by Hanna Hart
A Next Door Neighbor The Cowboy Billionaire
(Brookside Ranch Brothers)
Hanna Hart
Book 6
Copyright 2020 by Hanna Hart - All rights reserved.
In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.
Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
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About the Author
1
Jaxon
It was true what they all told Jaxon Brooks: time flies.
It had already been four years since had has taken up as the owner of his parents’ luxury Brookside Ranch in New York state.
He was only twenty-one when he became the owner and manager of the billion-dollar business.
At first, he hated everything about it. He hated that his rich family had given all six of their sons a luxury ranch to run the minute they came of legal age. He hated that he had to leave his Texas friends and family behind, he hated the responsibility that came with running a tourist destination—he even hated the name of the town his ranch was located in: Kerhonkson.
But the resentment he felt toward his parents and eldest brother, Jett, was short-lived.
“Have you seen it yet?” Dylan Atkinson asked as Jaxon walked into his office at the ranch.
“Seen what?” Jaxon asked, nodding toward his friend and business partner.
Dylan’s eyes went round and wide. The man ran a hand through his prickly red beard and scolded himself. “Ah. Forget I said anything!”
“Have I seen what?” Jaxon repeated with a laugh. “What went wrong? It’s the wedding party, right? Now they’re saying March is too cold to do the big barn ceremony?”
“Surprisingly, no,” Dylan said with some humor. “Which is great, because if I hear one more bride trying to get a freebee out of this ranch, I’m going to lose my mind.”
Like most of his brothers, Jaxon had a hands-on approach to his ranch. His father, Roger, didn’t believe that the owner of a Brookside Ranch should be a nameless CEO who hid in a high-rise office. He believed that the owners of the ranches should know how to do everything: caring for the property, feeding the animals, and hosting tours and activities. They should be a “people person.”
This was fine by Jaxon. He’d been born and bred to run a ranch. His father had been teaching him how to host activities and please customers since he was a little boy.
Most guests were a dream to deal with, but the ranch had the occasional nightmare client—usually the brides.
“Speaking of which,” Dylan said as he shook his pen between his thumb and forefinger. “Did Kiara tell you we’re booked solid until November?”
“No, I didn’t hear,” Jaxon said. “My old man will be happy to hear that report.”
“No kidding,” Dylan laughed.
Jaxon narrowed his brows curiously and sat at the desk across from his friend as he asked, “So, what were you asking if I’d seen yet?”
“Oh, that,” Dylan said, his expression falling. “Well, it’s not about the ranch.”
“No?”
The ginger shook his head and reluctantly removed his phone from his pocket. After a few swipes and scrolls, he turned the screen to Jaxon and handed the device to him. “You may as well do this while I’m here and we can just get it over with together.”
“That doesn’t sound ominous at all,” Jaxon said.
“Do you still follow Skylar on any socials?” his friend asked, and Jaxon immediately stiffened.
“No, why?”
“Oh, man. I didn’t know that. Okay, well, here,” Dylan pointed to the screen.
Jaxon turned the brightness up saw Skylar’s most recent social media post: a photoshoot with her new boyfriend. He had his arms wrapped around her waist, which made Jaxon twinge with jealousy, but his heart sank farther as he saw her hand extended to the lens of the camera to show an engagement ring—with a diamond the size of a spec of sand—snugly fixed around her ring finger.
“She’s...engaged?” he managed to stammer out.
“Yeah, man, looks like it.”
“How long has she known this guy?” he snarked, holding the phone back toward Dylan before taking a second glance at the phone. “A couple of months?”
“I know, right?” Dylan shrugged. “Juliet showed me this morning; I was just as surprised as you.”
“Juliet still follows Skylar?”
As the question left Jaxon’s lips, he realized how juvenile it sounded.
“Go easy on her,” Dylan said. “She loves you, but those girls have been friends since they were in kindergarten.”
“Right,” Jaxon nodded.
“You okay?”
“It’s a little surprising, but I’ll live,” he said with a shrug.
Dylan looked dubious. “You sure?”
“Look, she isn’t in my life anymore. I don’t have the right, or frankly, the time, to be commenting on who she’s choosing to spend her life with.”
“Seems a bit rushed,” Dylan said.
“That’s going to be her problem to deal with, not mine.”
“Alright,” his friend nodded. “Sorry, man.”
Jaxon met Dylan’s eyes and forced a smile. “Don’t be.”
The rest of the day was a blur.
He didn’t want anyone to know he was hurting, but every so often, he would feel his heart pull and lilt with worry and have to stop what he was doing throughout the day.
