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The Wildcatter
Peggy Nicholson
Seeking treasure–finding pleasurePenniless wildcatter Miguel Heydt has come seeking his fortune–oil–on Suntop land. But the cranky old owner of the Colorado ranch will tolerate no mineral exploration on his spread, so Miguel hires on with the ranch's haying crew and explores for oil at night.Until a secret contract the rancher proposes is too tempting for Miguel to resist. In exchange for unlimited drilling rights, he's to marry the old man's daughter, Risa, and produce the male heir Ben craves.Miguel woos, wins, beds and then weds Risa–falls in love with her, too. But minutes after the wedding, she finds out what he did and she flees.Eleven years later, Risa and Miguel meet at Suntop once more, and the fire between them is still there.But how can she trust him again? A man who'd marry her for drilling rights…a man who'd trade his own son for an oil well?
“I…”
She made a little moan deep in her throat, but she didn’t pull away. Her lashes shivered; the color swept over her breasts, a dawning of desire.
He fingered one swelling rosebud—leaned to adore it with tongue and mouth, felt her heart thundering against his cradling palm. Ah, marry me, Risa, and we’ll do this every night of our lives! He raised his head to replace his lips with his coaxing fingers. Perhaps it was male instinct that would brook no denial. He would have her surrender. “Say yes!” he demanded, his voice husky with emotion. “Only leap, Risa-Sonrisa, and I will catch you!”
“Truly?” She flattened a hand against his heart. “¿De veras? You really want me?”
More than all the oil in the world. He caught her slender waist and lifted her to kneel astride his lap. “You’re all that I want!”
But that…that was a lie he’d pay for.
Dear Reader,
I still remember the first oil well my geologist father took me out on. It was some place in the Big Thicket country of East Texas.
What a circus of sights and sounds for a six-year-old! The towering rig, the massive machines bellowing and roaring—spinning and rising and falling. The muddy, greasy men performing their dangerous balletic feats up on the drilling platform. The rig lit up at night like a Christmas tree.
The trailer where my dad and others studied the wavering, intricate lines on long scrolls of paper as the drill bit gnawed its way down to black gold—or a dry hole that cost a fortune.
Big, drawling male voices, lots of laughter, the underlying tension and excitement. Back then in my preprinting days I never dreamed that someday I’d want to write about these men. I just knew that, looking up from buckle level, they all seemed like heroes to me.
So here I give you my latest hero, Miguel Heydt, a seeker, a searcher, who comes to Trueheart, Colorado—to Suntop Ranch—looking for treasure.
Thanks for coming along for his ride!
Peggy Nicholson
The Wildcatter
Peggy Nicholson
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
DEDICATION
This book is for the first and last wildcatter
in my life: Erwin Grimes, of Kerrville, Texas—
the man who taught me to dream big; to dare to back my
dreams with action; and to come back smiling…even when
a well comes up dry. Because there’s always the next time,
the next dream, isn’t there? And thanks so much,
Dad, for all your advice and background on this story—
couldn’t have done it without you!
And in memory of Yaffa.
She came; she saw; she conquered. We wept when she left.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
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
PROLOGUE
The Present
MIGUEL HEYDT TURNED the flattened wedding ring that rested on his palm. Not much thicker than a piece of tinfoil, the golden, metallic shape looked like a starburst. Or maybe a sunflower with the center shot out of it.
Shallow, crescent-shape gouges in the gold showed the imprint of whatever tool had been used to make this final statement. Flip it over, and the pebbled texture suggested that the object had rested on concrete at the time of its smashing.
Looking down at the ruined marriage band he’d carried in his wallet for eleven years, Miguel Heydt had to smile—even as all the other old emotions roiled within him.
Emotions like anger.
Disappointment.
Hot desire and biting humiliation.
Maybe even a touch of wistful sorrow?
But the first emotion this battered ring always evoked in him, on the rare occasions when he allowed himself a look, was reluctant admiration. Aren’t you something, though?
For Risa Tankersly Heydt, without wasting a single word, had sent him her message, loud and clear: “You can kiss my sweet ass goodbye!” Miguel murmured ruefully. That’s what Risa was telling him when she mailed him his ring back from Las Vegas.
At the time she’d dropped it into an envelope and passed it to a postal clerk to postmark, he and Risa had been married for roughly eighteen hours.
Had to be one of the shortest marriages on record.
A marriage eleven years in the past, yet still he could close his eyes and taste her—taste that kiss he’d claimed at the altar, with Risa’s father, her family and all her fine, fancy world to witness. She’d tasted like hot golden coins dipped in honey. Like a poor boy’s dream of triumph.
“Ah, Risa.” She’d annulled their marriage in Las Vegas—then married another man the day after. The happy couple lived far away from Trueheart, or so Miguel had been told.
Risa-Sonrisa. He didn’t think about her often. A man couldn’t look back and stay a man. A man walked forward into his life, with long strides in big boots.
But eleven years later he’d come full circle. His strides were taking him from Alaska back to where their story had begun. To Suntop Ranch, outside the small Colorado town of Trueheart.
Not that he was going back for Risa. Oh, no. That dream was over and done. Ashes. This time he’d keep his eye—and his heart—on the money, as he should have from the very start.
CHAPTER ONE
Eleven Years Earlier
IT WAS A RITUAL, some thirty summers old. Joe Wiggly would meet the boss up at the Big House half an hour past sunrise. He’d bring Tankersly his mount for the day—something half a hand too tall or a tad too rank for a man in his seventies, but then, that was the only sort of horse the boss would ride.
