My Cowboy's Second Chance Surprise (Billionaire Ranch Brothers Book 1) Read online

  My Cowboy’s Second Chance Surprise

  (Billionaire Ranch Brothers)

  Hanna Hart

  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

  More By Hanna Hart

  Exclusive Offer

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Nash

  “Are you okay if I take off?”

  Nash blinked, surprised to hear his brother’s warm voice suddenly fill the silence of his office.

  His eldest brother, Gage, had been staying with him for the last five months to help him run his ranch.

  He lived in a town south of Corpus Christi called Tillsonburg. Since the arrival of his family-owned business, Havenview Luxury Ranch and Spa, the town had become a hotspot for rich tourists looking to get out into the wilderness for the week.

  The ranch was one of many that his parents planned for, all to be owned by one of Nash's brothers.

  From oldest to youngest, there was Gage, Hayes, Nash, Trent, Holden, and Wilder. Their parents, Kelly and Joshua, had a big family and big dreams to open a chain of luxury ranches—both of which had worked out swimmingly.

  “Yeah, I’ll be alright,” Nash said, nodding toward his brother. “You’ve done enough damage here.”

  In his imagination, his words came out charming and full of soft, polite humor designed to dismiss his brother with no hard feelings. In reality, his words came out even and sad.

  It seemed Nash wasn’t happy enough to make jokes yet. Not even really lame ones.

  “I know that didn’t sound sincere,” he added, noting the look of concern that had washed over Gage’s face. “But I’m okay. Really.”

  “It’s okay if you’re not,” Gage said.

  “Thanks, Mom,” Nash responded.

  “Hey, I’m just looking out for you,” Gage laughed, spinning in the guest chair on the other side of Nash’s desk. “If you say you’re ready to roll on your own, then I’ll take off. I just want you to mean it.”

  Nash met his brother’s eyes and fought off the desperate urge to tell him to stay another week. That kind of behavior would be, one, insane, and two, an open season to be treated like a little kid.

  He wasn’t used to having people baby him, and that was exactly what his friends and family had been doing for the last five months. They’d been babying him, treating him with kid gloves.

  It made him feel small. He hated it.

  Nash gave a helpless shrug in response to his brother. “I’ll be okay,” he said with conviction. “I’m ready to make this ranch huge.”

  Gage studied him, rubbing a finger against his stubble with careful consideration. “Okay,” he said in summary. “Then I’ll be heading out tonight.”

  “Head out now,” Nash said, nodding toward his brother. “It’s almost six, and the night shift is already here.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m gonna stay for another hour and answer some e-mails,” he offered. “Then, I’m headed home.”

  It was clear from his brother’s expression that Gage didn’t believe him, but he graciously let it slide.

  There was no way Nash was going home. That was the truth.

  He’d been making the ranch his obsession. It was his reason for getting up in the morning. He poured every ounce of himself into making this property—the newest Havenview ranch—a success.

  His parents had given him this ranch to run on his own, which he had been doing for the last five months without incident.

  Ranching was in his blood, after all. He’d been working with horses, leading tourists on world-class dude ranch experiences, and even landscaping since he was a teenager and his parents opened up their first location.

  But it wasn’t ego that was keeping him busy at Havenview or even his family rivalry with the Brookside Ranch locations.

  It was a broken heart.

  Just over six months ago, Nash’s wife Kenzie had been killed in a violent car accident.

  He moved to Tillsonburg just a month after her passing. He needed to get out of Dallas; needed to get his mind on something else. Gage went with him, claiming it was to help open the ranch, but Nash knew it was to support him through his hard time.

  But unlike Gage, Nash wasn’t someone who shared feelings. He didn’t want to talk about Kenzie. He wanted to forget.

  Because losing someone in death wasn’t like a breakup.

  This was saying a lot, seeing as Nash had been through one fireball of a breakup several years ago. The kind that left you devastated and lost.

  This? This was a million times worse.

  When you break up with someone, there’s always the possibility of more—even if you were the most broken, miserable couple on the planet. You can always reach out.

  Always find each other on social media.

  Always think about what could have been—something Nash had done for years and years after his last breakup.

  But death was so solid. It was a permanence that Nash had never experienced before. He hadn’t been expecting the sheer weight of it.

  He’d never really lost anyone he loved. Two of his grandparents had passed—both on his mothers’ side—and it had been sad on both occasions, but he wasn’t all that close to them. It didn’t shatter his world. It didn’t even really shake it.

