Adele had known that Zach would marry Devon, but apparently it hadn’t been enough for Devon to have Zach. She’d wanted to rub Adele’s face in it.

She’d never told anyone about her relationship with Zach. Not her friends and not her sister. Looking back on it, she wondered how she could have been so foolish. Not only had she given her heart away easily, she’d given it to a jock.

The last she’d heard, Zach was playing pro ball for Denver, not that she kept up on sports. But occasionally she had heard his name mentioned in the sports segment of the nightly news or seen his face selling Gatorade or Right Guard or jock itch cream on television. Okay, so she’d never seen him selling jock itch cream.

She didn’t know if he was still playing for Denver or had been traded. She didn’t know where he was or what he was doing, and she didn’t give a damn. Hopefully, he was still married to Devon, and his wife was making his life hell.

Adele leaned her head back against a cushion and let out a breath. She was getting a little bitter. About her life and men, and she really didn’t want to live that way. She loved her life, mostly, and despite her rash of bad dates and her first heartbreak, she loved men.

Don’t I?

She sat up and looked across the room. What if all the bad dates had more to do with hidden anger and resentment? Adele shook her head. No, she didn’t have hidden anger and resentment. Or at least she didn’t think she did, but…if it was hidden, how would she know?

“Oh God,” she groaned. She was crazy.

The telephone rang and saved her more mental torment. She rose and moved to the kitchen to pick up the cordless receiver. She glanced at the area code and groaned. Apparently her mental torment was not over. She really wasn’t in the mood to talk to her older sister, Sherilyn. The responsible one. The one with the perfect life. The one happily married to a dentist and happily raising a perfect teenage daughter in Fort Worth. The perfect sister due to have a perfect baby boy in four months. The one who wasn’t cursed or crazy.

She thought about letting it go to voice mail, but in the end she answered because it might be important.

“Hey, Sheri. How’re things?”

“William left.”

Adele felt her brows go up and her eyes widen. “Where did he go?”

“He’s moved in with his twenty-one-year-old assistant.”

“No.” Adele pulled out a kitchen chair and sat. She’d never liked William, but she’d never suspected he was so low as to abandon his pregnant wife.

“Yes. Her name is Stormy Winter.”

Adele supposed there were more important questions, but the one she asked was, “Is she a stripper?”

“He says no.”

Which meant she’d asked. “How’s Kendra?” Adele asked, referring to her thirteen-year-old niece.

“Mad. At me. At William. At the world. She’s embarrassed that I’m pregnant and that her father’s moved in with somebody eight years older than she is.”

Wow. Sherilyn’s life was more messed up than Adele’s. That was a first.

“My life is a wreck.” Sherilyn’s voice broke, and she started to cry. “I don’t know how this happened. One day everything was per-perfect, then the next William’s run off.”

Adele suspected there’d been signs that Sherilyn had chosen to ignore. “How can I help?” she asked, figuring there was really nothing she could do but listen.

“I’m moving back to Cedar Creek. Come home with me.”

Adele was home.

“I need you, Dele.”

Adele hadn’t been back to Cedar Creek since her father’s funeral seven years ago.

Sherilyn burst into another round of sobbing before she pulled herself together and managed, “I nee-need my family in my time of cris-sis.” By the sounds of it, Sherilyn was beyond crisis and rushing headlong into a breakdown. “Please. I have to go home. I can’t stan-nd it here without William. All our friends kn-ow, and they pity me. My life is falling ap-part.”

Sherilyn was the most capable woman Adele knew, and she knew a lot of very capable women. For that reason and many others, she and Sherilyn had never really gotten along for more than five minutes at a time. “Oh, Sheri…” For the first time ever, Sherilyn needed her, and Adele was the only real family she had left. But…Adele’s life was in Boise. She’d bought a house and planned on painting her office. She was thinking about getting a Pug.

“Just for a little while. Until Kendra and I get settled in our new pl-ace.”

She’d made a life for herself, and she had friends here. Good friends…who were married or getting married and had lives different from hers now. She was quite possibly cursed with bad dates and was very likely crazy. Maybe she needed a break. To get away from her life.

Just for a few weeks. “When do you need me?”

Chapter 2

Texans loved God, family, and football, though not always in that order. It all depended on the time of the year and your brother’s latest wife.

