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

A shipping package sat on the front steps. He carried Seth into the foyer—no messy boots or sandals sat in the shoe tray—down the hall, through the kitchen to the family room, while Travis brought in the discharge paperwork and grabbed the package.

“She ain’t here, Dad, but I need to talk to her,” Seth persisted, worry climbing in his voice, like he’d been saying since waking up yesterday, as a tingling of premonition shivered through him. “It’s important.”

After getting his son situated on the couch with the TV remote, a chill raced down his spine as he eyed the kitchen table while slicing fruit to take to Seth, spying Toby on the back deck working the grill and catching up with T.R., and the soccer balls lonely and forgotten in the overgrowing grass where they’d been left three days before.

Clean. Heart’s fossils on the kitchen table were gone, as were her archival pens and other various things.

“You told her to leave,” Stevie said softly but darkly from the back door with Frodo at his side, still in his oversize tie-dyed shirt, shorts, and boots causing Tyler to put down the knife on the cutting board. Toby came up behind him, eying Tyler ominously, shaking his head no.

Panic finally cracked him. He strode out of the kitchen, down the main hall to the foyer and opened the sideboard drawer. The other cord he’d loaned Heart to charge her phone was wound up and put back. Shoe tray, of course, empty. He slammed it shut and toed off his boots, letting them topple unchecked at the bottom of the stairs, then taking them two at a time. He shoved into his bedroom.

Her books, no longer stacked around his floor, were gone. Her bags. Her equipment. All gone. He swept a hand across his dresser. Her change and earrings—gone. He shoved into his bathroom, the door banging the ball and knocking towels off the hooks over the door. No lotions or facial soaps sat on the sink, even if her vanilla-almond scent lingered in the air as if a twisted cosmic joke meant to rub his face in the truth. It was as if she’d never been here.

He pulled out his phone again, tapped his texts, rattled off another frantic one, but spying the string of unread messages, he backspaced and shut it off. It wasn’t as if she’d read it anyway.

He pushed out of the bathroom, taking in the made bed and the laundry hamper nearby. Spied faded plaid fabric within it, reached inside, and pulled out the shirt he’d loaned her. His eyes pricked. He cleared his throat on a growl and shook the sentiment away. Of all the stupid things to draw emotion out of him. He brought it to his nose like a creeper and inhaled. Smelled faintly of him but fuck so much like her: peppermint, vanilla-almond, sweat, her.

It seemed so final. Tossed in the hamper as if an ominous harbinger of where she and he stood. He scoured his face.

Once everyone was in bed that night, he pulled back his sheets, dread creeping in and seeping into his blood. The sheets were cold. Barren. He hated it. He didn’t want it empty anymore. And yet, anger worked it’s fiery tendrils into his blood. She’d left him. Left his boys. Left them all in limbo not knowing what to do. With no explanation. Did she think she was being altruistic? Saving the boys from her? Like Isabella had finally admitted over the phone? Naw, Izzy might have given up the boys to what she thought would be a better, safer life for them, but she’d still chosen to abandon them for her career. Heart? She wasn’t choosing her career. She was one of the most unselfish people he’d met. She’d tried more than once to sacrifice her contract for him. She simply didn’t feel worthy.

And when he lay his face on his favorite pillow, he inhaled that vanilla smell, saw her smushed face as she slept, and that anger turned to furious lashings through his system. He bolted upright, unable to touch the sheets without feeling as if they scalded his bare skin. Grabbing the piece of shit pillow, he flung it over to the other side of the bed and snatched up a T-shirt from the hamper, tossing it over his head.

He stormed out of his room. Stalked down the stairs, spying the package that had been left on the porch and plucked it up. Addressed to…Heart Carvalho. From a company called Dressweavers Formals. Goddammit. Her dress for the wedding. They’d sat up in bed, him on his side and propped on an elbow reading, like they did every night, glancing up from his book as she showed him dresses on her laptop to compare and asked which one he’d liked best. He’d liked the sheer ivory one, long, sleeveless, diaphanous, with pastel colors faded along the bottom hem that matched her tattoo.

