Tangled Up in Texas Read online

  Their past never faded—and neither did their passion.

  Between running his family ranch and dealing with far too many needy relatives, Shaw Jameson doesn’t have time for more trouble. But when his first love, former-child-star-turned-businesswoman Sunny Dalton, returns to Lone Star Ridge, Shaw senses things are about to get a whole lot more interesting.

  Shaw isn’t prepared for the memories that come flooding back now...or the reignited spark between them that turns into a raging inferno. Still, this gorgeous cowboy will do everything he can not to get burned a second time. Because Sunny never promised this visit was permanent and Shaw has no intention of giving up the land he loves. Letting Sunny go again is certain to leave a Texas-sized mark on his soul—and a permanent wall around his heart. Unless he can prove their small town holds the promise of the future they both always imagined.

  Praise for USA TODAY

  bestselling author Delores Fossen

  “This story took me for a wild Texan style emotional, entertaining, captivating, and most of all delightful ride...”

  —Books & Spoons on Sweet Summer Sunset

  “The plot delivers just the right amount of emotional punch and happily ever after.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Lone Star Christmas

  “Clear off space on your keeper shelf, Fossen has arrived.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Lori Wilde

  “A marvelous Christmas romance novel, a fantastic family saga, and a deliciously desirous addition to the beloved series!”

  —Books & Spoons on Lone Star Christmas

  “An amazing, breathtaking and vastly entertaining family saga, filled with twists and unexpected turns. Cowboy fiction at its best.”

  —Books & Spoons on The Last Rodeo

  “Fossen certainly knows how to write a hot cowboy, and when she turns her focus to Dylan Granger...crank up the air conditioning!”

  —RT Book Reviews on Lone Star Blues

  “Nicky and Garret have sizzling chemistry!”

  —RT Book Reviews on No Getting Over a Cowboy

  “Delores Fossen takes you on a wild Texas ride with a hot cowboy.”

  —New York Times bestselling author B.J. Daniels

  Also available from Delores Fossen

  and HQN

  Lone Star Ridge

  Tangled Up in Texas

  Coldwater Texas

  Lone Star Christmas

  Lone Star Midnight (ebook novella)

  Hot Texas Sunrise

  Texas at Dusk (ebook novella)

  Sweet Summer Sunset

  A Coldwater Christmas

  Wrangler’s Creek

  Lone Star Cowboy (ebook novella)

  Those Texas Nights

  One Good Cowboy (ebook novella)

  No Getting Over a Cowboy

  Just Like a Cowboy (ebook novella)

  Branded as Trouble

  Cowboy Dreaming (ebook novella)

  Texas-Sized Trouble

  Cowboy Heartbreaker (ebook novella)

  Lone Star Blues

  Cowboy Blues (ebook novella)

  The Last Rodeo

  The McCord Brothers

  What Happens on the Ranch (ebook novella)

  Texas on My Mind

  Cowboy Trouble (ebook novella)

  Lone Star Nights

  Cowboy Underneath It All (ebook novella)

  Blame It on the Cowboy

  To see the complete list of titles available from

  Delores Fossen, please visit www.deloresfossen.com.

  DELORES FOSSEN

  Tangled Up in Texas

  To Luke and Ruth.

  Thank you for bringing so much light to my life.

  Contents

  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

  EXCERPT FROM CHASING TROUBLE IN TEXAS BY DELORES FOSSEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  SHAW JAMESON SLAMMED on his brakes when he spotted what appeared to be a red bra in the middle of the road.

  This wasn’t an ordinary bra, either. This one had cantaloupe-sized cups, was made of shiny leather and had three-inch gold lightning bolt spikes on the nipples. The spikes arrowed up to the sky and looked lethal enough to have taken out a tire or two had he run over it. Good thing he’d seen it in time to stop.

  Of course, it would have been darn hard to miss.

  He pulled his truck onto the shoulder, putting on the emergency flashers in case another vehicle came around the deep curve in the road. He didn’t want anyone ramming into him even though there wasn’t likely to be much traffic at this time of the morning. Heck, at any time for that matter.

  The narrow two-lane road led from his hometown of Lone Star Ridge to his family’s ranch, which he could see from across the pasture. This was hardly the beaten path, but obviously that odd bra was proof that someone had beaten it.

  He got out and walked to the garment for a closer look. Yep, it was a bra all right, and a few feet away was a matching pair of thong panties, complete with more spikes that were on the sides of the slick red leather. If these were someone’s actual garments, then the wearer obviously had a more adventurous spirit than most people. As a general rule, he didn’t wear anything that could maim him or others.

  There was a huge cardboard box not far from the underwear. It was on its side, crushed and gaping open. Other items of underwear were spilling out from it. He saw more spiked bras, a thong made of what appeared to be a Hefty trash bag and a bustier with rhinestones and feathers. No spikes on that one but rather bright yellow duckbills in the nipple regions.

  Yeah, definitely someone who was more adventurous. And possibly bat-shit crazy.

  Shaw looked up when he heard the sound of an approaching vehicle. Not coming from behind but rather ahead—from the direction of the ranch. It was a dark blue SUV barreling toward him, and it screeched to a stop on the other side of the intimate apparel.

