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

“Did all these fossils come out of that escarpment?” She pointed in the direction of the slump, although the trees obstructed it.

He nodded, then squatted down, and picked up another one of Gramps’s Folgers cans and sifted through the canisters. “Why’d you wanna come here?”

She shrugged. “To see you smiling like that.” She squatted next to him, her fingertip touching his cheek. “You didn’t get to be a kid, did you?”

He shrugged. Kept sifting. “Not always.”

“Neither did I.”

She said it softly, like she was seeing a secret piece to him. Which felt like not just another thread of an attachment, but like a whole damn root coiling between them.

She sifted around in her canister. “Some of my fondest memories were on my grandparents’ vineyard in Beira. Much of it was undeveloped outlands like your farm. So fun to explore.”

“Beira? Where’s that? Portugal?”

She nodded. “I used to spend my summers there between school terms.”

“You didn’t go home?”

She glanced at him quickly, gaze flitting back to the impression of a shell she was examining, holding up to catch a ray of sunlight. “No.”

“So you spent a whole year at boarding school, then spent your breaks in Portugal?”

She giggled. “I’m not really much of a Texan, am I? No wonder I don’t have a Stetson.”

Naw, now Tyler was getting somewhere. Maybe she’d brought him back here for her, because it made her reminisce about someplace she loved since it was beginning to sound like her parents’ home hadn’t been on that list.

“Your sister go with you?”

She kept sifting through the fossils. Such an act, pretending she was interested in what she was looking at, but he could tell by the steady, measured way in which she was picking them up, then placing them down, that she was thinking harder about something else.

“No. Just me. Vo and I would walk the hills for hours, though. I’d take a basket and load it with any rock that looked interesting. He always had a pair of muck boots waiting for me by the door every June because he knew I wouldn’t even want to sleep off the jet lag, I’d want to begin romping the hectares right away, and my avó had always bought me a new sweater in town near the train station where they picked me up, because I was scrawny and gangly and they said I grew two inches every time I came home—”

She giggled softly to herself again, even though she’d cut herself off. So she considered their vineyard home but not her real home? In all his years of being frustrated with his dad, he’d still looked forward to going home, to being surrounded by everyone.

She grinned at him. That happy grin she was so good at. A mask.

“He’d lay out a bottle of wine at night and smoke a pipe. We’d dump all the rocks out on the terrace table overlooking the brick winery from the 18th century that he still used, and sort them. He bought me a geology guidebook so I could learn how to identify them.” Her smile softened. “My avó—grandma—refurbished a whole dresser for me with foam inserts so I could store my collection like museum displays.”

“Your grandparents sound like great people.”

“They are. Yours did, too. Mine took me under their wing when my parents couldn’t—” She cut herself off again, then glanced toward the trees. “You know, I think you have something here, Tyler. I think there’s a way to protect this land. For so many fragments to wash out of these hills, I’m starting to suspect that perhaps there’s a cache—”

“Why couldn’t your parents do it?” He felt a sudden need to drill her for answers.

She shook her head.

“Naw, baby, you keep poking me under the skin, but the second I ask you about your past, you lock down. If we’re gonna do this boyfriend-girlfriend thing, you can’t be afraid to talk to me about that stuff.”

Which was ironic, because he still didn’t know how he was going to get around that NDA.

She forced a smile. He didn’t miss her hand creep onto her stomach. His brow furrowed. Her scar? “My parents were busy. It was easier for them to pay others to finish raising me.” She cleared her throat, but her words had tightened up. Her smile was also gone, and a stony, far more mature expression had hardened her brow. The smile returned. “Come out to the slump with me once I whip up my preliminary findings.”

“The ground’s unstable,” he admonished, and once more, letting her reluctance go. But he wanted to comfort her. It seems they’d both sought refuge from the same places, when life with their parents had been hard.

“And delightfully so. Check it out.”

At this, she stood and motioned for him to follow. Instead of taking him farther into the woods, she returned down the trail to her truck and climbed over the tailgate, tight tank, jeans hugging her ass, his oversize Stetson, like a Texas Aphrodite with the sun sinking behind her, casting her mahogany hair in a halo.

She unzipped her backpack and withdrew an archival box, opening it, revealing a rock. Wait, had she gone up on the escarpment today? Alone?

“Were you up there today?” he growled. “It’s dangerous.”

“And promising. You were onto something as a kid in your little hideout and didn’t even know it.” She waved off his scolding and held the box out to him with such a glow of excitement glistening in her amber depths, he didn’t have the heart to argue further. “If there’s more of this out there?” Her box contained a perfect impression of some sort of shell, pristine, jagged edges of the stone indicating it had probably just been fractured in the land shift. “Like, a lot more? Ty, you’re gonna have a lot more leverage.”