  Losing Kenzie was like losing a lung. There was something missing, something painful that made life impossible to live comfortably without.

  And there was nothing he could do about it.

  There was no second chance to make things better. There was no do-over. No level two.

  She was just gone.

  Nash hated that.

  Being home was the worst feeling for Nash. He hated being at home back in Dallas because it seemed so haunting. The ghost of Kenzie’s memory seemed to linger in every room.

  When he walked in through the front door, he could see her running up and greeting him when he got home from work.

  Down the hall, he saw where they had their first fight as a married couple—it was about having children. A big doozie.

  He hadn’t been interested in starting a family. Something she knew when she married him and, evidently, hoped he would change his mind about.

  He hadn’t.

  Walking further down the long hall was their bedroom, and he could feel the memory of their first make-up prickling against his skin.

  He could feel her lips against his, remember the curve of her body as she pressed into him.

  There was a myriad of memories in-between.

  Some were big: their wedding day and seeing her walk down the aisle—that first glimpse of her dressed in a simple white gown.

  H
e remembered their first time traveling together and how effortlessly fun it was. He remembered the silly way she would pronounce things like ‘Misshapen,’ which she would say ‘Miss-happen’ because that was how her South African grandmother would say it.

  Nash also remembered the cute way she would wrinkle her nose when she had an idea, the gentle way she interacted with the horses at the ranch, and the sweet smell of her.

  But most of all, he remembered the night he found out she was gone.

  She was coming home from her job. She worked at a local radio station and usually got home around seven.

  It was December, and while it didn’t snow in Dallas, it had been a curiously wet month.

  She texted him, “See you in like 10?”

  “K,” he texted back.

  “Do we need anything?”

  “No,” he wrote back. “I ordered Indian, and if you don’t get home soon, I’m going to eat it all without you ;)”

  She never responded.

  He remembered being surprised when twenty minutes had gone by and she still wasn’t home.

  “You get held up?” he texted.

  When his phone rang, he answered without looking, assuming that it was Kenzie.

  “You’re too late,” he quipped. “Food’s all gone.”

  This humorous greeting was met with stark silence. Nash cleared his throat and said, “Hello?”

  “Hello,” came an unfamiliar male voice. “Is this Nash Haven?”

  Nash felt a chill pass through his body. “Yes,” he said slowly. “Who is this?”

  “Sir,” came the official tones of the mystery man on the other line. “Do you own a white Range Rover?”

  Nash swallowed hard, and the saliva in his mouth felt impossible to get down. “My wife does.”

  “This is Officer Greene,” the man identified himself. “I’m afraid your wife has been in an accident.”

  Nash was already putting his shoes on. He grabbed his keys out of the oversized glass bowl by the front door and headed out to his car. “What happened?” he said. “Where is she?”

  The officer told him the accident had been bad and she was being airlifted to the Greater General Hospital. He offered to stay on the phone with Nash while he drove there, but Nash refused.

  He remembered speeding all the way to the hospital. He’d never been so panicked in all of his life.

  Nash shook his head, pushing his thoughts aside.

  All of these memories whirled around him like a storm until he couldn’t take another minute in their Dallas home.

  “Send me to Tillsonburg,” he’d begged his parents, pained and desperate to get out of the city.

  They happily obliged.

  “It’ll be good for him,” his father said.

  And it had been.

  His mother had also come to the ranch for the first three months. She was an ace with finances, having worked as a financial planner for many years before starting the family ranch, but he knew she too had come to the ranch to help him out.

  She was one of the only people he would talk to about Kenzie, but even then, it was rare.

  His mother encouraged him to try therapy, insisting that he shouldn’t bottle up his feelings.

  He tried it four times before deciding that it wasn’t for him.

  Therapy wasn’t something you went to once and were magically fixed. It was a process. You had to get to know your therapist. They had to get a feel for you before they could understand how to help you, and the truth was, Nash wasn’t all that into sharing.

  So he buried himself in work, and for the most part, it seemed to help.

  He loved the idea of creating something—even better that it was raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars on a monthly basis.

  So no, he wouldn’t be going home that night. He’d been spending most nights sleeping at the ranch in one of the luxury suites—a room he had taken off the books for the foreseeable future.

  Knowing that he could wake up, get a great breakfast, and go right to work without too much thought was an immense comfort to him.

  “You should start making a home here,” Gage said as though he were reading his brother’s mind.

  “Yeah,” Nash nodded, fixing his eyes on his computer screen.

  “I’m serious,” his brother continued. “You’ve been here for months now and I bet I’ve spent more time at your place than you have.”

