The Cowboy's Texas Heart (The Dixons of Legacy Ranch 3)

Chapter Eight

Rule Number 2

No girlfriends.No dating.

The midday sun beat down. Sweat beaded Heart’s temples and rolled down her cheek as she pressed the keys on her total station. She could still smell Tyler’s intoxicating scent from his pillows. Phantom smells. When she let her hair down and it splashed in her face. Cedar. His signature.

She’d woken from the soundest night’s sleep she could remember with her face pressed into that masculine scent and fresh fabric softener. She hadn’t woken up next to a cowboy, though. But it was clear that he’d been in the room. All her belongings had been brought up, stacked nicely, taking up the floor space in his neatly decorated turn-of-the-century space. He’d still been outside working until at least midnight when Heart had finally crashed, calls ringing out, spotlights flooding the ground from the rack atop his dually as winches ground and power tools droned. If he’d come to bed at all last night, he’d slipped beneath the king-sized sheets without waking her, and he’d been up and out before her alarm had gone off.

Thankfully her total station, a theodolite for measuring distances and slopes between points with a built-in processing system for collecting and computing the data, had only needed calibration after being thrown around during Mother Nature’s temper tantrum. A few screws pilfered from Tyler’s toolshed—he’d said to make herself at home—had fixed the battery pack. She’d ordered him another box from the local hardware store online last night.

The rest of her things? Not doing so hot. Just considering her fossil specimens caused an ache in her chest, so she was choosing not to think about them. Thanks to her tech care plan, a new computer was also on the way. Too bad the Cretaceous Period couldn’t send her some new fossil replacements, too.

She rolled out her shoulders and typed in the next set of measurement parameters, popping another peppermint in her mouth. “Distressed” wasn’t her mojo, so she focused on the task at hand and slipped her sunglasses back up her nose as they slid down on her sweat and ignored the cedar and thoughts of the man who wore it. Strands of hair falling free from the messy knot atop her head clung to her neck.

She leveled the bull’s-eye, double-checked the ground distance, and jotted it all down on her clipboard, then texted Charlie a pic of a wild daisy to show to her daughter, Daisy—whose entire bedroom was a daisy explosion. The state wanted to compare a current land survey of the pump-jacks installed in the sixties with the original survey to ensure no changes had occurred since the original contract—it seemed someone was forcing both Fossyl and the state to triple-check all their data before Fossyl was allowed to start pumping for oil. Probably Tyler, now that she thought about it. What was Tyler trying to accomplish by stymieing Fossyl’s plans? Why had he been so venomous yesterday when she’d called him out on how he downplayed the significance of this incredible farmland and home?

Fossyl Corporate had also requested to build on their leased land for the first time in over fifty years. The state had asked Heart for a comprehensive report of the landscape surrounding the oil equipment and within the mineral rights boundaries for potential development.

She frowned, though, as she adjusted the vertical plummet and captured the coordinates of the last of the pins she’d installed over an acre away in the theodolite’s crosshairs.

There was something about these oil grasshoppers. The way they were cordoned off with fifteen-foot-high chain-link and chained shut, locked, and overgrown with weeds spoke of some sort of problem that she wasn’t privy to. The surrounding hills were green. New-growth pine trees had sprung up around the pump-jacks themselves as nature reclaimed them, as if to hide them away like those photos online of deserted places. It was beautiful here, and just glancing at the surrounding trees obstructing her view of the escarpment had her itching to go exploring. This same escarpment, on neighboring properties, had yielded Eocene fossils over the years, some of which she’d excavated, most of which she’d cataloged during her graduate work. She’d much rather go hiking to see what secrets this land held, than map out coordinates of the defunct pump-jacks.

Tyler hated them, that much was clear, while Fossyl was primed to put them back into production. And what had just been a regular survey job, one of many types her consultancy took on, had suddenly become a source of unease in her gut she couldn’t pinpoint. Knowing Tyler on a more personal level had screwed her impartiality.

She walked back through the wild grasses toward the gravel road where she’d left her water jug, scooping it up to take a long guzzle, when an orange and black butterfly flitted across her periphery. Instinctively, her eyes trailed after it.

Several monarchs were congregating on the milkweed edging of the meadow.

“Monarch,” she said, looking at them in wonder and setting down the jug, approaching them. “I wish I could talk to you sometimes.”

