The Cowboy's Texas Sky (The Dixons of Legacy Ranch 2)

“Yup.” She grinned, deciding that if she couldn’t shut down his stubborn streak, she’d simply have to out-stubborn him instead with that syrupy honey that caught more flies than a bad attitude did, a skill she’d sadly learned from being Rhett Rivers’s daughter. “We’re gonna master basic equitation first, then we’ll move on to the harder stuff. Bring him back to the mounting block.”

She tapped Patches into an easy trot across the dusty corral. Brandon was far less likely to be lippy without an audience, and it would give him a sense of independence. Besides, Handsome was as tried and true as horses came. If anything, the lazy equine would simply stand there. He was one of her best therapy horses.

Dismounting, she draped Patches’s reins on the rail and adjusted the mounting block alongside him, pleased that he’d walked the animal with natural poise.

“Good job.” She smiled up at him.

Holding Handsome’s bridle, Brandon took his time placing his foot on the block, leaning forward and bracing himself on the saddle horn, bringing his other leg over. This hadn’t been the wisest activity post shoulder reduction, but she was willing to make an exception because after the hard-fought progress he was finally making, if he had to face a month of being grounded from training, she worried he’d regress and he’d lose any inch of headway made.

“Okay, take him to the barn. I hear Jasper in there, so he must have just gotten here. He’ll help you untack him.”

Remounting, she swiped her Stetson off a fence post and trotted Patches, the spitting image of Travis’s old horse, Cimarron, and a mare who’d come to her as a bag of bones from a severe neglect case, now her animal sidekick, onto the trail that led to the canyon rim. She needed a minute to get her head on straight before she dashed to the clinic for a semi-emergent feline patient, and after yesterday’s truck accident, the insurance fallout, Anita breathing down her neck all evening and dropping hints that Brandon’s placement with her was in peril, then being awake half the night scouring the internet after Travis Dixon had waltzed into the ER bay like he owned the world and she was merely a footnote in his past, she was feeling rough.

Sleep had eluded her. She’d gone to bed vowing that Travis and his abandonment could suck a big one and woken this morning, her stomach a ball of stress and anticipation.

He’d lied to her.

That fated phone call had tipped her fragile world on its head, his loss having worked its talons into every fiber of her being. She’d tried dating, but it had never felt right when the risk of forming attachments and ensuing loss and heartbreak loomed like ominous shadows. She’d married her job instead. She couldn’t enjoy intimacy without irrational fears consuming her afterward of what could be gained, then lost. Couldn’t let things get serious, couldn’t replace the Travis she’d loved with a paltry substitute.

Any moment, the glorious sunrise would crest Sierra Blanca, a watchman over this stretch of Chihuahuan Desert that set the vast expanse of creosote bush; sotol shafts like desert stalagmites; yucca kissed with fluttery blossoms, the likes of which the scraggly desert deer would eat before Skylar could pluck them for her salad; and grassy clusters of fairy-dusted candelilla into atmospheric layers of sage, lavender, and beige. All of it, nestled between Cañon Del Diablo and Tyson Beef’s original, nineteenth-century historic ranch home she rented for cheap.

But today, Sierra Blanca spurred memories of Cerros Casas Grandes, where she and Travis had made love under the stars like hormone-crazed rabbits with four years of pent-up high school lust unleashing in torrents of careless but honest-to-God glorious carnality—Don’t spiral down that hill today. You’ll drive yourself mad.

She spiraled anyway. Bitterness roiled. Anger, desire, excitement, despair, a primal urge to kiss him warring with betrayal had culminated into her at three a.m. on her laptop, clicking away like an NSA agent to dig up the scoop of what had happened to him, like she was captivated by a train wreck. An old, grainy photograph had finally stared back at her, like a library microfiche film scanned to a database, of a hollow-cheeked, vacant nineteen-year-old wearing fatigues too baggy for his emaciated frame, in a wheelchair, disembarking a military plane, the attached article reading, Miracle Survival. After Harrowing Act of Heroism, Dixon Cattle Son Lives.

It had haunted her until her alarm had gone off. She’d finally X’d out of her browser after that. But her confusion culminated into an awakening of questions she couldn’t ignore, revival of grief she’d long since thought she’d made peace with.

Her texts chimed. She slowed Patches. A reminder about the voicemail dinged, too.

Jasper:Hey, Doolittle. Helped Bran stable Handsome. Where u at?

The foreman for Tyson Beef, the most punctual man on Earth, was nagging her. She grinned. She could set a clock by him. It must’ve been seven thirty on the dot. She needed to get to her clinic for a semi-emergency—a cat with a possible distended stomach—set to arrive in just over an hour. Saturday or not, her nonhuman patients were her life. Kept her grounded and focused, and she couldn’t bear when they were in pain.

Skylar:In the canyon, exercising Patches.

Jasper:Light a fire, woman. Ain’t you got an 8:45 this morning?

Skylar:Yes, DAD. I’d forgotten all about my clinic schedule that I’ve built from the ground up and have never been late for. Ever.

Jasper:No lip from you, sissy.I got something to give you.

Skylar laughed at his teasing and arrived at the magical little tinaja hidden down the trail inside the canyon. Jasper was an old-school cowboy. But also a grandpa who’d discovered emojis and overused them. He’d welcomed her into his fold. She played with his gaggle of grandkids when they visited, blanketing them with all her maternal energy since she wouldn’t have babies of her own like she’d once wished so fervently for. He’d been the first one to greet her when she’d moved in, made her feel like she belonged somewhere, was the father figure Rhett had never been—after she’d scraped through college on Pell grants and graduate school on loans and a part-time job, having lost her undergrad scholarships when she’d hit rock bottom and failed out of Texas A&M in the wake of Travis’s death and the emergency room visit that had followed. Not everyone could be born with a silver spoon in their mouth like Travis Dixon had.

She snorted. His momma had framed commemorative baby spoons for each of her sons’ births. He was literally given a silver spoon.

She loosened her camera strap that slashed between her breasts, aimed, adjusted the aperture as her resident kit fox lapped up spring water, lifted its head at the sound. Those wide ears were aimed at her. Assessing her but not frightened. Click.

The percolating spring water splashed a trickle into the pool from the rock overhang above. This freshwater oasis served as a precious watering hole for desert dwellers of all species, including people, judging by the remnants of a turn-of-the-century well pump discarded by settlers long ago.

The voicemail reminder dinged again. On a sigh, she tapped it open.

“You have three new messages.”

She listened, arrowed to the next, listened, arrowed to the next—

“Hi, Skylar. I, uh, know we got off on the wrong foot—”

Travis. That was Travis’s deep baritone voice! Goose bumps erupted on her skin despite the warming temperature. She scrambled to tap the Back button and start the message over again.