Lonestar Secrets

Can a secret be kept forever?

Five years ago, Shannon Astor left the beautiful high-mountain country of West Texas as a single mother. She was desperate for a fresh start and a way to keep the secrets of her past buried. It almost worked.

Until a chance to make a better life for her daughter leads her right back home. To the very place of the past betrayals.

But it also leads Shannon to horse-trainer Jack MacGowan--her handsome high-school nemesis, now a widowed father. His daughter looks so startlingly like her own that Shannon can't help but question the circumstances surrounding her daughter's birth. Wary of each other's intentions, Shannon and Jack reluctantly join forces to untangle a deep mystery that swirls around Shannon's parents, a lost Spanish treasure, and a legendary black stallion.

If Shannon can learn to entrust her secrets to the man falling in love with her, the truth just might set her free.

LONESTAR SECRETS

OTHER NOVELS BY COLLEEN COBLE INCLUDE

Cry in the Night

Lonestar Sanctuary

Anathema

Abomination

Midnight Sea

Fire Dancer

Alaska Twilight

The Rock Harbor series

Without a Trace

Beyond a Doubt

Into the Deep

The Aloha Reef series

Distant Echoes

Black Sands

Dangerous Depths

COLLEEN COB LE

For my brother David Rhoads, who should have been a cowboy

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1

MILES OF EMPTY ROAD STRETCHED AHEAD OF HER. SHANNON ASTOR HAD babied the old jeep along I-10 west from San Antonio until the traffic ran out. She watched a million stars in the sky through the windshield as the hill country gave way to desert and the sun began to peek above the dark horizon in her rearview mirror. The Big Bend area was only an hour away now. She smelled smoke from the wildfires in southwest Texas and hoped the flames didn't get any closer.

Shannon glanced in the rearview mirror, and her heart melted with tenderness. Her daughter Kylie slept peacefully in her booster seat, her head resting against the back of the seat. The glimmers of sunrise gilded her pale blonde hair. Shannon would do anything for her, even go back to the place she'd sworn never to set foot in again.

She was doing the right thing. She could never get ahead with the cost of living in San Antonio, and facing her demons back in Bluebird Crossing was worth getting her daughter out of the slum apartment. This job was her lifeline to something better for Kylie.

Her cell phone rang, and she grabbed it off the seat beside her before the chimes to "The Last Unicorn" could awaken Kylie. Who would be calling at six in the morning? Her friend Mary Beth's name flashed across the screen. Shannon flipped her phone open. "Mary Beth, what are you doing up?" Only silence greeted her at first. "Mary Beth?"

"I ... I shouldn't have called," Mary Beth gasped out. Music blared out of a radio in the background.