LITMIR.BIZ

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cocked a hip and leaned against the closed stall door as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Lazily, he rearranged his battered hat. “Tell me something. What’s the annual revenue Wade Ranch brings in for stud fees?”

      “How should I know?” Kyle ground out. “You run the ranch.”

      “Yeah.” Liam raised his brows sardonically. “Half of which belongs to you. Grandpa died almost two years ago, yet you’ve never lifted a finger to even find out what I do here. Money pours into your bank account on a monthly basis. Know how that happens? Because I make sure of it. I made sure of a lot of things while you ran around the Middle East blowing stuff up and ignoring your responsibilities at home. One of those things I do is take care of Maddie and Maggie. Because you weren’t here. Just like you weren’t here to take on any responsibility for the ranch. I will not let you be an absentee father like you’ve been an absentee ranch owner.”

      “That’s a low blow,” Kyle said softly. Liam had always viewed Kyle’s stint as a SEAL with a bit of disdain, making it clear he saw it as a cop-out. “You wanted the ranch. I didn’t. But I want my girls, and I’m going to be here for them.”

      Wade Ranch had never meant anything to him other than a place to live because it was the only one he had. Then and now. Mama had cut and run faster than you could spit, once she’d dumped him and Liam here with her father, then taken the Dallas real estate market by storm. Lillian Wade had quickly become the Barbara Corcoran of the South and forgot all about the two little boys she’d abandoned.

      Funny how Liam had been so similarly affected by dear old Mama. Enough to want to guarantee his blood wouldn’t ever have to know the sting of desertion. Kyle respected the thought if not the action. But Kyle was one up on Liam, because those girls were his daughters. He wasn’t about to take lessons from Mama on how to be a runaway parent.

      “Too little, too late,” his brother mouthed around the straw. “Hadley and I want to adopt them. I hope you have a good lawyer in your back pocket because you’re not getting those girls without a hell of a fight.”

      God Almighty. The hits kept coming. He’d barely had time to get his feet under him from being sucker punched a minute after crossing the threshold of his childhood home, only to have Liam drop twin daughters, Grace Haines and a custody battle in his lap.

      They stared at each other, neither blinking. Neither backing down. They were both stubborn enough to stand there until the cows came home, and probably would, too.

      Nothing was going to get fixed this way, and with Grace’s admonition to prove he was serious about providing a stable environment for Maddie and Maggie ringing in his ears, he contemplated his mule-headed brother. He wanted help with the ranch? By God, he’d get it. And Kyle would have employment to put on his Fatherhood Résumé, which would hopefully get Grace off his back at the same time.

      “Give me a job if it means so much to you that I take ranch ownership seriously. I’ll do something with the horses.”

      Liam nearly busted a gut laughing, which did not improve Kyle’s grip on his temper. “You can feed them. But that’s about it. You have no training.”

      And Kyle wasn’t at 100 percent physically, but no one had to know about that. His injuries mostly didn’t count anyway. It just meant he had to work that much harder, which he’d do. Those babies were worth a little agony.

      “I can learn. You can’t have it both ways. Either you give me a shot at being half owner of Wade Ranch or shut up about it.”

      “All right, smart-ass.” Liam tipped back his hat and jerked his chin at Kyle. “We got a whole cattle division here at Wade Ranch that’s ripe for improvement. I’ve been concentrating on the horses and letting Danny and Emma Jane handle that side. You take over.”

      “Done.”

      Kyle knew even less about cows than he did babies. But he hadn’t known anything about guns or explosives before joining the navy, either. BUD/S training had nearly broken him, but he’d learned how to survive impossible physical conditions, learned how to stretch his body to the point of exhaustion and still come out swinging when the next challenge reared its ugly head.

      You had to start out with the mind-set that quitting wasn’t an option. Even the smallest mental slip would finish a man. So he wouldn’t slip.

      Liam eyed him and shook his head. “You’re serious?”

      “As a heart attack. I’ll take my best shot at the cattle side of the ranch. Just one question. What am I aiming at?”

      “We have a Black Angus breeding program. Emma Jane—she’s the sales manager I hired last year—is great. She sold about two hundred head. If you want me to call you successful, double that in under six months.”

      That didn’t sound too bad, especially if there was a sales manager already doing the heavy lifting. “No problem. Now drop the whole adoption idea and we’ll call it even.”

      “Let me see you in action, and then we’ll talk. I have yet to see anything that tells me you’re planning to stick around. If you take off again, the babies will be mine anyway. Might as well make it legal sooner rather than later.” Liam shrugged. “You made your bed by leaving. So lie in it for a while.”

      Yeah, except he’d left for very specific reasons. He and Liam had never been close, and Kyle hadn’t felt as if he was part of anything until he’d found his brothers of the heart on a SEAL team. That’s where he’d finally felt secure. He could actually care about someone again without fear of being either abandoned or betrayed.

      He’d like to say he could find a way to stay at the ranch this time. But what had changed from the first time? Not much.

      Just that he was a father now. And he owed his daughters a stable home life. They were amazing little creatures that he wanted to see grow up. With the additional complications of Maddie’s health problems, he couldn’t relocate them at the drop of a hat, either.

      “I’m not going anywhere,” Kyle repeated for what felt like the four hundredth time.

      Maybe if he kept saying it, people would believe him. Maybe he’d believe it, too.

       Three

      Kyle drove into town later that night on an errand for Hadley, who had announced at dinner that the babies were almost out of both diapers and formula. She’d seemed surprised when he said he’d go instead.

      Of course he’d volunteered for the job. They were his kids. But he’d made Hadley write down exactly what he needed to buy, because the only formula he’d had exposure to was the one for making homemade explosives. List in his pocket, he’d swung into his truck, intending to grab the baby items and be back in jiffy.

      But as he pulled into the lot at Royal’s one-and-only grocery store, Grace had just exited through the automatic sliding doors. Well, well, well. There was no way he was passing up this opportunity. He still had a boatload of questions for the girl he’d once given his heart to, only to have it handed back, shredded worse than Black Angus at a slaughterhouse.

      Kyle waited until she was almost to her car, and then gingerly climbed from his truck to corner her between her Toyota and the Dooley in the next spot.

      “Lovely night, isn’t it, Ms. Haines?”

      She jumped and spun around, bobbling her plastic sack full of her grocery store purchases. “You scared me.”

      “Guilty conscience maybe,” he offered silkily. No time like the present to give her a chance to own up to the crimes she’d committed so long ago. He might even forgive her if she just said she was sorry.

      “No, more like I’m a woman in a dark parking lot and I hear a man speaking to me unexpectedly.”

      It was a perfectly legitimate thing to say except the streetlight spilled over her face, illuminating

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