Strawberry Hill. Cassidy Starr's headlights shined on the faded words of the wooden sign, which looked nearly ready to collapse. She knew exactly how it felt.

Taking a deep breath, she pushed her kinky mass of red hair behind her ears, then took hold of the steering wheel of her truck and drove up the dark, tree-lined lane. Up the hill, the two-story, yellow Victorian appeared in her headlight beams, and a wave of nostalgia and relief washed over Cassidy. She was home.

Humiliated, but home.

Tears dampened her eyelashes and she blinked them away. "I will not get emotional. I will not get emotional," she chanted to the silence around her.

She was done with tears.

Seriously done.

So over them.

These days the only thing tears did was make her mad when they dared to threaten.

Coming back here must have been pulling these feelings from her, because it had been months since the divorce, since she'd walked away. Coming back to Aunt Roxie's was just ... well, it was emotional.

She hadn't planned on getting here this late, but on the way her truck's battery died in some tiny town in the middle of nowhere. She'd been lucky when an older man had finally come along and given her battery a jump-start.

Pulling to the rear of the house, she parked, then nearly rocketed out of her skin when the truck backfired. The engine sputtered and died.

"Terrific. Par for the course."

She was suddenly shrouded in darkness as her truck lights died. She groaned — it was blacker than Texas oil out here. Other than the ones coming from the ranch house half a mile away, there wasn't a light or even a moonbeam anywhere to be seen.

Cassidy swallowed hard and tried to crank her engine. It made a sad attempt, but then the battery completely flew the coop as just a clicking noise sounded when she turned the key.

"Well, how do ya like them beans?" she muttered while fumbling around for her cell phone. When she finally found it and turned it on, she groaned again — the battery life meter registered in the red. Two percent life was all she had — this wasn't looking good.

Clicking on the phone's flashlight app, she reached for the truck door. She had to act fast before the little light she had ran out. The heated air of the early June night hit her as she climbed out of the truck, then slammed the door extra hard, trying to make noise, just in case any unwanted visitors were roaming around. Hopefully the noise would scare them off. She remembered that once when she'd been here as a girl, she'd met a skunk face-to-face. Not a good situation at all.

"Yah! Get on outta here!" she yelled loudly into the night. She remembered Pops saying that when he wanted to move cattle along. Pops owned the ranch next door, and she'd been able to tag along with him and his grandsons a few times on roundups. She didn't want to round up anything now, but yelling should run off things too.

At this moment, all she wanted was to get inside Aunt Roxie's house — her house now. It had been six years since her aunt passed away and left the house to her, as if she'd known Cassidy would need it someday. And she'd been right. The thought settled depressingly on her shoulders and she shoved it away.

A bed and sleep were all Cassidy needed for now. It had been an exhausting day of travel from Plano, which had started with catching all the morning commuters in Dallas and then gone downhill from there. If it could go wrong, it had, and all this was more of the same.

Heart thundering, Cassidy moved toward the back porch. Memories greeted her as she approached the house, but now was not the time to be waylaid by them. So she shoved them away, too, and trudged forward.

She stomped up the steps and stooped down to feel beneath the flowerpot that had sat next to that back door since she was a kid. No key.

She should have made certain the Burke brothers, who kept watch on the place, still kept it in the same spot. She just hadn't thought to ask about that when she'd made arrangements to have the electricity turned on.

The eerie sound of a Hoot Owl sounded from the direction of the barn's hayloft, and Cassidy shivered despite the warmth of the summer night. She shined the phone's light that direction just in time to see the bird fly off into the darkness.

She swallowed hard, then turned back to the door and gave the handle a twist, hoping that maybe ... Nope, nothing. She eyed the doggie door with skeptical eyes. No, no way. Striding over to a window on the porch, she tried opening it. No budge.

She was worried about her phone battery too.

"Why couldn't there have been a full moon tonight?" she grumbled, then promptly tripped over the step as she hurried off the porch. Managing not to fall, she found the rock that sat in the flower bed beside the porch and lifted it, hoping maybe ... A couple of bugs scurried away, but there was still no key.

Clomping around the house, she tried each window and the front door.

"Come on!" Weariness was starting to get to her.

She should have felt some excitement at being here, but instead she felt weighed down by the trepidation swirling in the pit of her stomach. She was here, but it was not looking good.

Stop that. She might not be inside her new home yet, but she would find a way. She would —"

Umph," she grunted as she fell facedown on the ground, her phone flying out of her hand. She knew instantly that she'd hit the water spigot that had always protruded from the earth in the middle of the yard. She'd forgotten it was there despite having tripped over it several times growing up. Either it had rained at some point or the water hose had been leaking, because dampness instantly began seeping through her clothes. Then her phone light died, the battery evidently giving out.

"Great. Just great."

She jerked up to her hands and knees and felt around on the ground. Finally she gave up, knowing she'd find it in the morning. Her knees were soaked now, and her determination was wavering.

Sleeping in the hot truck might be her only option. Her head was starting to thump, a lingering ailment from the accident that had pushed her to move to Strawberry Hill. Being hit by a car and spending two days in a coma made a person take a serious look at her life. Rubbing her temple, Cassidy scrambled up and eased around to the back of the house, still wary of what critters she might run into.

She seriously needed to be in the house and get some light. Her stomach was churning, her head was thumping harder, and now her knee throbbed where she'd hit that metal water spigot. She grimaced with each uncertain step.

Aunt Roxie would have plowed through this inky black and dared something to jump out at her. Her aunt had lived her entire adult life single, independent, and self-sufficient. She'd been able to do anything. Cassidy remembered the roof once sprang a leak during a rainstorm and there went Roxie, stomping out to the barn, grabbing her ladder. The next thing Cassidy knew, the woman was up on that roof with a blue tarp and tacks, covering it up until the rain stopped.

"It's just going from point A to point B," she'd tell Cassidy. "You can do anything you want in life if you think about it like that — and read lots of books." To prove that belief she had shelves and shelves of books on every subject imaginable.

The bottom line was her...