Jaxon had watched his older brothers go through many girlfriends over the years. He’d been to wedding after wedding, watched two of his brothers lose their wives in death, and saw new loves begin.
He was happy for his brothers, but if he were being honest, the idea of marriage seemed like an outdated—terrifying—cosmic joke.
If you loved someone, why did you need a legal document to prove it? Wasn’t faithful devotion enough? Didn’t actions speak louder than words when it came to showing love?
He’d never even considered the possibility of spending forever with a ring on his finger...until he met Skylar.
He met her the same year he moved to Kerhonkson, New York.
She was studying to be a veterinarian and working part-time as a vet assistant specializing in equine handling. He’d first met her when she came in to check up on one of the older horses at the ranch who seemed to have a runny nose. The two hit it off immediately, and by the end of her first day on the ranch, he had asked her out on a date. The two spent nearly every day together from then on.
There was something fun about Skylar. She was an animal lover, like him, and she was always up for an adventure.
Roleplay in hushed whispers, pretending to be a mobster’s daughter every time someone got into an elevator with them?
Skylar was game.
Invest half of her life savings into a local comedy club in town?
Why not!
Drive the two hours south to New York City and spend the night at a questionable underground art club in Manhattan?
Sure!
Whatever the challenge, Skylar was ready to embrace it.
He was captivated by her. She made him feel things that were ridiculous—things he had never been able to fathom with his teenage girlfriends. She was the only girl who made him think, “Hm...maybe there is something to this marriage thing.”
Of course, Jaxon never actually asked Skylar to marry him. He’d never even bought a ring.
But he did commit himself to her in every way possible. She had his attention from day one. He didn’t entertain other women. He didn’t check them out or make flirtatious chit-chat with anyone else.
After six months of dating, Jaxon asked Skylar to move in with him, and she said yes.
Jaxon was so deeply in love, it almost embarrassed him. His family had spent countless amounts of time with Skylar over the years. She’d even managed to win over his incredibly fussy mother.
From oldest to youngest, Jaxon’s sibling tree went Jett, Bennett, Colt, Phoenix, Hunter, then Jaxon, and his baby sister Kennedy.
With so many children and just as many age-gaps, Jaxon was closest to Kennedy, who was only two years younger, and Hunter, who was six years his senior.
Even with these close relationships, Jaxon avoided talking about his affection for Skylar with his siblings.
The closest he came was one night he spent at a business meeting with Hunter.
His brother was no stranger to love. He’d married their older brother Phoenix’s fiancée after carrying on a secret relationship with her.
Jaxon was one of the only members of the family who didn’t judge Hunter for it. He supported the relationship, but he never really understood how a girl could be more important than family loyalty. Then he met Skylar, and everything changed.
“I get it now,” he’d said one night to his brother after they finished a late dinner meeting with a ranch investor.
“What’s that?” Hunter asked, tilting his chin up.
“Everything that happened with Rachel,” he said.
“Rachel?” Hunter repeated in surprise. The pair had been together for years and years at this point, so to have Jaxon bring it up must have seemed out of the blue.
“There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for Skylar,” he said.
A proud smirk formed in the corner of Hunter’s lips, and his brother said, “Ah.”
Jaxon wasn’t one to open up about his feelings, so to Hunter, that statement had said it all. He was madly in love with Skylar.
Jaxon could never imagine life or love with anyone else, and After two years together, Skylar asked him if he ever planned on marrying her.
“I love you forever,” he said. This was their thing.
“I love you forever,” she agreed, but her gaze didn’t leave his. She wasn’t willing to drop the subject, which was strange, since she’d never forced the issue before. She knew how he felt about marriage, but that night, she couldn’t seem to let it go.
“So, is that a no?” she asked dubiously.
Jaxon bit his lip and looked at her curiously. “You know how I feel about it,” he said with a noncommittal shrug.
“Then just give me a definitive answer, one way or the other,” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said, suddenly nervous. “Why?”
“I’ve just been thinking about us,” she said, swinging his hand in hers as they walked hand in hand down the sidewalk. “I want to know where this is going.”
“Well, I’m not going anywhere,” he smiled, pulling her closer. “Are you?”
“No,” she giggled.
Jax stopped walking and lightly spun her around to face him. “Well then?”
“Jax,” she said, her soft features falling into an uncharacteristically serious expression. “I want a family.”
He exhaled in surprise, and Skylar’s eyes went wide.
“I’m not asking for a ring,” she smiled. “But I am asking for forever. I am asking for a future with you. So, what do you say?”
