LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter One

      Maddie Wallace stepped out into the early morning west Texas sunshine and drew a deep breath. Quietly closing the door behind her, she smiled in anticipation at the beautiful day. Not a cloud in the sky. She drew another breath and wrinkled her nose. While the air was fresh and clean compared to Fort Worth’s city fumes, it smelled of fresh hay, a hint of sage and lots of cattle. Did anyone get used to that smell if they lived here long enough?

      She walked down the flagstone pathway that led through the iron gates and headed for the foreman’s house—only a three-minute walk from the sprawling brick home she’d been staying in for almost a month. Today was the first day of her new job. Wiping her palms on the sides of her dark slacks, she had a moment of apprehension. She wasn’t really a nanny. What if she was a total flop? Desperate times called for desperate measures and when the offer came, however reluctantly, she’d jumped at it. She was not one to freeload.

      Not that her newly discovered twin ever hinted at such a thing. She’d suggested this opportunity with Ty as a way to keep Maddie in Grasslands.

      “It’s the perfect answer,” Violet had said yesterday after they happened upon Ty and his daughter, Darcy, looking after a sow and her babies in one of the small barns. “You’d be helping Ty, and it means you’d stay here for a while longer at least. I’m not ready to lose my sister yet.”

      “I’m in,” Maddie’d said to the sister she hadn’t even known existed a month ago. “But it’s possible Ty doesn’t want me.”

      When the twins both turned to Ty, the handsome cowboy seemed genuinely torn. “I guess we could give it a test run,” he had finally conceded after a long pause. “Maybe until school starts, anyway.”

      Although the sisters breathed a collective sigh of relief, Maddie still harbored secret doubts about sticking around. After all, to discover at age twenty-five that she had a twin sister was almost more than she could take in. Who would have suspected that breaking up with her fiancé would result in finding a part of her family she never knew about?

      Once again a thousand questions flooded her mind. What had happened so long ago to split their family? Why had her father never mentioned he had other children? Why let her and her brothers believe the only mother they’d ever known was their real mother when it seemed apparent now that Belle Colby was her mother? Hers and her older brother Grayson’s.

      Everything had been topsy-turvy in the past month. This job offer, such as it was, added to the Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole feeling.

      But she was willing to give it a shot—especially after seeing the way Ty had kept a watchful eye over his little girl when she ran out of the barn and began scampering around the property. It filled Maddie with relief to see Darcy momentarily escaping the reality of losing her mother and moving someplace new. She could only imagine what a shock it must have been for the poor child to arrive at the ranch from Houston without a clue the man she met for the first time was her father.

      As Darcy chased the goat around, Jack’s dog, Nipper, barked at their antics, which had Darcy dissolving into gales of laughter. For a few precious minutes, she was a happy little girl. Yet, despite the girl’s burst of exuberance, Maddie was struck by the bleak expression in Ty’s eyes.

      “Really, I’ll do a good job,” she said earnestly, trying to reassure him. “I mean, I can cook breakfast for her—I

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