He dropped the package back to the sideboard and stalked through the kitchen, grabbing a beer out of the fridge—leftover custard pastries sat in a Tupperware on the top shelf—and popped the top off, leaving the bottle opener on the island. It was too fucking clean in here, yet her presence lingered everywhere.

He lumbered through the living room, through the pocket door and into the den where he dropped down onto the couch beside the repaired piano bench, dragging a blanket from the tin drum, took several hard swallows, then flopped back and extended his legs, using a throw pillow under his head. He couldn’t sleep in his bed. Couldn’t sleep with reminders of what he feared was lost. But then again, he’d been a fool to try and tether her in the first place. He was an anchor, but she was a butterfly.

He tapped open his social media, searched her profile page like the desperate man he was. Her profile was oddly dormant, the most recent picture being from three days before, of his boys and her with the T-Rex behind them. So happy. Fake screams, genuine laughter. He held it up in the air, filling an empty space beside the photo on the wall of him and his boys on the historic McClintock Farms wagon. A print like this belonged on his family wall. His boys and the momma they’d chosen.

“Shit,” he bit out, his eyes misting, and he lost it.

He shoved to sitting, swinging his legs, now tangled in the blanket to the floor and braced his elbows on his knees as Frodo padded in, hopped up on the couch, and curled next to him. He glanced to the piano, where Heart had finally bared her soul and he’d seen how wounded she truly was beneath the bright exterior. It was where he’d realized he had a home for her, with them. He had a family for her who would love her. He loved her.

She couldn’t forgive herself, and maybe that was the true mark of her love for him. But he could forgive her. Because the only reason she’d been working out back on the escarpment was to help him. He closed his eyes, rubbing the moisture from the corners, when these old floor planks that didn’t lie creaked. Looking up, Seth stood in front of him in baggy pajama pants and a plain white sleeveless undershirt, his arm still immobilized. His face was solemn.

“Is she coming back?” he asked.

Tyler forced a smile, but his brow was so furrowed and his eyes were stinging that it probably looked like a grimace. “I don’t know.”

“Did she leave because of me and Steven?”

Tyler shook his head, his chest aching for the pain in his boy’s hesitant question. “She left because she feels responsible for you getting hurt. And she doesn’t think she’d make a very good mom.”

“What? She didn’t make me go out there. I was just mad at everything and knew it would piss you off.”

Tyler nodded, then opened his arm and Seth, for the first time in ages, came to him and sat, leaning into his side. Tyler wrapped his arm around his son, the little person who had changed his entire life forever in the blink of an eye with that positive pregnancy test. He owed it to his boys to be strong, and palmed his shaggy dark hair, dropping a kiss to it.

“I’m sorry,” Seth murmured.

“Hey.” Tyler lifted his chin and glared, growling. “You got nothing to be sorry about, y’hear me? You were just trying to find out who your mother was, and it was wrong of her and me to never tell you—”

“No. I mean…” Seth pulled his face away and looked down, picking at a loose thread on his knee, making the snag worse, but leaned harder into him. “I mean, thinking the worst. Blaming you, all this time like it was your fault that she wasn’t here. Hating you for it when really,” he shrugged, “you were just trying to protect us. You ain’t that bad.”

Tyler barked a laugh at the backhanded compliment, then ruffled Seth’s hair and gave him a playful jolt off-balance, the way they’d used to roughhouse when Seth was younger, making Seth laugh. “Not that bad, huh. I guess I’ll take it. Hey, how d’you feel about us getting some land out west near your uncles?”

Seth’s face lit up. “Near Aunt Skylar and Uncle Trav’s horse ranch?” Tyler nodded. “And Uncle Toby and all his Star Wars stuff?”