LITMIR.BIZ

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his mother, Regina. She didn’t answer, of course, and Lawson had no idea where she was. Regina wasn’t exactly motherly in the normal sense of the word and rarely returned his calls. Still, he left her a message.

      “It won’t do any good, you know,” Dylan commented. “The papers have been signed.”

      “Since when? Because the gossips in this town are too good for me not to have heard about this.”

      Dylan shrugged. “My guess is Lucian kept it quiet by using his San Antonio lawyer. He probably didn’t want you putting up a fuss before the deal was finalized.”

      “Putting up a fuss” made him sound like a toddler who didn’t want a nap. Shit. This was serious. “Eve will practically be my neighbor.”

      Dylan showed no sympathy whatsoever about that. “It’s a quarter of a mile from yours, and pardon me if I don’t boo-hoo about you having a hot actress to gawk at every now and then.”

      Lawson wouldn’t be gawking because if he couldn’t figure out a way to nix this deal...well, he didn’t know what he was going to do, but it might involve building a very high fence. And yeah, he did sound like a cranky toddler.

      “Eve doesn’t know the house she bought could be right on the edge of the land that might eventually be part of a lawsuit,” Lawson pointed out. And that was something he could enlighten her about.

      But Dylan quickly burst that bubble. “I told her all about it.”

      Lawson frowned. “What about her knowing that I’ll be her neighbor?”

      “I mentioned that part, too, and she still wanted the place. I have no idea why.”

      Hell. Lawson did. But it couldn’t be that. Eve had lost her virginity to him in that house on her seventeenth birthday. It was definitely memorable, but after the way she’d left town and broken off things with him, she couldn’t be sentimental about the location of her de-virgining.

      Could she?

      He thought about that a second and decided the answer was no.

      “So, I heard Eve named the baby Aiden,” Dylan continued while he sipped his beer. “I guess she decided against Brett.”

      That pulled Lawson right out of his de-virgining thought. “Brett?”

      “Yeah. I talked to her last night when she got in, and she mentioned it was one of the names on her list.”

      Lawson was glad she’d nixed it. He didn’t need anything to remind him of the friend he’d lost, not when he was working so hard to forget it. Of course, Eve would likely think it was easier for him to forget since he couldn’t remember much. Only bits and pieces. In a way that made it worse because Lawson had filled in those gaps with some god-awful stuff.

      “Why’d you talk to Eve?” Lawson asked, getting his mind back on the conversation with his brother. “Better yet, why didn’t you tell me you’d talked to her? And is there any reason you didn’t mention to me that she was coming here or that she was pregnant?”

      Dylan scratched his chin. “That’s a lot of questions. Angry-sounding questions. Are you jealous?”

      “Hell, no.” And he gave Dylan “the big brother” look that often had preceded a butt-whipping when they were kids.

      Dylan smiled, made a yeah whatever sound. That sound had often preceded a butt-whipping, too. “Eve called me right before she bought the house. She asked me how I thought you’d take her moving back. She was worried that you’d be upset—”

      “Damn straight I’m upset—”

      “But I told her you were a grown man,” Dylan said, talking right over him, “and that the stuff that happened between you two was water under the bridge.”

      “I’m a grown man with a memory,” Lawson fired back, which, of course, sounded toddler-ish again. He huffed. Since he wasn’t gaining any ground here, it was best he headed out, and he was about to do that until Dylan spoke again.

      “If you talk to Eve,” his brother went on, “let her know that I did try to call Tessie for her. She’d given me the girl’s number and address in case of an emergency.”

      She’d given the number to Belle, too, and Eve had also asked him to call Tessie if something went wrong with the delivery. “Did you talk to Tessie?”

      Dylan shook his head. “I tried, but the call went straight to voice mail.” He paused. “Eve and Tessie are on the outs, and Eve’s all torn up about it. That’s why you need to cut her some slack about this house business. She’s going through a rough time right now.”

      Well, Lawson wasn’t going through a picnic what with the breakup with Darby, the flashbacks about Brett and the butt stitches, but this sounded like more than just a mother-daughter spat. “What happened?”

      “Eve didn’t say, but considering the timing, maybe Tessie didn’t approve of her mom having a baby. Or her mom having sex with Kellan Carver.”

      Hell, Lawson didn’t approve of her having sex with the turd, and he didn’t have a say in this.

      “Have you met Tessie?” Lawson pressed.

      “No, but she moved to Texas earlier this year. She’s going to school in Austin.”

      So, not far. And it was sort of on his way to and from the cattle auction. Sort of. “Could you text me Tessie’s phone number and address?”

      That wasn’t a charming look Dylan gave him. It was a suspicious one. “What are you planning on doing?”

      “I’m planning on leaving for a cattle-buying trip,” Lawson snapped. He checked his watch, but it was all for show. It was a seven-hour drive, and he had a week to get there and would be gone for well over a month. A calendar would have been better use to him than his watch. “But I was thinking on the way back that I could stop by and see Tessie. You know, just to make sure she’s okay.”

      Dylan squinted one eye. “Why?”

      For such a simple one-word question, it was plenty hard to answer. Because it was going to make him sound like a toddler again. That’s why he kept it to himself. But if things were patched up between Tessie and Eve, then Eve might not want to live at the ranch. Maybe she’d leave and go back to LA or even to Austin with Tessie.

      And maybe, just maybe, she’d take the trail of memories, broken and otherwise, with her.

       CHAPTER SIX

      WHEN EVE DROVE up in front of her house, the first thing she noticed was a hot cowboy on the porch. Not the hot cowboy, Lawson, but rather his cousin, a hot cowboy from the same sizzling Granger gene pool.

      Roman.

      The second thing she noticed was the disturbing stuffed horse next to him. It was at least five feet tall, had urine-yellow spots, large black owl eyes and a neck crooked at such an angle that it looked as if someone had strangled it. There was a large purple-wrapped box next to it.

      “Wow,” Cassidy murmured. She was in the passenger seat, and with her mouth open, she stared up at the porch.

      Eve figured Cassidy’s reaction wasn’t for the horse, and she got confirmation of that when Cassidy made a sound as if she’d just taken a lick of something sinfully delicious.

      That was most women’s reaction to Roman.

      Since she wasn’t blind, Eve could appreciate Roman’s good looks, but he’d always been too much of a bad boy for her. Plus, in her younger days, she’d never been able to see past Lawson. That hadn’t stopped Roman and her from becoming friends though.

      “Please tell me he’s not an actor,” Cassidy said. “Or a mirage brought on by this heat.”

      Well,

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