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

“No need.”

“No need? You and your family are close. You and Toby were like a dynamic duo. I used to want to be part of that close-knit fabric so much. If it had been my family, I’d go home all the time. I might never have left. Your parents were the nicest. I loved cooking with your momma.”

His parents had loved her, too. His eyes cut down to hers with intensity sparkling in them but quickly darted back toward the late summer sunset. It was touching the horizon now, like an orange upon a tabletop, the landscape sprawling beneath them, a vast, receding plain.

He nudged her shoulder in return, rocking her off balance, grinning and catching her, laughing, before she bumped the side of the truck. Pivot this conversation, man.

“You playing twenty-one questions?” he teased. “Why so fascinated about my family?”

She gazed at his dimple and touched the divot. Mixed signals. Was she putting distance between them or coming on to him? “They were a big part of my life. I just want to know about you again. Don’t mean to pry. My dad did always say I had this annoying habit of prying.”

“Shoot… Your daddy didn’t know his ass from his mouth, Skylar. Pry? You hardly used to talk to anyone except me, let alone pry.” The only time she’d argued with him, so disappointed in him, was when he’d confessed that he’d enlisted.

“I can pay for college on my own this way, without my daddy pulling the strings. The army’s even got veterinary school scholarships I can compete for, and you know my GPA is at the top of the class. It ain’t like we’re at war or anything…” he argued.

“It doesn’t matter. You could be deployed, die somewhere, and if you get back, they’ll move us from base to base… Why didn’t you talk to me about it first? The army owns you now.”

She pulled away from him, his uniform scratchy on his skin—a sensation he could still remember.

“Sky, I can do what I want now, follow my own dreams without him stomping on every idea I have for the ranch he insists I gotta inherit,” he argued, further trying to justify himself to her and make her see reason. “Why can’t you just support me?”

“But what aboutour dreams?” she whispered, her voice shaking. “What about my dreams?”

That had been the end of it. She’d never argued with him before—or since—then but had sidelined all their plans to support his enlistment, found a way to get her own student apartment, a student job, another parttime job, since he wouldn’t be home anymore to help provide and had given up his inheritance.

He looked her over now, like he was sizing her up. “I like this. I like how you, you know, don’t take shit anymore. I like how you seem to know what you want and go for it.”

She leaned on him, her head resting against his shoulder. “Speaking of going for what I want, then…” What had he just set himself up for? He took a deep breath and braced himself. “How come you don’t seem to want to talk about your family?”

He huffed and shook his head. The pivot hadn’t worked. He should have known she’d see through the veil.

“My folks are both passed on.”

Skylar inhaled, and he felt her fingers tighten upon his. He supposed it was a shock to lay it out there like that. His folks had cared about her, had protected her in the ways that they could, given her a safe place to be. She pulled up his hand and draped it around her shoulder, wiggling against him to get comfortable, and his fingers curled around her upper arm.

“I’m really sorry to hear that.” Her voice was much gentler. “They were wonderful people. I loved them so much for how they welcomed me into their hearts.”

He pulled her tighter to him.

“What happened?”

He shrugged, then remembered her remark about shrugging and took a swig. “Pops passed on a few years ago. My momma just lost a battle to cancer last year.”

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

He chewed his cheek, his fingers mindlessly stroking her arm. He didn’t want to talk about going to see her, ravaged by chemo, wishing he’d been a better son, wishing he’d somehow found more ways to reassure her he was fine so she’d stop worrying. Even in her last months, when he’d fretted endlessly and emailed Toby to get his ass home from wherever he’d been off shirking responsibility, she’d worried about him, hounded him about keeping his appointments and working out his leg. She couldn’t stand for him to worry about her and had hated how he’d drilled her physicians with his own set of twenty-one questions, doctor-style, arms folded like a special-ops badass, hoping to glean some medical mistake her cancer team could rectify to reverse her decline.

“Anyway, with Tyler gone—he runs my momma’s family farm out in Nacogdoches—it’s just Tobes at home. He drew the wild card and got the ranch.” He couldn’t help grinning a little.

Skylar’s eyes widened. “No way. Toby runs the Dixon empire? I thought he wanted to ride rodeo.”

Toby had been such a wild child, with zero intent on ever becoming a rancher.

Travis harrumphed. Skylar’s fingers released his and rested on his thigh again.

His attention honed in on the touch like Doppler tracking a storm, and his eyes dipped down to look at her long, slender, work-roughened fingers, inches from his fly.

“Naw. Rodeo was just one more way for Toby to dick around.” Dick. Stupid. But she had his hormones whirling into a haze. “But as it turns out, he isn’t half bad at ranching. Believe it or not, he’s got himself a fiancée and seems to love that she’s clipped his wings. I kind of think he clipped them himself.”