Chapter Twenty-Five
Heart sat crisscross on a tumbled rock along the edge of a dry creek bed at the base of the slump, organizing her data when she heard the plodding of horse hooves in the distance, then the sound of boots dismounting. Excitement had brewed these past couple days about what she’d found, and now that she was putting together a bigger picture of this escarpment, she knew the answers to Tyler’s problems lay in this unexpected catastrophe.
Her backpack buzzed with a text, and she began playing her typical game of “in which pocket did I stow my phone,” finding it with a message from Tyler on the screen.
Hercules:I see your truck. Where are you?
She tapped a response, popping a mint into her mouth, noting that her phone was still mostly charged from this morning. Well done, Heart. Ty would pat you on the back, she grinned.
Heart:Up the trail past your hideout. What’s with the horse?
An ellipsis wavered.
Hercules:Drove one of the herds to the repaired pasture. Came to see the slump. Show me what you got.
Heart:I can think of a mill innuendos, but I also saw Seth snoop thru my phone when we did Tolkien trivia, so it’s prob best not 2 sext LOL.
Hercules:Yeah I gotta ride this saddle all the way home. Don’t make it hard for me.
A grin split her lips. That dry sense of humor she’d grown to love. She rattled off a reply.
Heart:C u in a sec :-)
She turned on her phone’s personal hotspot—there goes my battery life—and shifted her laptop in front of her. After sending off the finished land survey to Bill at the State Committee that morning, she’d clicked open a few PDFs that she’d looked up the day before and stayed up late reading on the couch while the boys curled beside her with books and Frodo warmed her feet. Fossyl’s public records regarding their mineral rights lease. The state’s website on land protection and conservation.
Moments later, she heard footsteps on the trail. Tyler emerged beside her, coming out of the trees, and dropped down on the rock.
“Careful, it’s hard,” she joked out of the corner of her mouth. Even sitting, he was so much taller, and she smiled up at him. “Hey—”
“Look at the geologist telling me a rock is hard. Get your mouth on mine, Tie-Dye.” His lips fell to hers in an unrestrained kiss, taking her mouth, hands raking into her hair and angling her sideways to his advantage. With the boys in their midst, they’d had to be more careful. Her computer jostled on her knees and she barely caught it, but he didn’t break stride. His Stetson knocked her pencils in her hair. His breath exhaled warmly upon her, his scent filled her senses. Cedar. She never wanted to be without this comforting, tangy scent.
“D’you order that dress you liked for the wedding?” he murmured, his teeth nipping her lips, her jaw, her ear. She nodded. “I can’t wait for you to meet my brothers and their girls. Can’t wait to show you the ranch where I grew up.” He soothed the stings one by one, always coming on strong, always gentling afterward as she gripped his thigh for leverage.
“You miss it out there, don’t you?”
His muscles tensed beneath her touch as he drew back an inch, nodding. “Yeah, I do.”
“You could always come out to my place and take on a legal case or two for your brother’s ranch. The boys homeschool, right? It’s not like they’d have to miss class, and I have plenty of room. A loft they can have all to themselves. I only have twenty acres. But it’s close to Alpine.”
Huh. And T.R. could run the farm in his stead. A couple weeks ago he would have felt like he had to do it all. Right now? It wasn’t a bad idea to delegate. It’s what T.R. was always complaining at him to do anyway.
“Tell me about this slump.”
She swallowed. Picked at his T-shirt. Grinned. “I think I’ve got some very not-impartial loopholes to tell you about.”
His eyes sharpened on hers, even though he didn’t relinquish her. “You talkin’ dirty to me, sweetheart?”
“Yup. As in loads and loads of dirt.” She twisted in his grip to pull her laptop closer while the wind fluttered her notebook pages. “Okay, so I need you to verify something. Bill over at the committee mentioned there’s a new contract between you and Fossyl. When did you sign it? And, total tangent, why on earth did you sign it if you didn’t want to lease out these rights?”
Tyler’s brow furrowed and he leaned back to level a hard stare. “I didn’t sign a thing. My granddad signed it the final year of his life before he passed away.”
Heart slipped a pen out of her messy bun to jot down his response on her scribbled notes. A tendril of hair fell into her face, and Ty’s work-roughened finger brushed it over her ear for her.
“Huh. So this contract conveyed to you?”
“It wasn’t mentioned in the probate stuff. I didn’t know about it until after the property was finally stamped in my name. The only information I could find about who owned the pumps was from a copy of the original contract in my granddad’s records, and it showed the fifty-year lease was expired. So I contacted Fossyl and asked them to remove the equipment. That’s when I learned he’d signed a new one back in 2007. And in that contract, it did have a clause for conveyance. I tried to argue that because I hadn’t been presented at the time of inheriting, that the entire contract should be void, but a judge didn’t see it that way.”
Heart glanced at Tyler.