  “I’ll get you a medal for that,” came his sarcastic, albeit absent-minded response.

  Gage picked up his jacket and pitched it over his shoulder. “Alright,” he said. “I’m out. I’m driving back to San Antonio after I pack up at the house, but I’ll be back next week.”

  “You don’t have to keep coming back,” Nash said, forcing an amused laugh. “I’m okay. Really.”

  “Yeah, well,” Gage shrugged. “It’s less than an hour’s drive. Plus, I want to see how that ranch is doing next door.”

  The ranch he spoke of was a farm property next to Havenview.

  “I’m still kicking myself that we didn’t buy up the property. Expand the ranch,” Gage lamented.

  “For what?” Nash laughed. “An extra couple of parking spaces?”

  The land next door was small and hardly worth Havenview’s time or money. It was going to be a cute little family farm, nothing more.

  “Hey,” Gage laughed. “Our parents started out with a family farm and look at what we have now.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he waved dismissively. “Get out of here.”

  His brother smiled and began toward the door. Stopping with his hand on the handle, he turned and said, “Hey, Nash…”

  Nash looked up.

  “If you need anything.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know. Thank you.”

  “See ya,” his brother said, giving an army salute before heading out the door.

  “See ya,” Nash called back.

  He thought he would feel some sort of relief knowing that he was no longer putting his brother out—that Gage could go back to running his ranch and living his own life—but he didn’t.

  As the door shut behind his brother, Nash felt a hollowing pain crash through his body. He was really alone now.

  Chapter Two

  Sophia

  Breakups make people do the strangest things.

  Sophia Sawyer was very familiar with this fact.

  When she was just twenty years old, Sophia took a small job as a marketing assistant at a mid-sized company in Texas called Loche and Barnes.

  She worked long hours for little pay, but it was a steady income that allowed her to stay in a small town with her boyfriend and commute to Dallas for work.

  Two weeks after her twenty-third birthday, after she and her ex had broken up, she decided she’d had enough of country life and wanted to make a new start for herself.

  Sophia began applying as a social media marketer for jobs all across America. She applied to places in California, New York, Tennessee, Florida, and Washington.

  She was both excited and horrified when she was hired to live in Seattle.

  Sophia had convinced herself that she was ready to make a change. Moving to her was the break-up equivalent to girls who got dumped and then chopped their hair off. It just seemed like the natural next step.

  Her life in Seattle was great. She made plenty of money at her job and was able to take advantage of the daycare in her office, giving her daughter Imogene somewhere to go while she worked.

  Then she met a man named August Smith. He was four years older and worked as an investment banker.

  They dated for six months before calling it quits.

  Six months is not a very long time to be dating someone, Sophia told herself. There was no reason to be this heartbroken over it. And she wasn’t heartbroken—just angry.

  Now, at twenty-six years old and after three years of living in the city, Sophia began to wonder if she’d made a huge mistake moving away in the first place.

  She mis
sed life in the country.

  Sophia grew up on an expansive farm with her parents. It was half a dairy farm and half greenhouse.

  Her family grew microgreens such as beets, broccoli, cabbage, and radishes, but their biggest crop was by far corn.

  So one day, on a whim, she decided to look at properties in Texas and found the most adorable little farm in a happy community called Tillsonburg.

  The farm was one hundred and thirty-one acres large. To the average person buying a house for themselves, this seemed like more space then you could ever use. But for farm owners, the little Tillsonburg property was still one hundred acres shy of what was considered to be a small family farm—but Sophia loved it.

  The price was shockingly low, which Sophia knew meant that the property would be a fixer-upper, but she was more than okay with that.

  The Victorian farmhouse was exactly what she wanted for Imogene. Even though the girl was only two years old, Sophia wanted to give her the kind of childhood she had growing up.

  She wanted Imogene to remember their character home and playing with the animals and running through the fields of endless green. She wanted her to have kind-hearted country friends and live at a slower pace for a while.

  It would be a good life for them.

  She loved everything about the sale process.

  She loved the rush of nerves that she felt when she signed over all of her life savings to the farm owner.

  She loved the Pinterest deep dive she did looking at renovation ideas, and she loved that the day she showed up to her new home in Texas, the previous owners were there to give her the keys.

  “We loved making our home here,” said Andrea Willis as she took Sophia through the house.

  Her husband, Frasier Willis, walked in front of them and explained every room in detail. It was sweet, but at times she wanted to laugh at the way he talked about the simplest things.