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

“Hey, Boss!” One of his farmhands rode by on a quad bike and slowed to a stop, pulling an 8x10 mailer from beneath his thigh. “Delivery out front just made me sign for this!”

Still chuckling, Tyler released Heart and jogged over to his guy. “You know you can drop this stuff on the porch.”

His employee shrugged. “Looked important so I thought I’d put it in your hands. It’s from a law firm.”

A law firm? Heart glanced over at him at his guy’s explanation, then turned back to the boys, demonstrating a technique and encouraging them to try it alongside her. It wasn’t unusual for him to get legal correspondences. He still took an occasional contract case, or jumped in to help his bros with their adoptions.

“Thanks, man.”

Tyler tore open the envelope as his guy drove off, as the boys and Heart resumed playing… His pulse quickened as he slid out the papers and read the letterhead. Adrenaline flooded his system as his eyes roved over the words of the official document. The timer on the grill went off, but he hardly heard it as the words fell into place and made sense. The soccer action lulled at his obliviousness to the timer—unlike him to ignore it. Heart dashed to it and turned the propane off. He felt, rather than saw, everyone migrate over to him at what must be an angry scowl forming on his brow. The damning words, a legal action for damages in the form of a lot of zeroes on the left side of the decimal, sat in front of his eyes. His blood ran cold.

“What’s wrong, babe?” Heart said, sweat rolling down her temples and soaking her tank top as she caught her breath.

Seth and Stevie watched him worriedly.

“Is it something bad, Daddy?” Stevie piped up, stretching up his oversized event shirt to wipe his face.

His eyes flashed to Heart, then to his older son, as a realization crashed down on him. Mandy’s words about Seth sneaking in and out of the computer lab had worried him, but with the ensuing reprieve from Seth’s angry attitude all week, he had yet to talk to Seth about it. He turned and paced a couple steps to try and grasp at some semblance of stoicism, then turned back around, tapping the papers.

“What all did you do when you broke into the computer lab last weekend?”

Seth’s face drained of color. Dammit. There was no denying how furious he was growing with every passing second, but not at Seth, and he needed to lose the “drill sergeant voice” before Seth took it personally and clammed up. Right now, he needed answers, not sullenness and silence, and he couldn’t shoot himself in the foot. He swallowed. As wrong as Seth had been, that same punch of sympathy, that same anger, that his kids had been put in this position, twisted like a wrench in his gut. His eyes dipped back to the legal action, his scowl intensifying. He shook his head before his gaze darted back to Seth, whose face was frozen.

“Answer me, son,” he said, his voice low and soft. “Did you send any emails through any websites?”

Seth’s shock slowly morphed into that damning defiance, that anger that had become all too familiar in recent months, that had blessedly vanished as his kids had latched onto Heart and the illusion of a happy family took form. A smoke screen though, wasn’t it? Seth’s face now mirrored his own.

“Yeah. I did,” Seth replied, venom dripping off his slight words. “I emailed our mom”—he delivered it like a punch to the chest—“since you wouldn’t tell us anything about her, about why you took us from her.” Silence. Even with the dregs of farm labor whizzing in the background as T.R. finished up for the day, the noises faded to the periphery. “And there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”

“Why?” Tyler took a deep breath, unable to shield himself from Seth’s verbal spears any longer, that lodged right in his heart. Tried to calm his racing pulse and subdue his urge to shout. He rubbed the back of his neck mercilessly, eyes darting to Heart who looked so shocked. Did she think what Seth had just said was true? He’d never filled her in on the details, but everything he’d confessed at the drive-in was true. That crippling fury he’d felt so long ago, that he’d done so well to wrangle down, lock in a box over the years, was finally swelling for release and he wasn’t going to be able to control it anymore. His eyes dipped back to Seth’s. “You don’t know the half of this, son,” he croaked. “You couldn’t be more wrong. Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

He stalked back to the house, up the porch, into the kitchen. He stormed to his office, managed to not slam the door like he wanted to as noise filtered into the kitchen, and at that point, in his sliver of privacy, finally unleashed.

“Fuck!” He slapped the document down on his desk so hard, the papers came unclipped and fluttered to the floor.

Silence in the kitchen fell.

His eyes rolled shut. Whoever had come inside, his kids or Heart, had heard him.

He rolled out his shoulders. Fine. After eight years, he’d shouted one curse and tossed a stack of papers and let off a tiny amount of steam from the pressure cooker. He wouldn’t lose control like that again. With shaking hands, he ripped his cell phone from his pocket and opened his email. He’d tried so hard to protect them. And he’d failed. He’d failed the two little people that mattered the most to him.

He opened his spam folder where he’d dumped the weird European message that had come through a week ago, tapped it. Short and sweet:

My legal team advises me that you violated our confidentiality agreement. Call me. Now. Izzy.

A quick scroll through his call log showed that the accompanying phone number in the email matched the random number that had called him with an international code, that he’d ignored. She’d done due diligence before siccing her American legal team on him, and unknowingly, he’d ignored it.

Seth had done what Tyler had feared all along. And he never would have done it had it not been for the NDA.

He punched the international number bitterly into his landline. It was six thirty here, which meant it was the middle of the night his ex’s time but he didn’t care. The phone picked up.

“Tyler?” Just hearing her say his name after all this time, made him grit his teeth.

“What the hell is this legal action I just got served with?”

“Hello to you, too,” Isabella said, her English accented in that way that had bewitched young Tyler when he’d first met her. “It’s exactly what it looks like. You agreed to take sole custody, and you signed my agent’s confidentiality agreement to protect my identity, and you violated it.”

“I didn’t tell Seth a damn thing. I never once broke the NDA. All these years I’ve had this gag in my mouth, and I never told so much as one soul who my kids’ mother was.”