WILD TEXAS HEARTS
BOOK 4
DEBORAH GARLAND
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The Cowboy’s Rebel Heart Copyright ©2021 Deborah Garland
WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Edits by:
Julie K. Cohen
Marsha McDaniel
Samantha Soccorso
Cover Designed by Kudi Designs
Published by Deborah A. Garland
www.deborahgarlandauthor.com
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
DEDICATION
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
WILD TEXAS HEARTS COWBOY SERIES
MORE BOOKS BY DEBORAH GARLAND
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
HERE’S DEBORAH
DEDICATION
For anyone who grew up not feeling perfect.
Your time to shine will come.
Chapter One
Delsey
Crash-landing my Bombardier custom jet in Wild Heart, Texas wasn’t the subtle way to sneak into town my publicist had in mind. Leaving Houston on the heels of a brewing scandal, I was hoping to lay low for a week.
“Mac, you okay back there?” My pilot Hayden peeked out of the cockpit door.
“Yes, yes. I’m fine.” Now I added surviving a plane crash to my list of accomplishments. “Are you okay?” I asked, catching my breath, my heart pounding.
“Yes, ma’am.” He tipped his cap to me. “Looks like the landing gear snapped. NTSB is on their way.”
“Oh crap,” I mumbled to myself. That won’t keep my homecoming quiet now, will it?
My smarts got me out of Wild Heart, yet here I was back in the small town I escaped after graduating top of my class in high school. I’d aced college, graduate school, and nailed a PhD in chemistry. All of my successes felt small and insignificant now that I was being accused of animal abuse.
Okay, not me personally. My cosmetics company. The empire I’d built to make women with less than perfect skin, like me, beautiful. And no, we didn’t abuse any animals. We didn’t even test on animals. Never have. One false accusation on the dark channels of the web and cancel-culture was ready to skin me alive.
Once I realized Hayden was fine, I worried about my precious plane. My pink and black jet with big red lips painted on the side hadn’t faired too well by how the right side was forty-five degrees lower than the left. Funny how planes can fly without engines, but landing gear was essential.
I sniffed, waiting to smell smoke and watch my gorgeous interior of pink satins, white faux fur, and dark walnut trim go up in flames. I grew up feeling quite unfortunate looking and always wanted everything around me to look goddamn gorgeous.
Including men. That’s where I got into trouble.
Speak of the devil...
My phone chimed to life and I snarled inwardly at the caller. “Yes, Truitt?”
“Jesus Christ, Mac. Are you okay?” The alarm in my COO/ex-fiancé’s voice almost sounded real. Every time I heard his voice lately, all I remembered was how he moaned my assistant’s name while banging her on his desk.
“I’m perfectly fine,” I said all curt, refusing to let him think otherwise.
I was having one hell of a month. First, I caught my intended with another woman, then someone accused me of hurting bunnies, and now I’ve been in a plane crash!
“You said the exact same thing when you called off our wedding.” Truitt had an iron-clad contract at Delsey Cosmetics, so I couldn’t fire him. Not for personal reasons, anyway. Instead, he agreed to say our break-up was mutual and we were staying good friends, even if I considered him anything but at the moment. I didn’t care to be humiliated by his infidelity and I’d kept the news of our engagement on the down-low anyway since he was my COO.
“Not that you cheating on me is as bad as a plane crash.” I couldn’t help the dig since no one was watching us pretend to be cordial.
The past few weeks had been tense, but I’d retreated to my lab where I felt most comfortable and let Truitt manage the company. Which I will say, he was excellent at doing.
He had plenty at stake, stocks, options, a title that got him into galas and parties all over Houston. Running Delsey Cosmetics into the ground wasn’t in his best interest which was why I didn’t think he’d planted the story about testing on animals.
“I always loved you for your priorities, Mac.”
Until you screwed my assistant... But I’d beaten that horse enough. Shit. I’d have to avoid saying stuff like that if I was going to disprove these accusations and improve my company’s image. “It’s no big deal. We just skidded off the runway.”
“I told you to take the helicopter.”
That flying tin can reminded me of a wasp and scared the living daylights out of me.
“The Wild Heart tower wouldn’t have cleared us if they didn’t think we could land. Oh shit,” I said, glancing out the oval window, stunned by all the firetrucks, cranes, and television cameras. Sunday nights must be boring in Wild Heart for everyone to jump into action like this. “Are we done with this conversation? I was in a plane crash, Truitt.”
“Right. You are okay, I can tell by how bitchy you sound.”
“I. Was. In. A. Plane. Crash.”
“Just call me when you get settled in your parents’ house.” He surprised me with the caring angle out of nowhere. “Are they even home?”
