Chapter Two

Tyler Cruz stalked diagonally across two plots at the Snyder cemetery. Idiot lawyer. Senseless will. But his dad … his dad had triggered a defensive reaction within Tyler that had him growling like a cornered javelina. Good thing the old man was already dead or Tyler might have taken a sledgehammer to him.

Anger pressed against him as he stood in the center of the grave, panting. A steady rhythm pounded his temples, and the skin on the back of his neck grew moist from sweat, yet he forced himself to settle down. The will didn’t matter. He could work with it. When he met his lawyer that morning, he had imagined leaving the office with the bulk of his family’s estate, and he still would. Eventually.

His boots sank into the soft mound of dirt, and he asked himself why he had come there. Such a female thing to do. Mothers or girlfriends or wives, left with empty arms, might stand by the graves of their loved ones and bawl enough tears to green the dry West Texas grass.

Tyler’s eyes were dry.

He hadn’t come because he missed his dad. He came because this was the last place he had seen Fawn. She stood near the back of the crowd at the funeral—looking as though she might pass out from the summer heat—while he sat in a folding chair under the canopy. At the time, he figured it served her right, but in the past hour, he had developed a change of heart.

He looked down and noticed two flower bouquets, now brown and brittle, left on either side of the tombstone by grievers the morning of. Tyler squatted with an elbow to his knee and pulled a stem from one of the cement vases. Without thinking, he waved the corpse silently back and forth, and remembered Fawn years ago in a high school play, dressed in pink fluff and holding a magic wand between her fingertips. Glinda the Good Witch. He crushed the petals in his fist.

Five months ago the woman had infuriated him as much as his father ever did. She had done it quietly out at the ranch, but she might as well have taken out a full-page ad in the newspaper. Everyone for miles around knew he had been rejected. They knew Fawn turned her nose up at his family’s millions and swore a blue streak she was done for good this time. But none of that mattered now because Tyler was man enough to forgive her.

He released his grip, allowing the bits of dried flower to sift through his fingers and fall to the base of the granite marker. It might take a while, but he could woo her back.

After all, she needed him. Her privileged upbringing hadn’t prepared her for parenthood, especially not as a single mother. Not that he had been raised any differently, but he would have enough money to make up for it. Fawn, on the other hand, wouldn’t get ten cents from her uppity Bible-righteous parents even though they had it to give.

A chuckle rose from deep in his throat as he brushed trembling palms against his jeans. Fawn wanted him to think pregnancy had somehow made her self-sufficient, defiant, even tenacious, and perhaps he had wondered about that at first.

But when she showed up at his father’s funeral, she nullified all the verbal claims she had made about their future. She exposed her subconscious feelings, her naive simplicity, her yearning for things to be set right.

And she proved to Tyler that he still owned her.