"What have you gotten me into, Amanda Jones?"

Staring at the rough-looking building, Maggie Hope clutched her cell phone to her ear and fought down a hot flood of panic. "The sign says the Bull Barn. What is this place?" she gritted through tense jaws.

Rustic was an understatement for the faded wooden building sitting on the outskirts of Wishing Springs, Texas. It had dark windows and a long plank porch supported by columns made of knobby tree trunks. The steeply pitched red roof sagged in the middle. It was a dive, a shack.

"Calm down, Mags," Amanda croaked, the flu causing her to sound like an eighty-year-old smoker, instead of the intimidatingly elegant, thirty-five-year-old bombshell who was the key ingredient of the most popular morning show on Houston's local channel. She coughed. "It may look a little rough, but it's the cowboy and local folks' hangout."

"But—it's deserted. Lonesome. If it's a hangout, where is everyone?" It didn't look like a place anyone would want to hang out in. Especially Maggie. Dives brought back memories she worked hard to forget.

The TV station's van was the only other vehicle in the white rock parking lot—and that only added to her distress, which in truth was more about the TV camera than the clapboard building that looked like a leftover of the Wild West days.

She swallowed the lump in her throat. She wanted to go back home and write her daily advice column, "Gotta Have Hope," in obscurity. But ... not happening. Amanda was delirious to have offered Maggie as her stand-in for this important interview with champion Quarter Horse rider, trainer, and ladies' man, Tru Monahan.

Tru Monahan!

Maggie was a writer, not a reporter. She wasn't comfortable being in front of people—it brought back memories of the worst times of her life ... not only a time of shame and embarrassment but also a time when her life fell apart. But none of that mattered to anyone but her, and since the same conglomerate owned both the newspaper and the television station, Maggie hadn't been asked to do this. She'd been told.

Amanda sneezed. "The show asked for the interview to be done when there was no one else around. Small-town interviews tend to be harder when locals are involved. It's better for you this way." Amanda's hoarsely whispered words ended in another croaking cough.

"Amanda, you sound terrible." Sympathy won out over Maggie's nervous breakdown.

"I feel awful," Amanda wheezed. "I'm going to sleep now. You let those red heels do the walking and get in there, girlfriend. You can do this."

"But—," Maggie blurted, but the line had gone dead.

Maggie's hand tightened on the now useless lifeline to her friend.

She glared into the rearview mirror and cringed at her overdone blue eyeshadow. Her cheeks were too pink, too, and her lips sticky with gloss. Amanda had assured Maggie that for the camera she needed a little more color than was normal.

A camera.

Clammy fingers of panic tightened around her windpipe. Maggie squeezed her eyes shut and counted to ten ... calm did not come. It was a wonder she hadn't broken out in hives or something on the two-hour-long drive over here.

"Gotta Have Hope" was a dream come true for Maggie and it was because of Amanda's recommendation that she even had the job. No one truly knew what a blessing the advice column had been for Maggie. A lifesaver, really. As Amanda had been to her when they'd first met several years earlier.

She owed Amanda ...

Even so, Maggie figured this gig was going to be the full sum of her debt owed. Yup, paid in full was getting stamped on that bill. Amanda was always looking out for her, but she didn't know about the fool Maggie had made of herself in her freshman year during the school play. Freezing up, then knocking down the entire set in her panic ...

Everyone laughing ...

And then the aftermath—a chill filled Maggie. What if she made a fool of herself in front of thousands of TV viewers?

"Stop," Maggie huffed, glaring at herself in the mirror. She was not that insecure kid anymore. Not the kid whose home life was so messed up that she could barely hide it from everyone her seventh grade year. The kid who'd tried to lose herself through acting as an escape from reality only to fall apart that night on stage. The clumsy kid who left the stage in tears only to arrive home to find police hauling her father away.

The night of that play, Maggie's life changed from bad to worse.

No, Maggie didn't do limelight well. It brought back far too many bad memories that she was still trying hard to wipe away. Maggie closed her eyes and inhaled slowly. She'd found out the hard way that she wasn't meant to be in the spotlight where there were things she couldn't control.

But none of that mattered because her bosses believed this would be good for her floundering advice column. They wanted her readers to see the person behind the column. Ha—they might discover that was a really bad idea when they saw her in front of that camera. She'd probably freeze up, throw up, or all of the above.

Stop. Just stop.

"Positive thinking here, Mags. You will do this and you will do this well."

Pulling from the well of determination that had gotten her out of that life and into the life she had now, Maggie opened the door of her baby blue Volkswagen Bug. Fear never got her anywhere.

June heat slammed into her along with the scent of something tasty roasting inside the awful building. Okay, so at least that was a positive sign. She reached across the seat and grabbed the red high heels—bought specifically for this interview. Amanda swore they'd give her courage and confidence. Carefully, she set them on the chunky, white rocks of the parking lot and then slipped her feet into them.

She might be a lot of things, but chicken wasn't one of them. Sure, she'd once been afraid but she'd learned to push through her fear. And that was exactly what she was going to do now.

She reached for her red leather folder—something else Amanda said worked for courage—slung her large purse over her shoulder and stood in a decisive movement of decision to give this her all. Her hand trembled as she smoothed her flowing skirt, but she ignored it, then slammed her car door and took a step toward the Bull Barn.

The rumble of a large engine had her glancing over her shoulder. A shiny, black four-wheel-drive truck whipped into the parking lot the same instant a whirlwind swept across the dusty ground. Maggie's skirt had been swishing gently about her knees, now it caught air and attempted to do the Marilyn-Monroe-thing and fly up over her head. Maggie let go of her folder and desperately grabbed for the dancing skirt.

She managed to clamp it down just in time but dropped her folder.

"No," she gasped as it hit the ground and the papers with Amanda's prewritten interview questions instantly swirled up into the whirlwind like birds freed from a cage. Fumbling to gather her skirt hem in one hand, she grasped at flying pages with the other. The white gravel Texans were partial to did not get along well with her heels. She knew she was making a ridiculous spectacle of herself wobbling and tottering as she watched her interview fly into oblivion.

She couldn't do the interview without Amanda's questions.

Her long...