The SEAL's Secret Heirs
“Well, I wanted to talk to you first. But yeah. The right answer is no.”
Relief squeezed his chest. And wasn’t that something? Kyle had never thought he’d consider the ranch home. But there you go. The threat of losing it—well, he didn’t have to worry about that, obviously.
“So it’s a no. What’s the big deal then?”
Liam shrugged. “I dunno. It just doesn’t sit well. The guy from Sampson, he didn’t even look around. Just handed me some paperwork with an offer that was fifteen million above fair market value. How’s that for a big deal?”
It ruffled the back of Kyle’s neck, too. “There’s no oil around here. What little there is has a pump on it already.”
“Yeah, so now you’re where I’m at. It’s weird, right?”
Kyle nodded because his throat was tight again. It was nice to be consulted. As if he really was half owner of the ranch, and he and Liam were going to do this thing called family. He hadn’t left this time and it might have made a huge difference.
It gave Kyle hope he might actually become the father his girls deserved. Grace, however, was a whole other story with an ending he couldn’t quite figure out.
Ten
Grace kicked the oven. It didn’t magically turn on. It hadn’t the first time she’d hauled off and whacked it a minute ago, either.
But kicking something felt good. Her foot throbbed, which was better than the numbness she’d felt since climbing from Kyle’s bed, well loved and then brokenhearted in the space of an hour. The physical pain was a far sight better than the mental pain.
Because she didn’t understand what had happened. She’d opened her heart to Kyle again, only to be destroyed more thoroughly the second time than she had been the first time. This was a grown woman’s pain. And the difference was breathtaking. Literally, as in she couldn’t make her lungs expand enough to get a good, solid full breath.
Determined to fix something, Grace spent twenty minutes unscrewing every bolt she could budge on the oven, hoping something would jump out at her as the culprit. Which failed miserably because she didn’t know what it was supposed to look like—how would she know if something was out of place? The oven was just broken. No matter. She wasn’t hungry anyway.
She wandered around her small house two blocks off the main street of Royal. She’d bought the house three years ago when she’d claimed her Professional Single Girl status, and set about finding a way to be happy with the idea of building a life with herself and herself only in it. She had, to a degree. No one argued with her if she wanted to change the drapes four times a year, and she never had to share the bathroom.
The empty rooms hadn’t seemed so empty until now. Spending the weekend with Kyle had stomped her fantasy of being single and happy to pieces. She wanted a husband to fill the space in her bed, in her heart. Children who laughed around the kitchen table. A dog the kids named something silly, like Princess Spaghetti.
A fierce knock sounded at the door, echoing through the whole house. She almost didn’t answer it because who else would knock like that except a man who had a lot of built-up anger? At her, apparently. After ten years of turning over every aspect of her relationship with Kyle, analyzing it to death while looking for the slightest nuance of where it had all gone wrong, never once had she turned that inspection back on herself.
But she’d made mistakes, that much was apparent. Then and now. Somehow.
Only she didn’t quite buy that what happened ten years ago was all her fault.
And all at once, she wanted that reckoning. Wanted to ask a few pointed questions of Kyle Wade that she hadn’t gotten to ask before being thrown out of his bed two long and miserable days ago.
She yanked open the door and the mad she’d worked up faltered.
Kyle stood there on her doorstep in crisp jeans, boots and a work shirt, dressed like every other man in Royal and probably a hundred other towns dotting the Texas prairie. But he wasn’t anything close to any other man the world over, because he was Kyle. Her stupid heart would probably never get the message that they were doomed as a couple.
He was holding a bouquet of beautiful flowers, so full it spilled over his hand in a riot of colors and shapes. Her vision blurred as she focused on the flowers and the solemn expression on Kyle’s face.
“Hey, Grace.”
No. He wasn’t allowed to be here all apologetic and carrying conciliatory flowers. It wasn’t fair. She couldn’t let him into her head again, and she certainly wasn’t offering up her heart again to be flattened. He didn’t have to know she’d given up on getting over him.