“What do I say?” he repeated as though the answer were obvious. “I say yes.”
Before he met Skylar, his answer would have surprised him. He loved his nieces and nephews but having kids of his own was never something he’d planned on.
Now he couldn’t stop thinking about it.
The only problem was that Skylar couldn’t have children of her own. They could have done in vitro, but after looking into fertility clinics and alternative options, both became passionate about adoption.
After two years together, the pair adopted a five-month-old baby boy named Sutton.
It was the best decision ever.
Until two years passed, and Skylar decided that forever was no longer what she had in mind for Jaxon Brooks.
The two broke up six months ago.
She left everything. The house, the ranch, her job, and their son. She made Jaxon a twenty-five-year-old single father.
To say he was stunned to see she was already engaged to someone else would have been an earth-shattering understatement.
But like always, Jaxon didn’t know how to express how he felt. So, he let the pain of Skylar pass through his body, feeling the weight of it like a crushing anchor, and stored it away in the private corners of his heart.
2
Madelyn
Madelyn couldn’t pack fast enough.
In two days, she was making the move from Rhode Island to New York State to create a new life for herself.
For years, she had been working off and on at her uncle Jim’s private investigation agency in Boston. The firm worked with family law matters, GPS tracking, spousal infidelity, corporate investigations, and skip tracing.
She had worked, unofficially, with her uncle since she was a teenage girl. There was “always use for a pretty young girl in an investigation agency,” or so said her uncle.
She began working there legally as soon as she turned eighteen and had been trained extensively by her uncle.
She had been working out in the field with other investigators, learning from their expertise, but once she got sick, her work had to take a back seat.
Her uncle lovingly kept her on at the firm, though her job was mainly paperwork and internet searches now.
This, and the fact that the agency also had a New York firm, meant that Madelyn had the freedom to live anywhere that was within a reasonable driving distance.
She was excited to be able to keep her job, excited for a fresh start away from her drug-addicted father, but not entirely pleased with the fact that she would have to leave her best friend and roommate, Tracy.
“I can’t believe you’re moving away. I am going to miss you so much,” Tracy said with a pout as she lazily rolled a drinking glass in some newspaper.
“It’s not that far,” Madelyn smiled. “Besides, we’ll see each other all the time still!”
“It’s lightyears away,” her friend whined.
“It’s a four-hour drive from Providence. That’s the perfect weekend! Or you could even do a day trip if you were ambitious.”
Tracy wrinkled her nose. “You mean if I’m committed to eight full hours of driving in a single day? Sorry, Maddie. I love you, but that’s insane.”
Madelyn had grown up in Connecticut, but she was no stranger to moving around as a child. She’d been to Manchester, Hartford, and New Haven before spending the last four years in Providence, Rhode Island. This was the city she called home.
Providence was the perfect blend of charming town and bustling city. It had unique buildings, great food, and was full of history. It was also within four hours of New York City and a simple thirty-minute transit to Boston on the Providence-Stoughton line.
“Tell me again why you’re leaving?” Tracy asked, n
ot at all committed to helping Madelyn pack.
“I have told you this a million times,” Madelyn laughed.
“To get away from your dad.”
“Just for a little while,” she said, though even as the words came out of her mouth, she didn’t know if it was true.
Initially, Madelyn moved to Providence to be with her grandmother on her father’s side. She was like a mother to Madelyn, and truly the only parental influence she’d ever had.
Madelyn and her grandmother told each other everything.
Everything.
It was only after Grandma May’s death three months earlier that Madelyn realized May hadn’t been entirely forthcoming about her finances.
As it turned out, she was a wealthy woman.
May left Madelyn two-hundred and fifty thousand dollars in her will. It was her life savings—all she had left after the sale of her very glamorous Providence property.
The money wasn’t worth losing her grandmother, of course. But it was more than a great nest-egg for her future.
“Are you still thinking your dad’s going to come after the money?” Tracy asked.
“I don’t know,” Madelyn said with a shrug. “He might. Besides me and Uncle Jim, my dad was grandma’s only living relative, and she didn’t give him a thing.”
“He’s better off without it,” Tracy said with a sympathetic roll of her eyes. “He’d probably end up smoking or snorting it. He’d be dead in a week.”
“Yeah,” Madelyn said, the vowels coming out slowly.
Her father had been an addict for as long as she could remember. He wasn’t a bad father and had managed to keep his addiction under control for most of her life. But the last couple of years, he’d been a mess. She tried her best to help him, but he wouldn’t commit to any recovery programs, and having him in her life only proved to be more toxic than anything else.
