“But you and I both know no one is better suited to throw the bachelor party that would go down in infamy. We’re talking get Guinness on the phone because we’re going to break every bachelor party record out there.”

Jesse pitched another rock into the river. “Yeah, something else I’m really not looking for in a best man.”

“You suck the fun out of any and every situation, you know that?” Even though I was masking the whole best-man conversation with humor, I was honored as all hell that he’d even consider me his best man. We’d grown up together, but plenty of shit had gone down between us—thanks to yours truly—and I just considered myself lucky that Jesse still talked to and tolerated me. Never once had I guessed he’d consider me as his best man.

But he was right. I’d make one pathetic excuse of a best man with my ideas on love, marriage, and happily ever after. I could smile and get through the ceremony, but I didn’t believe in any of that shit. Kind of hard to when the closest thing to love I’d experienced with a girl had been not wanting to immediately toss her out of my bed in the morning. For Jesse, I got it. I understood why he wanted to marry Rowen. He had it so bad for her, his eyes were about to go crossed. Love and marriage made sense for Jesse Walker. Love and marriage made no sense for me. Arch nemeses may have been an exaggeration, but they were concepts I was definitely avoiding.

Or had they been avoiding me?

“Do me a favor and give it some thought, will ya? I’d love to have you as my best man, but I’ll understand if you’re not up to it.”

I nodded. It was a decision I wouldn’t make lightly. “There doesn’t happen to be a spot for a ‘worst man,’ is there? Because I can assure you that’s got my name all over it.”

Jesse laughed with me. I was about to climb off the rock and go in search of that whiskey—enough heart-to-heart for a lifetime—when his face got all serious again. Shit. “What are you planning on doing now?”

I knew what Jesse was asking, but hell if I was answering. “Getting rip-roaring drunk and finding a woman who can make me forget everything, including my name, for a little while. Or a long while preferably.”

He let out a long sigh. “And after that? Then what? Dad said he told you that you were welcome to move into the bunk house with the rest of the hands, but you said you were staying at a friend’s place for a while.” Jesse gave me a purposeful look. “What friend do you have that I don’t know about who’d give you the green light to move in with them indefinitely?”

“One you don’t know.” I kept my reply short and my eyes forward. Jesse was an expert at sniffing out my lies. Probably because he had fifteen years of experience doing so.

“Name?”

“I’ve got a name for you.” I lifted my middle finger at him.

Jesse looked like he was going to shove me off the rock again but stopped. That, right there, was the defining line between the two of us. Jesse thought first, jumped later. Me, I jumped first and maybe, maybe, thought later. I’d make an argument as to which was the better option if it wasn’t so damn obvious which one of us was winning at the game of life.

“Fine. Should you ever desire to move out of your ‘friend’s’ place, or should they decide to kick you out, you know you’re welcome at Willow Springs, right?”

“As welcome as the clap,” I replied.

Jesse let out another sigh. His and Josie’s reactions to me were lining up. “I already said I’ve missed you, right?”

“Yeah, yeah. And I think I forgot to say fuck off.”

“It’s good to have friends.”

I tipped an imaginary beer at him. “Hell yes, it is.”

EIGHT SECONDS OF glory. All a man like me could ask from life.

Clay had beat that phrase into me when most parents were teaching their kids the alphabet. With Clay, it was all about the most important eight seconds of a man’s life, the glory to be earned from it, and not resting until I’d given the best ride of my life.

In another life, Clay’d been a bull rider, too. From what I’d gathered in between benders and the few pictures scattered around the trailer, one hell of a rider. He’d even been a part of the pro circle for a while. Then he met my mom, knocked her up with the little bastard known as me, and had his kneecap stomped on by a two thousand-pound, pissed off animal. Clay’s riding career had ended that day in the arena a month before I was born, and even though he left it with his life, it wasn’t much of one. I’d never known the man he was before the accident, and what I knew of the man after didn’t make me want to know who he’d been. Clay could have been the fucking Dali Lami of Montana and it wouldn’t have compensated for the man I’d known growing up. Atonement just wasn’t in the cards for Clay Walker.

Other than our looks, Clay and I never had much in common. Rodeo was the one exception. I was trotting on a horse before I could walk, and Clay tossed me up on my first steer the summer before kindergarten. Bull riding wasn’t about a father bonding with his son. No, bonding was something Clay reserved for his whiskey. Bull riding was about one man living vicariously through another. It was about Clay living his eight seconds of glory through me.

Eight seconds of glory and a whiskey cap. That’s all the man who’d conceived me had left me with. Not even a nickel more. It wasn’t a big surprise Clay had never made out a will because, really, what was there to fight over when he died? The macrame pillow coated with years of smoke and whiskey fumes? The single dinner plate I’d glued back together so many times I’d lost count? The trailer I’d been too embarrassed by to invite a friend or a girl back to? No, there was nothing to fight over. Nothing to show for a man who’d lived forty years of life other than a whiskey cap and a son who gave his middle finger to life at every turn. Even if there had been stuff, there was no one to fight with. I was the only family Clay had. Or at least the only family he hadn’t severed all ties with. Talk about leaving a legacy behind . . .

The fire department had determined the fire had started thanks to a faulty space heater. My guess was that the main “faulty” part of the fire had been Clay, but I guess even the fire department was worried about me losing it if they told me the whole truth. Oh well. How it had happened didn’t change that it had happened.

By the calendar’s measure, it had been three months since the fire. By my measure, it felt like a couple centuries. Clay was a distant memory, along with so many pieces of my life. Working at Willow Springs and bull riding were the only pieces of my former life that hadn’t changed. I’d cut off contact with most of the people in my life, at least the ones who knew the real me, not the person I wanted people to see when they looked at me.

Well, I’d tried cutting them off. Josie showed up at Willow Springs every now and then, trying to get me to ‘snap out of it,’ but she’d been about as successful as Jesse had. I wasn’t ‘snapping out’ of anything. I was happily snapped in. If they didn’t like it, that wasn’t my problem.

“Black. You’re up.”

I lifted my chin and slid into my leather gloves. Since the fire, I’d stepped up my training. I’d linked up with a few other guys who trained every Thursday night with Will Jones, who was basically bull riding royalty. Will was an old timer, probably in his seventies from what I knew of his career, but he still moved and held himself like one of us “young and dumb” types. Will had an indoor arena, a few practice bulls, and a mountain of champion belt buckles. The opportunity to train with one of the best didn’t come free. Or even cheap. I was shelling out hard-earned cash in my pursuit of eight seconds of glory, and the longest I’d managed to stay on a bull since the fire was five.