“Nope. Traveling again with the Rhodes. Another cruise. A twenty-day adventure down the grand rivers of Europe.” My family and the Rhodes had been tight forever. Their two sons, Parker and Walker always treated me like a little sister. Parker, all brutish cowboy, who wanted to herd cattle and not wrangle horses, had left for Wyoming after high school, while Walker went into veterinary medicine. He and I bonded over our love of science. While I got the geek label for being so smart that guys wouldn’t touch me with a ten-foot pole, Walker got loads of tail for being a gorgeous horse veterinarian and part-time professor at Tatum Veterinary College. I’d heard from my mother he had a girlfriend now. I had to meet the woman who hog-tied Dr. Walker Rhodes. “It’s why I agreed to hide out at Nickel Song. I couldn’t count on Charles and Mimi to keep quiet about me being home.”
Home. Wild Heart, horse country filled with l
ots of cowboys.
A face flashed at me. Chestnut brown hair, turquoise eyes, sculpted cheekbones, and a dimpled chin. Logan Grady. The man who’d made my life in high school utterly miserable. I hadn’t even considered how being home for this extended period of time meant I might bump into him. Something I planned to avoid at all costs.
“I’m surprised you’d even go home. Why not Paris, or Hawaii?”
“Yeah, those are the optics I want. Me sipping wine on the Champs De Elysée or my toes in the sand on a private beach next to a picture of a blinded rabbit.”
“Good point. So, who’s picking you up, Mac?”
I closed my eyes. No one in Wild Heart called me Mac. Short for Mackenzie. Somehow in Houston, it stuck. In my small Texas hometown, I was just plain ole Delsey. Literally and figuratively.
“My property manager Grace said she’d come get me.” When I squinted out the window again, I smiled. “And there she is. Out on the runway. Jumping up and down, waving to me.” Warmth spread through me when I saw her.
Someone cared about me.
“I remember you mentioned her. Said she was a spitfire, that one.”
“You’ve already screwed one assistant of mine and ran her off. Stay away from Grace, will ya?” When Truitt didn’t say anything, I said, “She takes good care of all my properties here.”
Over the years, I’d been buying real estate in Wild Heart. Homes that I rented out as well as commercial buildings on Main Street. A downturn in the economy left a lot of town folk struggling. I made the investments so opportunistic sharks didn’t take advantage of good people. But collecting rents and calling plumbers was a full-time job.
For an inkling of a minute, I wondered if I’d overworked Grace, a single mom. She’d never complained. Always answered her phone. I hadn’t looked at my rent rolls in nearly a year because I trusted Grace completely.
“What will you do for a week in that big house by yourself?” Truitt asked and I wondered why he’d stayed on the line.
Emptiness swamped me out of nowhere. My precious lab with taupe walls and peeling linoleum, the place I loved more than my penthouse apartment got closed down while a private team investigated the allegation per state regulations.
Running home to get out of the limelight had been my publicist’s suggestion and I quickly agreed, knowing I’d be safe in Wild Heart. I hadn’t considered how it would feel to knock around so many empty rooms by myself. Nickel Song, the house I grew up in, was a 25,000 square foot southern palatial estate.
“I’ll be fine, Truitt.” A wicked chill sliced through me and I bolted upright. The seatbelt held me back, sending a twinge of pain across my right shoulder. “Don’t even think about coming to Wild Heart.”
Silence. Damn. Had he been thinking of it?
“Mac...” His voice got low. “I said I was sorry.”
Nope. Not having that discussion again. “Uh oh. Smoke. I smell smoke. I have to go.”
“Mac, holy shit, wait—”
I clicked the phone off and pressed it against my chest. I held back tears from so much going wrong around me. Thank goodness, I developed a kick-ass waterproof mascara.
And I didn’t test it on the frickin’ Easter Bunny!
Logan
“NOW, IF SHE WERE DEAD...” I murmured to the television, staring at a pink and black caddywonked plane teetering on the edge of the runway.
Television crews had gotten out to Wild Heart Regional Airport quickly. First responders, too. Of course, Princess Delsey had flown into town on her jet with big red lips painted on the side.
“Who’s dead, Uncle Logan?” a scared little voice whispered from under the archway between the living room and the kitchen.
“Damn it,” I cursed under my breath and stood up. “No one, Maddie.”
Of all the things not to say around an eleven-year-old girl. After the horrific accident took the lives of Maddie’s mother—my sister—and my parents, dead, death, kill... All those words made my poor niece shake.
She’d been in that truck, too. My dad had been driving them to Maddie’s dance recital when his pickup truck’s low-hanging muffler bottomed out on the train tracks and got caught. Wouldn’t you know a fucking freight train just happened to be barreling along?
The gates hadn’t worked in forever. That sumbitch freight company had crafty lawyers, pointing to everyone else when it came time to pay restitution for three deaths and the permanent disability of one little girl. My niece lost a fucking leg!
I’d run out of money and had to drop the case. Maddie’s medical bills were killing me, but she was alive and that’s what mattered the most to me.
