It wasn’t difficult to stay under the radar if he stuck to small rodeos. In rural backcountry, it was impossible to throw a stone without hitting an amateur event, especially during the long, dry eastern Oregon summers.

West had been delivering supplies for the local tack and feed shop since right out of high school, so it was easy to hide his absence from town. Harder to disguise the injuries, but he managed. It wasn’t like anyone wanted to see him with his shirt off anyway—and didn’t that sting just a little?

There had been a moment when he'd thought maybe...but no. He'd been wrong. Even he knew better than to pine after a straight man.

Michael Whittaker was older, wiser, and tougher than West could ever be. Like the hero in an old-school Western, all square-jawed and lean-hipped. Women crawled over him everywhere he went, like ants at a picnic, especially when they realized how much money his ranch funneled into Sweetwater's struggling economy. He was everything small-town girls were raised to want, before they realized they'd be forced to settle for small-town boys. Feisty boys with quick smiles whose worlds closed in on them a little more every day. Boys who grew into men with no hope and no future. West was one of them, simple and unambitious, but it had never bothered him much until he stood next to a man like Michael.

Michael.

Everyone else called him Whit, ever since he'd first rolled into town, fresh off active duty with a pretty wife and baby girl on his arm. His eyes had been cold back then. Lonely eyes. That's what West had thought when he first looked up and met his gaze, all the way across the room. The only time those eyes had ever thawed was when his wife said his name. Michael. West had seen that warmth, and he'd wanted it. Not to steal it—not to keep it—but just to bask in it for a while.

So, he’d always been Michael.

Those gorgeous, bright eyes had only gotten colder the day lightning struck a tree in front of Mary Whittaker's horse. Michael was the first to reach his wife, the one to stop anyone from moving her when he saw the angle of her neck, but it was too late.

After the funeral, the Ladies Auxiliary had taken it upon themselves to set up a meal train. For months, Michael could do nothing but work and drink, and it was West who drove out to the ranch to deliver hot meals. He was the one who sat at the kitchen table with Michael's little girl, Abigail, sculpting with Play-Doh while the newly single father grabbed a nap and a quick shower. Their unexpected friendship had bloomed one day at a time, usually with a couple fishing rods and a cooler full of beer. It happened slowly, until their lives had become so tangled up that West couldn't separate them anymore.

Many of his friends worked the spread out at the Triple M, and he grabbed dinner at the ranch a couple nights a week. Every spring, he rolled up his sleeves for calving season. Come summer, he helped with branding, and he stacked hay in the fall. He never accepted a penny in exchange. In his world, that was just what friends did for each other.

But he hadn't been a very good friend lately.

Three months ago, a local farmer had set fire to the Triple M in a livestock dispute, and the ranch had been razed nearly to the ground. West was there that day, arriving just as they dragged Michael out of a burning stable before it collapsed, and his faulty heart had nearly stopped in his chest.

As Michael recuperated in the hospital, West never left his side. He barely slept or ate, certain that something terrible would happen once he looked away.

All at once, he'd realized how deeply he'd already fallen, and it terrified him.

Looking back, it was love from the start. From that very first day when the little bell over the shop door had jingled and West glanced up, right into the eye of a hurricane that sucked him up and never let him get his feet back on the ground. For years, he'd stuffed those feelings way down deep where he didn't have to examine them too closely, but one look at Michael, wounded and vulnerable in a hospital bed, and they all came gushing up to the surface. Suddenly, West questioned every motivation. He couldn't even trust himself enough to offer a comforting touch. He felt like a vulture, preying on a man at his weakest.

So, he ran. Turned tail like a coward, avoiding church, ignoring friends, and ducking out back doors whenever Michael walked in the front. It had been three months since he'd set foot on Triple M soil. Every time one of his friends invited him to check on the rebuilding progress, he invented a quick excuse, pretending he couldn't see the hurt and confusion in their eyes. But that was nothing compared to the ice that had slowly returned to Michael's gaze.

West tried to pretend he didn't notice by taking on an even bigger workload than normal. His newest delivery had taken him across the border into northern California, slinging fence for the autumn stampede in Montague.

His eyes were heavy and gritty from the road, and he was dragging ass by the time he finished the supply dump and robotically pinned his entry number to the back of his shirt. It was just a thin cotton T-shirt, nothing fancy like the pearl snap button-downs the other cowboys wore. Chaps and cowboy hats were practically a uniform for bronc riders, but he made do with work jeans and his lucky ballcap. They suited him fine when all he ever did was eat dirt.

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