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Her furious stare said he was playing with fire, but accusing him of being a common looter when he was the only one who’d given a darn about Newman Ranch in the past fifteen years? Well, it was a mistake she’d come to regret.

“Yep. Since you’re here to wrap up his estate, it seems you and I need to have a talk. Whenever you’re ready to say goodbye to this place for good, Maggie, you give me a call. You know where I’ll be. C’mon, Gander.”

He turned around before he could see her reaction, Gander reluctantly falling in step. He didn’t owe Maggie anything, but he didn’t want to give his heart time to change his mind.

Bennett Marshall prided himself on three things. One, being a man of his word. Two, a man of integrity. And three, stepping over anyone who challenged either of those.

That included a beautiful woman from his past who showed up a decade and a half too late to claim what wasn’t hers. If she wanted this life, she should’ve fought harder for it back then.

He might have some work to do to convince her to sell, but now that she was nothing more than a landowner to him, maybe it would be what he needed to forget the tug at his heart that rejoiced in seeing her home after all this time.

No, Maggie Newman being back isn’t something to celebrate. If she was in the habit of saying goodbye to Deer Creek, he might as well help her on her way.

*

Maggie sat down on the edge of the porch and poured a glass of sweet tea. The sun had slipped below the tree line, creating tall shadows along the chipped white paint on the back of the house. Bats started their nightly feeding ritual that reminded her of the newborn cattle their first season out to pasture, erratic and gleeful. The temperature had dropped almost ten degrees, and she shivered, drawing her shawl around her.

What had she and her dad named the fluctuating spring temperatures the year they’d lost her mom? Temperamental Texas? She smiled at the memory.

God, she missed her dad. Her mom, too, but those memories were shrouded under the fabric of time. Unlike the memories of a certain other person from her past that had come barreling back into her present.

Bennett Marshall. He’d come back to Deer Creek—and she hadn’t. She’d been so terrified she’d run into him and the woman he’d chosen over her, and that fear kept her from checking in on the ranch. Whatever dreams had taken the place of the ones she’d shared with Bennett as a teen, she loved the ranch. She should have come back to check on it, rather than relying on her dad’s monthly visits to San Antonio as enough proof he was doing okay. Clearly, that hadn’t been the case.

The hurt she’d buried deep in her chest floated to the surface like an oil spill and hadn’t abated no matter how much she tried to throw herself into tidying up.

Not that she had much to show for those efforts. A week wasn’t going to be near enough time to square away her father’s property to sell it, let alone bring it into the twenty-first century. Not even Bennett would want it in this condition. Briefly, she wondered what had made his list of repairs. Where did someone start when the damage was as bad as it was?

Her phone rang as she sipped at the ice-cold glass of tea.

“Hey, lady.”

“How was your flight?” Jill asked.

Maggie put down the glass and weeded through a box of her dad’s prescription pill bottles. “Oh, we had turbulence that made me feel like I should have updated my will and it still managed to be the best part of the trip so far.”

“Yikes. Things are that good, huh?”

“Well, I’ve lost a wheel on the Vuitton bag I just bought, a heel on my shoes, and most of my dignity.”

“Sounds bad. Is it weird being back?” Jill asked. She was born and raised in the city, so country life, in her words, didn’t compute. Still, she was Maggie’s first friend in San Antonio and her closest.

Maggie shrugged even though Jill couldn’t see her.

“Sort of. The town’s the same and, unfortunately, so are the areas around it. But everything else is… different.”

“Have you been inundated with old lady neighbors dropping off casseroles? Because that’s what I picture in the country—one long train of blue hairs with trays of food.”

Maggie laughed until she thought of the only neighbor she’d seen so far.

A shiver raced across her skin that had nothing to do with the chill settling in the valley.

“Um, no. No old ladies with food.”

Only a grumpy cowboy with a hold on my heart. Nothing to see here.

“Darn. I was kinda hoping to have all my assumptions confirmed.”

“Everything okay at work?” Maggie asked, desperate to switch the topic of conversation off her pesky neighbors.