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

“Ah, do you know what that is?”

Her teasing gaze flitted back to him, as she wedged backward against the seat and raised her hips to snap her jeans again.

His smile reappeared and he sighed exaggeratedly. “I have been known to partake in fun sometimes. Right here? Case in point.”

He motioned his finger between their bodies suggestively. But between the lines, it meant he had other partners on occasion, too, to take care of needs, and the thought of him with another woman made the unsettled feeling in her gut twist more, which was ridiculous. Of course he’d had other partners. This man had mastered the art of seducing a woman’s breasts and extracting an orgasm from between her thighs. He had kids for God’s sake. Whatever had happened with his ex, she’d clearly liked him enough to let that happen not once, but twice.

“We could go into town,” she suggested.

He conceded on a sigh, his expression unreadable, his hand reaching for hers as if second nature, but stopping, then fiddling with the center seat belt strap instead before retracting to rest upon the steering wheel with an exhale.

“I gotta grab a few things anyway from the courthouse, so, yeah. We can bring back a spread for my guys while we’re at it…”

But his talking faded away to the edges of her thoughts as her gaze settled on the western horizon, on the escarpment, and the sight of what she hadn’t noticed until just now.

“Oh man,” Heart exhaled.

He glanced at her. Glanced out the windshield where she was focused.

“What is it?” He frowned. “I swear you do these 180s that give a guy whiplash.”

She shook her head, flashing a smile, but pointed at the horizon and opened the door, jumping out.

Tyler killed the engine. When he opened the door, he had his Stetson reaffixed to his head, covering his adorable hat hair. Dirt plumed from his boots as he scuffed the soil, floating on the late-afternoon sunbeams. She watched his suntanned muscles torque as he slouched his hands on his hips.

“You’ve got a helluva slump, Ty.”

“Slump?”

She pointed. “Look out at the escarpment.”

Tyler followed her point. A landslide had broken off the ridge in the distance, overlooking those pump-jacks, probably only a quarter-mile west of them and shadowed in the sunset descending behind it.

“Did you know about this?” Heart shielded her eyes, gazing into the sun as she was. “Is that on your land?”

“What do you mean by ‘slump’?” he finger quoted, his brow pulling together with concern.

She pointed at a stretch that had been impossible to see from her vantage today where the pump-jacks were situated. A huge belt of the escarpment face had cracked free, sliding down and flattening trees, revealing a sheer drop-off at the top.

“Do you have a fault line on your land?” She reached through the truck window and fished for her cell phone. “That seems like something Fossyl’s specs should’ve mentioned.”

A moment later, she tapped in the URL for the database she and Charlie logged data in and typed in her password.

“Nothing I’m aware of,” he said. “What’re you talking about?”

“Huh… I’m not seeing any geoseismic activity…could be it’s not yet updated…” She tapped the search icon, not looking up as she poked around on the screen. “Slump’s a geo term for when a piece of earth breaks off a ridge, and, well, slumps downhill. This one’s fresh. Those trees look newly uprooted. It’s hard to tell with the escarpment shadowing it, though. Let me rattle off a message to Charlie…”

Silence. Deafening silence. She glanced to Tyler who was watching her, a tick in his jaw. “Who’s Charlie?”

He asked it with such forced casualness, it was clearly not a casual question.

“A friend. And colleague. We shared an apartment in undergrad. We hook up whenever I’m out east and usually do the STEM open house together, that thing I told you about next week. I crash at Charlie’s place from time to time or Charlie comes to mine out west… Why?”

He took a deep breath. His jaw hardened. “No reason.” But there was no ignoring the temperature drop, the chill wafting from him in icy waves despite his impassive face and quiet eyes. Where he’d grown serious before, he seemed downright tight now. He cleared his throat. “Could the storm have caused it?”

She furrowed her brow at the weird tension, referenced her phone again, looking for any marked faults. “Perhaps, but I’d suspect that sort of slump to result from an earthquake. I’ll check it out further.”

It wasn’t far from the wooded area where the hideout shelter had been built, now that she thought about it. Which meant, if those little fossils in coffee cans, fossils she now knew had just been falling out of the hills like he’d said, had been found around the area between the escarpment and the pumps, then there was definitely something of paleontological intrigue in the region. This escarpment had a clear vein of Weches Formation stratigraphy running through it. The fossils in those coffee cans had been marine, and although she couldn’t tell with certainty without analyzing them in a lab and comparing them to specimens in the database, they were likely a match to other Eocene fossils. Her bread and butter.