His Texas Heir (Holts of Briar Hill #1)

Chapter 1

ONE

Millie

The waiting room smelled like lavender and quiet desperation.

Or maybe that was just me.

I smoothed the printed spreadsheet across my knee for the fourth time, like flattening it would change the numbers.

It wouldn't. I'd run them six different ways on my phone on the drive over and three more times in the parking lot and once more in the elevator, and they kept coming out the same: not enough.

Not yet. Not with the job gone and the savings half-depleted and the three months of rent I still owed on an apartment in San Antonio that cost more than my mother's first house.

The numbers said: not this year, Millie.

The numbers could go to hell.

I folded the spreadsheet in half so I didn't have to look at it and pressed my hands flat on top and breathed in through my embroidered mask—the blue one with the marigolds my tía Rosa sent from Oaxaca, because if I was going to sit in a waiting room and quietly fall apart I was at least going to do it in something pretty.

Outside the window, June was happening aggressively.

Inside, the AC was set to the temperature of a sensible cardigan, and the chairs were the kind of padded waiting room chairs designed to communicate this will be fine, everything is fine while you waited to discuss something deeply personal with a stranger in a white coat.

Everything was not fine.

I'd had a plan. That was the thing—I'd had an actual plan, a real one, with a timeline and a savings goal and a color-coded spreadsheet, and I'd been eighteen months away from making it happen when the Riverwalk shut down and the hotel suspended operations and my boss's camera had been off for that Zoom call and I'd known before he said a word.

We're so sorry, Camila. We'll be in touch.

They had not been in touch.

So here I was. Twenty-six years old, unemployed, sitting in the waiting room of the San Antonio Fertility Center in my tía's mask with a spreadsheet on my knee that said I could not afford the thing I'd come here to discuss, waiting for a consultation I had already decided was probably pointless, because I was a woman who finished things she'd started even when the thing she'd started had quietly become impossible.

You want a baby so bad, my best friend Daniela had said, when I'd told her about the plan, back when it had still been a plan. You could just, like. Meet someone.

I've been trying to meet someone for three years, I'd said.

You've been working eighty-hour weeks for three years.

Same thing.

She hadn't argued with that.

The thing was—and I'd explained this to Daniela, and to my mother, who had lit approximately forty candles in response, and to my father, who had said sweetpea, are you sure in the careful voice he used when he was trying not to say Millie, this seems insane—I wasn't giving up on meeting someone.

I wasn't closing a door. I was just. Tired of waiting for a door that might not exist while the thing I wanted most kept getting pushed further down the timeline by jobs and apartments and men who were fine, perfectly fine, just never quite right.

I was twenty-six. I knew that wasn't old. My mother had me at thirty-two and liked to mention it whenever the subject came up, which was often.

But I'd wanted this my whole life—not just a baby, a family, the loud messy kind I'd always half-had and half-invented, the kind where someone was always in the kitchen and someone was always arguing about the radio and there were always too many people at the table and not enough chairs.

I was an only child of two people who loved each other very much and had given me everything except siblings, and I had spent my entire childhood at my cousins' houses pretending I lived there.

I wanted the table with not enough chairs.

I wanted it badly enough that I'd made a spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet said no.

I unfolded it again. Stared at it. Folded it again.

Unfolded it—

“‘Scuse me, ma’am. Is this seat taken?”

My eyes snapped up to the source of that deep voice, and I found…wow.

Well, I couldn’t describe him as anything but a giant.

He was six-three at least, maybe more, and broad enough through the shoulders to cast a man-shaped shadow over me.

He was in a plain dark blue shirt, open at the throat to reveal a dusting of dark chest hair, and he had the hands of a man who worked for a living.

I couldn’t see his face with the shadow. I couldn’t have cared less.

His crotch was at eye-level and I could see a bulge.

My mouth went dry and I swallowed hard.

“Uh…nope. Here all by my lonesome,” I stuttered.

All by my lonesome?

What a stupid thing to say.

He sat down beside me and his eyes crinkled in the suggestion of a smile behind his plain black mask. “Thank you,” he said in a Texan accent, in that deep voice that sent shivers down my spine.

I looked at him again out of the corner of my eye.

Couldn’t help it.

He was…maybe late thirties, early forties?