It was silly, but each butterfly she saw reminded her of her sister. Where her parents found pain in any mention of Monarch’s name, Heart had embraced her sweet sister’s spirit. It was either that, or sink into a deep, guilty spiral that she’d never climb out of, and she’d already been there, done that, and couldn’t do it again. Her hand migrated over her stomach—

No.

She drew closer to the butterflies, cutting through the fallow brome grass cows had once grazed on, now overgrown with meadow weeds and flowers, to the edge of the woods.

They were migrating. It was August. Milkweed dotted this former pasture, their favorite plant. She eyed the grasshoppers over her shoulder, resenting them. This acreage was its own ecosystem. It wasn’t just butterflies that migrated through here. She’d seen gopher holes, lizards, vultures, and a red-tailed hawk all before eleven o’clock this morning. She’d passed cicada holes beneath the woodland canopies, hiking here as day broke upon the eastern horizon in pale, stark hues over the escarpment, and a litany of small mammals and insects, even a few deer before the heat of the day kicked in. Whatever “developments” Fossyl wanted to do to their leased land, would likely raze this fresh wilderness.

She watched a butterfly’s wings open and close while it ravaged the milkweed. Another flitted over a deer trail leading into the woodlands, drawing her attention, as if luring her to explore. Young pines, sprouting between oaks and peeling-barked sycamores. Half the reason she’d gone into paleontology was because she hated boxes and loved to explore. Most careers trained someone to be in a box. Her parents had tried to put her in one. She’d found herself through such exploration with her vô—grandpa—around the vineyard in Beira on those long summer breaks when she’d felt so lost without Monarch and her parents. So much of her teen years had been lonely, sequestered away in her private school box during the year, shuffled off to Beira in the summers.

Getting lost on trails in the mountains beyond the Portuguese vineyard, collecting rocks with Vô who’d sit up late on summer nights, a bottle of wine on the table, smoking a pipe, helping her identify the quartz and various Devonian Silurian sandstones. Her avó, who’d helped her fill out her college applications, had refurbished an old dresser with padded drawers just for her to keep her specimens in. In some ways, her grandparents had stepped in to be parents when her own couldn’t. It had given Heart a purpose, when she’d felt nonexistent, when she’d felt so abandoned, the roots of their once happy family severed like a machete to vines overgrowing a building.

Unfortunately, geology, much to her parents’ dismay, wasn’t Julliard. Another disappointment. She was pretty sure they’d grown to resent her. Which was why they’d sent her away.

Her feet crunched along the trail overgrown with weeds. She pushed branches back, and let them snap behind her. Birds called among the trees. Still, the trail twisted through the woodland, climbing uphill. A vehicle rumbling, far off somewhere, edged her thoughts.

Afternoon sunlight cut through the thickening branches in piercing rays. A rustling squirrel in the detritus within the brambles drew her attention to…a tiny shack (?), nestled into the tree trunks.

Her eyes furrowed. It was hewn of decaying branches and baling twine tied at the corners in perfect knots, that looked as though they were slowly rotting; the roof propped on four fence posts looked hand-cut. She pushed through the branches that tugged at her clothes and peered beneath the roof, startling a cardinal that chattered off onto the air. An old milk crate? It sat overturned with plants twining through it, as if it had once been a stool upon which to sit. Old Folgers coffee cans, the metal rusting around the edges, were filled with debris. A pristine spiderweb filled the space between the far support posts. Random tools sat in an old wooden toolbox. Her furrow morphed into a smile at what looked like a faded, brittle G.I. Joe arm cast atop a piece of barn siding propped atop two more milk crates.

It was a kids’ playhouse, or hideout, forgotten by time, and she never would have discovered it had it not been for those butterflies catching her eye. Somehow, buried in these trees, the tornado hadn’t ravaged it. But as she picked up a coffee can and tipped it, sifting the contents and plucking out the leaves on top, her eyes widened.

Fossils.

Shark teeth, fragments of prehistoric turtle shell carapaces, brachiopod bits, bivalve ridges.

She picked through the contents, then set the can down and picked up another, disrupting an ecosystem of rollie pollies as well and some weird translucent larvae underneath that wiggled out of the offending light. More fossils. A kid’s secret collection?