Texas Heroes_ Volume 1(25)

Don’t get romantic about this, Maddie, and make things more complicated than they already are.

Boone thought about going on to bed and talking to Maddie tomorrow. He shook his head and pulled out his knife, spying a broken tree branch lying on the ground. Picking it up, he turned to the whittling that had always helped him think.

He owed her an apology. He’d just sit here and whittle while he waited for her return. Then he’d go to bed, get a good night’s sleep, and do his damnedest to keep the ranch going, come up with the money, and pretend Maddie Rose was invisible.

Sure thing, Boone. Maybe you should save that money and buy yourself that bridge in the desert—easier deal, all the way around.



Maddie walked back up the hill, her mind awhirl. She shouldn’t have gone into the little cemetery. She’d barely regained her calm and her determination to keep things in perspective, remembered that this was not her home, that she couldn’t get romantic about cooking in her grandmother’s kitchen. Boone was right, more right than he knew. She had plenty in her own life she didn’t want to discuss, and her foolish fancies of being Boone’s friend and coming back to visit were just that —fantasies.

Then she’d decided to see inside the little cemetery where tall juniper sentinels guarded the departed so securely. She wasn’t a person who was spooked easily, and cemeteries had never bothered her before. She didn’t fear ghosts or spirits walking the night.

But this cemetery had done something she’d never expected: it had charmed her. Inside the junipers lay an almost palpable sense of peace and…history. The plaque at the entrance denoted that only members of pioneer families were buried there. She’d gone looking for Rose Wheeler’s grave.

Somehow she hadn’t been prepared for the feeling of looking at the simple headstone and knowing that her grandmother’s bones rested there, cradled in the earth where Maddie stood. For the first time, it all seemed real. A sense of connection had tugged at her, and Maddie was shaken by it still.

Her grandmother. Maddie wanted to talk to someone who had known her. With a hunger that swept through her like a blast furnace, Maddie suddenly wanted to know what her grandmother looked like, how she laughed, how her voice sounded, what she wore.

And it didn’t matter that she wouldn’t stay here, that she couldn’t, that her life was elsewhere. Maddie wanted to take her heritage with her, wherever she landed. So she had made a promise, then and there, that she would make it her mission to find out as much as she could, in these weeks, about the people she came from. She wasn’t a person to lie around, anyway, and if Boone wouldn’t or couldn’t answer her questions, she’d find someone who could.

She’d headed back out of the cemetery, filled with resolve—until she’d passed the newest grave. It bore only a tiny marker right now, but the stone next to it told her everything she needed to know. Jenny Wallace Gallagher, Beloved Wife and Mother.

Boone’s mother. Buried next to his father Sam, the man who had brought her here. The man who had hurt his son so much.

She’d been angry with Sam Gallagher for putting Boone and her in an impossible position, but now she wasn’t so sure what she felt. The need that swept through her, for family and roots, was not a feeling she welcomed. Longing and discomfort mingled too closely. She’d let herself need Robert and forgotten that she was supposed to be enough for herself. She’d spent her whole life without roots. She shouldn’t need any.

Yet as she stared at Jenny Gallagher’s headstone, Maddie wondered if anyone would ever call her beloved. Being wife and mother had never seemed farther away.

And today’s phone call swirled into the mix, the heady knowledge that a restaurant that her colleagues would kill to work in wanted her, Maddie Rose Collins, enough to wait for her to finish out her month. She had options. She could be lionized in the only city that mattered, she could write her own ticket if she did well at Sancerre. And she would do well. She hadn’t lied when she told Boone she was good.

The money she had, combined with what Boone had agreed to pay her for the house, wouldn’t be enough to set up her own restaurant in New York, but if she did well at Sancerre, she might attract an investor or two. This time, however, she would hold the majority share. No more penniless Maddie in a one-way partnership like she’d had with Robert. And one day, she swore, she would have a place all her own. She’d put down roots, at last.

She had to keep her eye on the prize, to remember her real life and not let the romance of the past sweep her off her feet. She’d learned more than once that romance didn’t last, no matter how much she wanted to believe it could.