Face half-hidden, but still handsome—dark hair going silver at the temples, brown eyes, a jaw that I could see through the mask very much in the same way that I’d been able to see the distinct outline of something through his jeans.

The crinkle at the corner of his eye made it seem like he laughed a lot, but maybe I was just drawing conclusions because I’d never actually been this close to someone this hot.

I swallowed again.

Stared at my spreadsheet.

I felt him look at it.

“That spreadsheet looks like bad news,” he remarked.

I laughed before I could stop myself—a short, surprised sound that I immediately wanted to take back.

"That obvious?"

"The folding and unfolding gave it away." His eyes crinkled again. "You've done it four times since I sat down."

"I've been doing it for forty minutes," I admitted. "It's not getting better."

"Spreadsheets rarely do."

I looked at him sideways. He was looking straight ahead at the wall across from us, where someone had hung a framed print of a sunflower field that was doing its best and not quite succeeding at making any of this feel casual.

His hands were still on his knees. He had a ring of dried clay or maybe caliche along the side of his left boot that he hadn't noticed or hadn't bothered with, and there was something about that specific detail that made my chest do a small, stupid thing.

Stop it, I told my chest.

"Bad news or just disappointing news?" he asked.

"Is there a difference?"

"Bad news is something went wrong," he said. "Disappointing news is something you wanted didn't work out the way you planned."

I thought about it. "Disappointing, then. Nothing went wrong exactly. The math just doesn't—" I gestured at the spreadsheet. "The math doesn't math."

He made a sound that might have been a laugh. Low and brief, more exhale than sound, but I felt it somewhere in my sternum which was insane and I was choosing not to examine it.

"You drive far?" he asked.

"San Antonio. You?"

"About an hour north." A pause. "Little town called Briar Hill. Probably never heard of it."

I hadn't. "First time here?"

"That obvious?"

I smiled behind my mask. He'd used my own words back at me, easy as anything, and something about that made me feel slightly less like I was vibrating at an unhinged frequency. "The boots," I said. "And you sat down like you were deciding whether the chair deserved you."

This time the laugh was real—quiet, surprised, the kind that sounds like it doesn't happen that often. "Fair enough."

We sat with that for a moment. The sunflower print stared at us. Someone in another part of the clinic dropped something metal and we both looked toward the sound and then back at nothing.

"You here alone?" he asked. Then, quickly, like he'd heard how that sounded: "I mean—no partner, or—"

"No," I said. "Very much no partner. This was—" I looked down at the spreadsheet. "This was my plan B. Solo plan B, you could say." I paused. "Pun intended, I guess."

He was quiet for a beat. "Brave."

"Broke is more accurate." I folded the spreadsheet again. "What about you? Is your—" I gestured vaguely. "Are you here with someone, or—"

"No." He said it flatly, no elaboration, and then seemed to reconsider. "It's a long story."

"I've got—" I checked the time on my phone. "Forty minutes until my consultation. And I've run out of things to do with this spreadsheet."

He looked at me then—fully, for the first time, turning his head so those brown eyes were actually on me instead of adjacent to me—and even half-masked and in a waiting room with a sunflower print and terrible AC I felt it like a hand pressed flat against my sternum.

Three and a half years, I reminded myself. It has been three and a half years. This is just what happens.

"It's a really long story," he said.

"I'm a good listener," I said. "Professional hazard. I used to coordinate events for a living. You learn to let people talk."

The corner of his eyes creased. "Used to?"

"COVID took that too." I shrugged. "Hence the spreadsheet."

He nodded slowly, the way people do when they're deciding something. Then he settled back in his chair, those big hands loose on his knees, and said: "You know anything about inheritance law?"

“Not even a little bit,” I said. “Lay it on me.”

It took him about ten minutes to explain—without drama, without editorializing, just the facts laid out in order like fence posts.

His grandfather's deed had some weird stipulations.

There was a birth order clause. His uncle Arlo, the oldest, had been in prison for the better part of twenty years and had apparently chosen this particular moment in history, a global pandemic, to emerge and hire a lawyer. There was a twelve-month window.

If this man—this gorgeous, mountain of a man—was able to have a baby in twelve month? The land was his. If not…

"Production of a natural heir," I repeated.

"That's what it says."

"Your grandfather actually used the word production."

"1958."