Chapter Eighteen
“Dammit!”
He shoved shut the door as her truck kicked up dust. Paced to his desk to grab his keys to Blue Rocket from the drawer, boots clopping dirt onto the floor, breaking another house rule and knowing he’d have to vacuum.
Girlfriend. She said girlfriend.
She couldn’t have meant that. She’d been nervous because he’d sent her mixed messages. Sometimes it didn’t pay to be deliberate. He just hadn’t known how to answer that, hell yeah, he wasn’t ready for her to go. Ever since he’d held her last night, the thought of her leaving had twisted unease in his stomach. And get a hotel, my ass. Instead, he’d frozen like an asshole when she’d made a move, and left her vulnerable remark hanging in the air. His speck of pollen was attaching herself to him whether she realized it or not. Germinating. He was…okay with it.
“Don’t close yourself off, Tyler Jake…”
If Heart—Heather… Dammit, Heart it is, kept on schedule, she’d be gone in a week. He’d never log into Facebook again for fear of seeing what new horizon she was on. He’d already stalked her page. Seen her adorable desert bungalow, which hearkened to Old Tyler who’d given everything up. He’d seen pics of her when she was young with another girl who’d looked a lot like her. A sister? Or cousin?
He needed more time to work out how he felt about her, and she’d offered him a gift.
But what would he tell his boys when he couldn’t keep his hands off her? Because no matter his best efforts to maintain a partition, he’d eventually slip up. And her suggestion to drive in unseen each day like the help, like she was some sort of leper he wouldn’t want his kids knowing, was as insulting for him to think about as it had probably been for her to imagine.
A knot formed in Tyler’s gut.
He’d been so bent on protecting his kids from heartache, protecting their anonymity, protecting himself from that NDA, he’d never considered the impact it might have on a woman he had feelings for. Because he’d never intended to break rule number one. Toby’s text replayed in his mind. If you like her, why wouldn’t you want Seth and Stevie to meet her?
Toby’d met Rose’s little boy and it had been an instant bond. Toby’d blown everyone away, wanting to be a daddy. Travis had, too, when he’d met Skylar’s foster son. A kid had changed everything for them. How did Heart feel about the thought of not just being someone to him, but someone to his boys, too?
Take a plunge. Make a choice.
Stevie would latch onto her if she remained here. He’d have Heart out back toeing soccer tricks, would bring her The Hobbit to read to him, and she’d probably indulge him and do all sorts of faux British voices. There was still a little boy within him who loved to nestle against Tyler’s side and be read to late at night and in a year or two when he hit middle-school age, that lingering innocence would fade and yield to what was cool instead of what was unforgivably nerdy. And tie-dye? The kid’s favorite hoodie was a homemade tie-dyed masterpiece. Stevie would think he’d found his spirit animal in Heart.
Not to mention his fossils.
Seth would see right through Tyler’s charade and know there was something more—Seth already had at the drive-in. He’d be warier, would want to latch on, but would fear the attachment, or considering he remembered Isabella, he’d fear the abandonment. But Heart had won Tyler over in a matter of days, and it wasn’t as if he’d been an easy case himself. Seth wouldn’t be able to help himself. He’d fall for her, too.
He doesn’t need to hear the words to know he wasn’t wanted.Did Heart want kids?
If Seth remembered his mother, then he had to remember, even vaguely, the fights.
Where were his damned keys? He sifted around the drawer, making a mess of the organized things, his fingers skimming a wrinkled bar napkin. He paused. Withdrew it, his whirling thoughts slowing to a steady churning, and smoothed his thumb over the empty words written upon it, during one of the few times he’d connected with his littlest bro as a man and not as a big brother swooping in to fix Toby’s shit. He paused, lingered on the memory.
*
Eight years earlier.
Tyler nudged thedoorbell. Seth, sleeping on his arm, slipped. He hoisted him up, readjusted his grip on Stevie’s car seat.
If Pops so much as breathed that Tyler should have worked it out with Izzy, Tyler was going to snap. Pops had never had the first clue how tumultuous life with Izzy had become. The car accident should have been the nail in the coffin, her deciding to dash to a last-minute photo shoot with the kids when she’d agreed to be home with them so he could be in court, photographers chasing her down the highway, her losing control…
The evening sun illuminated Cerros Casas Grandes looming in the distance as he stood on the threshold of the Legacy in the Texas Chihuahuan Desert. Heat wavering off the horizon. Red Angus grazed in the pastures, the enormous house of his paternal granddads-past, imposing. What should have been his legacy as the first-born son.
He’d given it up. He shouldn’t have. He regretted the pressure it had put upon his younger brothers as he chased that Harvard degree and tried to set himself apart, because Tyler had always tried to protect them from Pops’s pressure. And now he was giving up that law career for his momma’s farm. Harold Dixon was still sore about that, but Tyler was finally done caring what the old man thought of him. For too long, he’d chased Pops’s approval, and it had set him up for failure.
Footsteps drew closer, lighter steps of his momma, lumbering thuds of his dad. He could see their shapes, distorted through the glass. The latch clicked. He took a deep inhale.
Deborah Ann-Michael Dixon pulled back the door and smiled a mile wide.
“My babies! What a surprise! Oh—” Noticing both boys slept, she whispered, “You know better than to stand out here. It’s your home, too…” Her warm tone trailed off, taking in Tyler’s grim lips while he adjusted the babies again. “What’s wrong, Ty?”
Toby, home from grad school, trotted down the stairs, a grin on his blue-eyed face at his big bro’s arrival. Great. He had an audience for this confession.
“Ty, what’s going on? How’s the farm? Where’s Isabella?”