“What’s that?” Maddie pointed to the television. She inched slowly into the living room, confidence returning to her, those narrow shoulders pointed back. She’d come a long way in a year since the accident. But we both had ways to go to being completely healed.
I had no idea what my path to mental salvation was paved with, but my financial salvation was nowhere to be found. I was dead broke and I hadn’t paid my rent in six months.
“That...” I struggled to answer Maddie. That’s trouble right there coming for me.
Would Princess Delsey Mackenzie, my landlady, actually fly into town just to exact her pound of flesh? Perhaps I was letting paranoia get the better of me. It’d been one hell of a year and my thoughts often turned dark.
Why else would Delsey be here in Wild Heart, though? Despite her parents still living here, she hardly ever came home. Last I heard, Chuck and Mimi were out of town, traveling again with Walker’s folks. We lived in a small town. Everyone knew everyone’s business here.
Delsey had to be gunning for me.
And I deserved her wrath. I’d made her life miserable in high school.
Then we’d shared a scorching kiss behind the scoreboard senior year. The best damn kiss in my life, if I were being honest with myself, which many times I wasn’t when it came to how I felt about Delsey. But it was a taste I’d not forgotten. Or gotten over. Back then, it rocked the piss out of me. I was so leveled out that I never admitted how I felt about her. So, I...I went back to bullying her. Didn’t know what the hell else to do.
Then the summer came and she went. Traveling through Europe with her folks. In the fall, she’d left for college and I hadn’t spoken to her since. The closest I’d gotten to her was eighteen months ago when we were both at the Citadel Royale for a horse auction. I wasn’t sure she noticed me, though. Why should she have? She was rich and had everything a woman could want. And that didn’t include the rough, hard-ass cowboy I was then. Now I’m just broken down and beaten up.
“Uncle Logan, you’re doing it again.”
“Hmmm? What, honey?”
“Mumbling to yourself,” Maddie said and squinted at the television. Pointing with a slack jaw, she said, “Are you kidding me? Delsey Mackenzie is here?”
My eyebrows knitted together. “How do you know who Delsey is?”
Besides her name whispered all over town, her family estate on the tourist map, and her face on the damn television all the time for being the famous CEO of Delsey Cosmetics... Shoot, how could Maddie not know who she was?
“She’s my hero,” Maddie chirped happily. “They talk about her all the time in school. They named the chemistry lab after her. And she always says in interviews how she felt people didn’t understand her for being so smart.” Maddie looked down. “Like me.”
Uh oh.
I stared at my niece and gripped her shoulders until she leaned in to hug me. How many blows could one kid take? Maddie was crazy smart, too. Aced all her classes. Her hero, another brilliant gal, might waltz in here and make us homeless.
Maddie had lost everyone as well in one blinding flash. I’d barely had enough energy or sanity to deal with that, and next, I was raising a little girl who’d lost her leg. Maddie’s father had told Janey to fuck off when she got pregnant and only came around to cause trouble now and again. It’d crept into my mind over this p
ast year that with Janey gone, Kyle could show up and take Maddie from me. Janey had put that asshole’s name on the birth certificate.
He had rights. Enough rights to challenge custody.
Raising a child, medical bills, and the amount I had to pay out to settle up my parents’ house when that sold drained my bank account.
I worked for Renner Ranch. Cord Renner and his son, Cam, my best friend, had each tried to throw money at me. I refused to take handouts. I took care of Maddie. Me.
Only, I’d gone broke doing it.
“Did you know Delsey wrote my textbook?” Maddie chatted on, smiling with that adorable ginormous gap between her two front teeth covered in brand-new metal.
Braces cost a fortune, too. Nearly all the winnings I’d made with Cam Renner running his racehorse Blue Lake was gone.
But when I couldn’t get Maddie new sneakers or a glittery backpack like my buddy Jamie’s daughter Chloe, Maddie never complained.
The poor kid still walked with a limp due to a prosthetic those damn fools at the hospital fifty miles away couldn’t seem to get right. I worried about her constantly. Kids were cruel. I knew that better than anyone. No one, and I meant no one had better say boo to her.
A pain stirred in my gut. Like I used to torture Delsey. For everything. Being a flat-chested string bean with greasy hair and acne. She was shy as all get out. Nerdy with coke-bottle glasses. But Delsey was brilliant. So smart that the teachers fawned all over her.
Holy shit. I deserved whatever payback the princess would deliver. But not Maddie. She’d been through enough. I cupped the top of her head as she still leaned into me. Delsey just better not fuck with my niece. Maddie didn’t deserve to pay for my past sins. If it came to it, I’d crawl to anyone for help, anything to protect Maddie.
“No, honey, I didn’t know Delsey wrote your textbook. Did you tell me that?”
She shrugged. “I don’t think so. I didn’t think you knew her.”
The Cowboy's Rebel Heart: An Enemies to Lovers Second Chance Romance (Wild Texas Hearts Book 4) Page 1