Seated astride his own sensible cow pony, the foreman of Suntop would smoke his first cigarette of the morning while he waited for the old man to walk out his front door.
When at last the door opened, always Ben Tankersly would stop short on his porch, as if stunned by first sight of this high-mountain valley. And to be sure, it was the finest view on Suntop Ranch—the biggest, richest cattle spread in all Southwest Colorado.
King of his own small kingdom, Tankersly would sweep his dark hooded eyes along the rolling meadows that sloped south, toward the distant main valley, invisible beyond the green flank of Suntop Mountain. Then he’d swing on his boot heel to inspect his eastern ramparts—a ten-mile-distant spur of the Trueheart Hills, which were low mountains, really, with big forested shoulders gashed by slabs of gray granite. The rising sun would be backlighting their craggy peaks with raw copper light.
From there Tankersly would draw a deep breath and swing north, toward the best view of all. The wild canyons and plateaus of the summer range, stair-stepping toward peaks high enough to scrape heaven—the San Juans, some fifty miles beyond. Already catching the sun, the lingering snow at their summits would be burning rose and gold in the clear mountain air.
On days when he had one of his pretty ladies in residence, Ben Tankersly would bounce out that front door to confront his view. As he stopped to survey his world, he’d be trying to rein in a dog-in-the-henhouse grin that kept breaking loose.
Days when there was no visitor to keep the family on its company manners, when one of Ben’s three hellion daughters had been kicking the slats out of her stall and busting through fences, Tankersly would bang out the door, to stand with his big chest heaving and his gnarled hands clenched, glaring at his kingdom—but not seeing it. Then he’d stomp down the wide fieldstone steps to Joe and the waiting horses, looking ready to chew barbed wire or curdle the milk.
Today was one of those days. Ben swung up on his too-big gelding, gave a grunt that meant “Let’s go” and shot away downhill toward the barns and pastures of the main valley.
Joe touched spurs to his mare and followed. Once they were loping along the dirt road, he stole a glance at his boss. After thirty years, neither of them would have presumed to call their relationship a friendship, but they understood each other.
“Risa,” growled Tankersly by way of explanation.
His eldest, the one with hair like a sunset aflame and eyes like a fawn tangled in a fence. Sweet as wildflower honey till you rubbed her wrong, which Ben often did, then it was hang on to your hat, cowboy. Joe had always been mighty fond of Risa. He’d missed her this past year, when she’d been away in the East at college.
She hadn’t hurried back home to them, either, come summer. Here it was mid-July and she’d arrived at Suntop only last evening. Joe had yet to see her himself, but word had got around. “I hear tell she has herself a beau,” he observed mildly.
“Huh—fiancé, she calls him. She’s wearing his ring. Diamond the size of a jackrabbit turd.”
Ben had never taken kindly to men courting his daughters. Which was pretty laughable, considering he’d have given his left nut for a grandson. At seventy-two, the old man seemed to have finally outgrown the notion of siring his own son, but he sure wanted himself a boy to raise. A boy to be the next heir to Suntop.
No suitors, no boy. But a wise man didn’t try to reason with Ben Tankersly. He might be as crafty as a lame coyote, but the owner of Suntop led with his heart, not his head. “Somebody she found back East?” Joe hazarded.
“Yep. A smooth-talking, limp-handed, self-satisfied snake of a Yalie lawyer.” Tankersly reined his big buckskin to a sliding halt. Nodding bleak approval at the cloud of dust thus raised, he patted the gelding’s glossy neck, then kneed him into a long walk. “Risa thinks the smilin’ scumsucker hung the moon.”
Joe fell in beside his boss again. “A lawyer.” Cattlemen liked lawyers about as much as rattlesnakes, jimson weed or big government.
“Denver stock, though why any man’d send his son east to college…” Tankersly’s growl died away to a mutter, probably as he remembered he’d sent Risa east.
Because she’d wanted to go west, Joe recalled. She’d wanted in the worst way to study film in Los Angeles, at the University of California. But Ben didn’t approve of actors or acting, and considering the way Risa’s mother had met her end, maybe he had a point. So he’d sent Risa against her will to Yale, and surprise, surprise, she’d paid him back with a Yalie lawyer.
“Well, if he’s a Denver boy, that’s not so bad,” Joe soothed. “Likely they’ll settle somewhere in state.” Denver was only an eight-hour drive to the northeast of Trueheart. Keeping Risa close to home would be good.
“Huh! You know what his old man does for a living? He’s a developer! Chops up useful ranchland into five-acre ranchettes. Has made himself two or three fortunes doin’ it.”
They’d rounded the base of Suntop, and now they paused on the crest of the ranch road to its south, overlooking the lower valley. Lush and green, the pastures spread out below them. The river rippled shallow and silver in the early light, then darkened where it deepened, plunging into a lacy line of cottonwoods that followed its meandering course down the valley. Beyond the foreman’s house, men and horses were stirring, moving between the corrals and the barns and the bunkhouse. A couple of dusty cars were climbing up from the distant county road—the hay crews assembling.
“Used to be a man measured himself by what he built,” Tankersly said softly, nodding at his world below. “Or if he didn’t build it himself—” Ben, after all, was the third of his line to hold Suntop; since the early 1880s this had been Tankersly land “—then he prided himself on holding something precious together. On expanding his holdings, improving his land, his stock. But nowadays seems a man measures himself by what he can tear down—a corporation…a ranch…a way of life.