Bless her heart.

Sunday belonged to the Lord, and he ruled the pews of the Bible Belt. His word whipped the faithful into a religious frenzy with sermons of sin and redemption and charged the air with the electric buzz of his spirit.

Can I get an Amen?

God could have Sundays. Friday nights were devoted to high-school football. Across the Longhorn State, high-school ball ruled the stands, whipping the faithful into a gridiron frenzy and charging the air with the electric buzz of twenty-five thousand cheering fans.

Can I get a Glory Hallelujah?

As the sun set over the flat plains of Cedar Creek, stacks of fifteen-hundred-watt lights flooded the green turf of Warren P. Bradshaw Stadium. Armed with felt pendants, bright pom-poms, and stadium blankets, half the population of Cedar Creek turned out to watch the Cedar Creek Cougars battle its crosstown rival, the Lincoln Panthers. With a shot at State on the line, the buildup to the game was intense.

From the moment of the kickoff, a bruising back-and-forth brought the fans to their feet and the Panthers’ coach yelling at the refs and throwing his clipboard on the ground. By contrast, the Cougars’ coach stood on the sidelines as cool as a tall glass of sweet tea. Only his intense gaze gave Coach Zach Zemaitis’s turmoil away as he read the opposition’s defensive line, signaled his boys, and adjusted plays. He loved ball. Had played it from as far back as he could remember, but there was no cause to get all uptight and bust something vital. Yeah, he’d been born and raised near Austin, and he knew that high-school football was as serious as a heart attack. He knew that some of these boys’ futures depended on the outcome of the game, but he also knew it was supposed to be fun. Perhaps their last chance at ball in its purest form, before college scouts turned their heads around by attention, money, and the lure of NCAA scholarships.

The two teams continued to hammer at each other until the last few moments of the game, when the Cougars scored a touchdown that brought them within one point of a tie. With three seconds left on the clock, they lined up on the Panthers’ two-yard line. The center snapped the ball and the quarterback handed off to his running back, who dove across the line for the two-point conversion. One side of the stadium went wild as the necessary two points flashed on the board. But unfortunately the same play that had saved the game for the Cougars sent their star running back to the West Central Baptist Hospital. There, fluorescent light washed the emergency rooms in sterile white, and teal-and-maroon curtains separated the beds of patients suffering from assorted illnesses, accidents, and overdoses.

Zach Zemaitis stood with his weight on one foot and his hands on his hips as he gazed at the young man on the gurney before him. Pain etched Don Tate’s thin black face.

Zach turned to the doctor beside him. “How long?” he asked even though he’d played long enough that he pretty much knew the answer.

“After surgery, at least two months,” the doctor answered.

That’s what he’d thought. “Shit.” Still in his junior year, Don was the best damn running back in the history of Cedar Creek High School, maybe in the history of the whole damn state of Texas. So far, he’d rushed for more than fifteen hundred yards for an average of ten. Scouts from Nebraska, Ohio State, and Texas A & M had reviewed Don’s tapes and were impressed with the seventeen-year-old boy. Football was Don’s ticket out of West Texas, and now this. A knee injury that could sideline his career before it even began. Shit.

Don licked his dry lips, and fear pinched his brow. A real fear that Zach understood all too well. “Coach, I can’t be sidelined for two months.”

“You’re going to be just fine,” Zach promised even though he wasn’t at all certain. Don had torn two ligaments in his left knee, and some guys never recovered one hundred percent.

Zach dropped his hands to his side and made another promise he wasn’t sure about, but one he’d try like hell to keep. “No one’s going to take your place on the team.”

“I gotta make All-State.”

“You will. Next year. Shoot, Gerry Palteer tore up his knee in a game against the Gophers in ’89 and went on to make All-State the next year. He wasn’t near as fast as you.” Zach raised his gaze from Don’s eyes to the boy’s mother, standing on the other side of the bed. A green-and-gold purse in the shape of a football with the word “Cougars” sewn into the fake leather hung off one of Rose Tate’s shoulders. The purses had been sold by the boosters that past summer to raise money for new helmets. “How much is the surgery going to cost?” Rose stared at the clipboard in her hands as worry lines creased her dark forehead. “Not that it matters, I suppose. If Don needs it, he needs it, but we lost our insurance when Gorman closed.”