  Because of the angle of the morning sunlight and the SUV’s tinted windshield, Shaw couldn’t see the driver, but he sure as heck saw the woman who stepped from the passenger’s side.

  Talk about a gut punch of surprise. The biggest surprise of the morning, and that was saying something considering the weird underwear on the road.

  Sunny Dalton.

  She was a blast from the past, a kick to the balls and a tangle of memories, all rolled into one. And here she was walking toward him like a siren in her snug jeans and loose gray shirt.

  And here he was on the verge of drooling.

  Shaw did something about that and made sure he closed his mouth, but he knew it wouldn’t stay that way. Even though Sunny and he were no longer teenagers and didn’t exactly have a good history in the sex department, his body steamed up whenever he saw her.

  Sunny smiled at him. However, he didn’t think it was so much from steam as a sense of polite frustration.

  “Shaw,” she said on a rise of breath.

/>   Her voice was smooth and silky. Maybe a little tired, too. Even if Shaw hadn’t seen her in a couple of years, he was pretty sure that was fatigue in her steel-blue eyes.

  She’d changed her hair. It was still a dark chocolate brown, but it no longer hung well past her shoulders. It was shorter in an unfussy sort of way that would have maybe looked plain on most women. On Sunny, it framed that amazing face.

  “Sunny,” Shaw greeted back. “Is that your stuff?” he asked, tipping his head to the bra.

  She gave a quick laugh, not exactly from humor, followed by a somewhat weary head shake. “Not mine. I was bringing it to my grandmother’s house for Hadley. She shipped me a bunch of stuff to bring to Em’s, but the box fell off the top of the SUV. We had to find a place to turn around before we could come back for it.”

  Well, since her sister, Hadley, was a costume designer, that explained some things. Not why Hadley would have made such garments in the first place, though.

  And especially not why Sunny was here.

  Sunny and her sisters hadn’t lived in Lone Star Ridge in years. Why the heck would she be bringing weird underwear out to her grandmother’s? Better yet, why had she taken it first to his ranch, because that’s obviously the direction she’d been heading?

  Before Shaw could ask her those puzzling questions, the driver’s side and back doors opened, and a young man got out from behind the steering wheel. He didn’t say anything to Shaw. Just as Sunny was doing, he began picking up the stuff.

  The other person who stepped out, however, didn’t do any underwear gathering. It was a teenage girl, and with her gaze zooming in on Shaw, she started toward him.

  Shaw took one look at her and cursed under his breath. She had trouble written all over her, and while she wasn’t exactly a bouncing baby girl, he was almost positive that she was here to tell him something.

  And the something was that she was his half sister.

  A half sister he hadn’t known squat about.

  Shaw figured that most grown men didn’t encounter news like this in their entire lifetimes, but the possibility of it stood a much higher occurrence if your dad happened to be a washed-up country music star named Marty Jameson.

  He wasn’t a good judge of age, but Shaw figured the girl was about sixteen or so. Her hair was a swirl of radioactive green and fluorescent orange, a mix that looked as if a tropical bird had squatted on her head. It spiked out in some places, was slicked down in others, and it matched the backpack she had slung over one arm.

  Unlike Sunny’s unfussy hairdo, the girl’s was probably a fashion statement. Ditto for the red crop top and the short skirt that was the color of the meds you took when you had a really bad stomach flu.

  Shaw didn’t help the girl close the distance between them. He stayed put and let her clomp her way to him in pink-tasseled cowboy boots. Yeah, pink. If she’d been older, he might have thought the spiky, duckbilled underwear belonged to her since it would mesh with her over-the-top clothes.

  Along with the tassels flinging and flying on her boots, the girl clanged and jangled as she walked. The noise was because of the various chains hanging from or studded on various parts of her rail-thin body. A chunky silver dragon necklace, along with the multiple piercings in both ears, her nose and her eyebrows.

  “Are you Shaw Jameson?” she snapped. Her tone leaned toward angry with a touch of badass.

  Shaw badassed her right back. “Are you here for an autograph?”

  Sweet baby Moses in a basket, let her be a fan wanting his dad’s autograph. That was darn sure better than the alternative, but Shaw couldn’t hold out even a glimmer of hope.

  The girl huffed, rolled her blue-mascara-laden eyes and propped her hands on her hips. Shaw saw it then. The tat scrolled on the top of her right wrist. A single word.

  Trouble.

  Hell, he hated being right about predicting this sort of thing. Hated the gut punch he got, too, when he combed his gaze over her face and spotted the familiar features. Those stone-gray eyes. The shape of her chin, complete with a dimple. It was a face that Shaw knew all too well.

  His father’s face.

  Shaw didn’t know why seeing those features on offspring still managed to throw him off-kilter, not when there’d been so many occasions for those offspring to pop up. But even with the sheer number of kids, he had a hard time wrapping his mind around the fact that his father, Marty, was an idiot when it came to birth control.

