They had both been wrong.
He had come to care for Helen, but he hadn’t loved her the way she’d needed. And then he’d yanked her out of her world and brought her to Texas after Sam’s first heart attack. Helen’s heart had dried to nothing in the harsh Texas wind.
And she’d died fleeing the life that was killing her, day by lonely day.
He’d tried to help. Tried to be enough, torn between two people who couldn’t stand each other—an old man who’d written him off years ago and a wife who was pining for a life that was light years away. He’d given her money he couldn’t spare so she could go home and visit, too proud to let her daddy foot the bill. It had been a futile effort to help her recharge her batteries so she could endure coming back to a place that she hated. Every visit back East only made things worse, though, because Boone knew by then that this was the only place he would ever be home.
The last time he’d seen her, she’d been carrying his baby and never even told him. His hope for a family died with his wife in a sailing accident.
With her old college flame at the helm.
Gulliver stirred and stamped, and Boone realized his hand was knotted in the gelding’s mane. Easing his fingers apart, Boone stepped away. The past was the past. He would spend his future alone because he had never figured out how to manage love.
But he had the ranch, and that would be enough.
Gulliver nuzzled at his hand. “Anybody exercising you, boy?” Suddenly Boone realized that he needed the ride, too. Needed to feel the wind and the sun, a good horse beneath him. He headed for the tack room to get Gulliver’s bridle.
He stopped in his tracks before the tree that held Sam’s saddle. His hand hovered over the leather, and happier days rushed back. Memories of being lifted up in front of his father, too young to ride his pony where they were headed. His mother would wave to them as they turned toward the pastures where Sam would pass along to his son the legacy of a lifetime’s hard work. Mitch had never felt the ranch sing in his blood, but Boone had soaked up every scrap of knowledge Sam wanted to share. He had been an eager student, and he had thought his future began and ended on this land.
Boone looked around the tack room and wished for his own saddle, uneasy at using Sam’s. Jim’s was missing from its tree; there were two others, neither big enough for Boone.
His gaze returned to his father’s saddle, symbol of all that Sam had once been, all that Boone had once hoped. In that moment, memories, bad and good, jostled for room in his chest. But what pierced through them all was a sharp ache for what could now never be.
Sam was gone, without a word to the son who had once thought the sun rose and set in him. They would never heal the pain that was now the legacy of this place.
But one thing Boone knew, deep in his bones. He loved this place, needed this land. If it hadn’t become his in the way he’d dreamed as a kid—worked with his father and then handed down with love—it was still his. Not the house yet, but even that would come in time. And his brother would be found, no matter how long Boone had to look.
He would reclaim this place for what was left of Jenny Gallagher’s dreams. He had spent enough years wandering, been rootless too long. He would have no one to pass it on to, but perhaps Mitch would.
Boone was home now, where he belonged. And here he would stay.
He picked up Sam’s saddle and with it, his own lost dreams. He had plenty to do to restore the neglect he could see all around him. Whatever the price to buy Maddie out, he would find a way to meet it.
He would ignore the gypsy with sass in her eyes and too little sense. He would give her wide berth, gone before she rose and back after she slept. And if his hands itched a little to touch remembered curves, well, he’d often been off on missions or at sea for months at a time. Boone knew how to control himself, and he would, for an instinct that had kept him alive in some hairy situations whispered that this woman could be trouble with a capital T. She was beautiful and totally out of place. She was what stood between him and the home he’d never wanted to leave.
Whatever her claim, whatever wrong Sam was trying to right, he would simply wait her out. She would stay her thirty days, he’d definitely see to that. The Caswells would get this place over his dead body. But everything he loved about the ranch was everything she’d hate.
It was no place for city girls. Maddie would be gone soon enough.
Maddie stretched and yawned, surprised that she’d fallen asleep. She’d only meant to lie down for a minute, but the bright sun had gone far past the window of this lovely room.
Vondell had told her it was once Jenny’s sewing room and like much of the house, Sam had left it almost a shrine. Vondell had wanted to put Maddie in the master bedroom, but Maddie couldn’t imagine a move more calculated to raise Boone’s hackles than to take over Sam’s quarters or the room that Vondell said had belonged to Boone’s brother Mitch. She was temporary, and this was the only room left. The downside was that Boone’s room was at this end of the hallway and there was only one bathroom, but neither could be helped.