  Along with Shaw, there was his brother, Austin, his sister, Cait, and their adopted brother, Leyton—who was also Marty’s biological son. But there were others, no doubts about that. Shaw figured even Marty didn’t know the actual count, but Shaw knew of six more. Miss Pink Boots would make seven.

  Well, maybe she would.

  He got another gut punch when he looked over at Sunny, who was putting the underwear in the SUV.

  Oh, shit.

  Shaw remembered hearing that condoms failed something like 15 percent of the time. He hoped that’s what hadn’t happened—he quickly did the math—fifteen years ago, the one and only time he’d had sex with Sunny.

  Hell, had he pulled a Marty Jameson and also been an idiot when it came to birth control?

  “Yeah, she’s from that stupid show about triplets that used to be on TV,” the teenager griped, glancing over her shoulder at Sunny. “The reruns are still on.”

  Shaw hadn’t needed Pink Boots to fill him in on that. He was well aware that Sunny and her sisters had been the stars of the reality show Little Cowgirls, which had been filmed right here at her grandmother’s ranch in Lone Star Ridge. He was well aware, too, of the reruns. And, like her sisters, Sunny had moved away the day after they’d graduated from high school.

  That had been just a month or so after she and Shaw had had sex.

  They’d lusted after each other for a couple of years before that, but since Shaw was two years older than Sunny and hadn’t wanted to spend time in prison, they’d waited until she’d turned eighteen and was no longer jailbait. Playing it safe.

  Well, maybe safe had come back to bite him in the butt.

  “Her name’s Sunshine or something like that,” the girl provided. “I remember that from the show.”

  “Sunny,” Shaw and Sunny corrected together.

  Their responses were as rote as swatting at a buzzing fly, and something that Sunny had no doubt had to do many times in her life. Sunshine was her mother’s name. Yeah, Sunshine, which he supposed was a hippie–flower child acknowledgment from Sunshine’s mom, Em, who had once been a hippie–flower child. And unless there’d been some big changes, Sunny would want to minimize the connections between her and the woman who’d given birth to her as well as being her costar on the show.

  Not trusting his voice, Shaw volleyed glances between the girl and her, looking for any hints of Sunny’s DNA in the mix. Sunny followed his gaze, gave him a ghost of a smile and went closer to him.

  “Rest assured, Shaw, you didn’t knock me up when I was a teenager,” Sunny whispered in his ear. “She’s not ours.”

  The relief felt like an ice water monsoon and he made a sound of relief that disgusted him. He had a reputation of being a hard-nosed boss. A real cowboy. And it was best not to let anyone know that he’d just had one big-assed scare that’d vised an internal organ or two.

  “But you can probably guess that she’s Marty’s,” Sunny added, still whispering.

  “Yeah,” Shaw admitted.

  The relief suddenly took a turn with the realization that while the teenager wasn’t his kid, she did share his gene pool. He was betting the girl hadn’t come here to celebrate that particular fact, either.

  “Who is she?” he asked Sunny.

  “I’m Kinsley Rubio,” the girl spit out before Sunny could answer. “Where’s the bio-dad, sperm donor, country music singer butt hole who planted me in my mom? Is
he in there?” She pointed to the sprawling two-story white house that loomed on the hill above the pasture.

  Shaw decided to overlook the mild profanity and the shitty attitude. He’d gotten similar reactions from some of Marty’s other kids, and he preferred those to the demands for the gobs of money that two of the offspring had made.

  Marty had money, maybe even gobs of it if he hadn’t blown it, and Shaw wasn’t hurting in that department. In fact, Shaw owned the majority share of the ranch. No thanks to Marty but rather Marty’s father, Sam, who’d divvied up the place in his will to Shaw and his then-known siblings. Sam hadn’t had a lot of faith in his only child—had basically thought Marty was a screwup and not deserving of the ranch that’d been in the Jameson family for six generations.

  “The bio-dad doesn’t live there,” Shaw explained to the girl. “He and my mom got a divorce when I was a kid, and she lives there. And no, I don’t know where he is, but I can call him and let him know you’re here.”

  Or better yet, leave a message to let Marty know that Kinsley Rubio existed. Informing his dad of that, however, wouldn’t guarantee Marty would answer the call or do anything more than tell Shaw to handle it. Marty wasn’t exactly a coldhearted bastard, but he often believed that a check for a couple of thousand dollars and some “let’s keep in touch” consolations would be enough to soothe ruffled feathers and fulfill his parental obligations.

  “Then call him and tell him to get out here,” Kinsley demanded. “I want him to look in my face and explain why he never told me he was my father.”

  “And why didn’t your mother tell you?” Shaw asked. Not that he was giving Marty a pass on this, but he wanted to know what he was dealing with.

  Kinsley huffed as if that was the most unreasonable question in the history of unreasonableness. “Call him now,” she repeated, and with what he had to admit was impressive speed and some surprising athletic ability, the girl jumped the ditch, climbed over the fence and started toward the house.

  The very house where his mother lived.

  Now it was Shaw’s turn to huff, and he knew he’d have to go after her. His mother was home, and while she’d want to know this was happening—again—Shaw didn’t want her to have to deal with all this surliness alone.