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Fortune Hunter's Hero
Linda Turner
When Buck Wyatt and his sisters inherit Broken Arrow Ranch, it comes with a catch: One of them has to be on the premises at all times for one year, or they'll lose it.So Buck counts on setting up stakes. What he doesn't count on is lovely fortune hunter Rainey Brewster. He soon realizes the woman is telling the truth about a hidden gold mine–and that his interest in her goes beyond professional.Yet as their search for gold–and their passion for each other–intensifies, it's clear someone wants them off the land–and is willing to kill for it.
Fortune Hunter’s Hero
Linda Turner
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
With special thanks:
First, I need to thank my mother, Margie Turner, for believing in me even when I refused to be on the school newspaper in high school.
My agent, Lettie Lee, and my editor, Gail Chasan, have always had great faith in me, especially over the last few years, when my life turned into a roller coaster. Thank you both so much for your continued support and patience.
And last, but not least, I’d like to thank Frank Bays for keeping me on track—and on deadline—throughout the writing of this book. Thank you, honey, for that…and for keeping your head in the middle of a hurricane in Mexico. What would I do without you?
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Epilogue
Prologue
London, England
Seated with his three sisters in front of Clarence Jones’s desk, Buck Wyatt lifted a dark brow at the solicitor who had worked for the family for as long as he could remember. “All right, we’re all here, as you requested. What the devil’s going on? What’s the big mystery you couldn’t talk about over the telephone? Have we won the lottery or what?”
A slight smile curling the corners of his mouth, Clarence only shrugged. “Possibly. It all depends on you.”
“Are you having a scavenger hunt like you had for your birthday?” Priscilla asked him, intrigued. “You wouldn’t tell us anything then, either.”
“Oh, I hope so!” Katherine said, delighted. “What’s the prize this time? How about a week in Monte Carlo? That would be marvelous! I’ll invite Peter—”
“No one said anything about a scavenger hunt or the lottery,” Elizabeth pointed out dryly. Studying the older man with narrowed eyes that missed little, she warned, “Watch it, Clarence. You’re beginning to resemble kitty when she swallowed the canary. Cough up your secret before we have to pound it out of you.”
“There’s no reason to get physical, Lizzie.” He chuckled, his green eyes twinkling behind the lenses of his glasses. “I do have some good news…possibly.”
“What do you mean…possibly?” Buck retorted. “It either is or it isn’t good, old man. Which is it?”
Far from offended—he’d been a family friend long before he’d become the Wyatts’ solicitor—Clarence chuckled. “Patience, my dear boy. All in good time.” Sobering, he opened the single file that lay in front of him on his desk and added, “I received a copy of Hilda’s will yesterday from her attorney.”
Whatever Buck had been expecting, it wasn’t that. He’d only learned of Hilda Wyatt’s existence three months ago, when he received a letter from her informing him that they were cousins—her grandfather and his great-grandfather were brothers. The two sides of the family had lost touch decades ago when Buck’s great-grandfather moved to London in 1902 as a diplomat, and there was nothing Hilda wanted more than to get the family back together.
Surprised, Buck was in total agreement. He was named after his great-grandfather, who had been quite an adventurer, and one of Buck’s most prized possessions was his namesake’s journals. Reading them as a young boy, he’d been fascinated with the stories his great-grandfather had written about growing up on the family ranch in Colorado. When he was nine, Buck had promised himself that one day he would go to the States and see the Broken Arrow Ranch—if it still existed—firsthand.
Hilda not only confirmed that it still existed, but she’d invited him and the girls to visit next summer. Thrilled, Buck had just begun making travel arrangements last month when he learned that Hilda had unexpectedly died when she’d fallen and broken a hip.
Buck had only spoken to her a few times—he barely knew her—but her death had still come as a shock. Besides his sisters, she had been his only living Wyatt relative, and he’d been looking forward to getting to know her better. He’d had hundreds of questions about his American ancestors, and now those questions would never be answered.
“Why did her attorney send you a copy of her will?” he asked with a frown. “We’d only spoken a few times. I seriously doubt that she would have left us anything. She didn’t even know of our existence until three months ago.”
“That may be,” Clarence agreed, “but she was a spinster and had no children. Leaving the ranch to family was important to her—which is why she left the ranch to the four of you.”
Buck couldn’t have been more stunned if he’d told him the queen had left Buckingham Palace to him and his sisters. “You can’t be serious!”
The solicitor smiled slightly. “It’s in the will, if you’d like to read it.”
“We have a ranch?” Priscilla exclaimed, a look of pure horror on her face. “With cows?”
“You don’t have to say it like that,” Elizabeth chided. “You make it sound like Hilda left us a bunch of rattlesnakes or something.” Struck by the thought, she turned to Clarence with wide blue eyes. “Oh my goodness. I suppose there are snakes on a ranch, aren’t there?”
“In all likelihood,” he agreed, amused. “Though they won’t be a problem in the winter.”
“Winter—summer…a snake’s a snake,” Katherine retorted, wrinkling her nose in distaste. “I don’t want anything to do with them.”
“I still don’t understand why she left the ranch to us,” Buck told Clarence with a frown. “She lived there her entire life. Even if she didn’t have children, she must have had a lifelong friend she could have left the place to.”
“The ranch has been in the family since the 1850s,” he replied. “Apparently, she didn’t want to be remembered as the one who gave away the ranch.”
“So she left it to total strangers?”
“No. She left it to family. With stipulations,” he added.
Priscilla sat back with a sigh of disgust. “Here it comes. The strings. Why are there always strings?”
“Hear the man out,” Katherine told her. “It may not be that bad. Maybe she just wants us to make sure there are fresh flowers on her grave every month.”
“Actually, Hilda’s stipulations are a little more involved than that,” Clarence said dryly. “One of you has to be at the ranch at all times for a period of one year.”
“You mean we can’t leave?” Elizabeth asked, surprised. “For an entire year?”
“Oh, any given three of you can leave at anytime,” he assured her. “You can come and go, changes places, trade out—whatever you want to do. But for the period of one year, one of you can’t be absent from the ranch for two or more consecutive nights.”
“And if we are?” Buck asked. “Things come up. We could agree to the stipulation then find ourselves going in four different directions when life interferes. There’s no way to predict what’s going to happen over the course of a year, Clarence. You know that. What happens if one of the girls gets seriously sick and ends up in the hospital? You know we’ll all be there. What happens then?”
“The ranch goes to an unnamed heir,” he said simply.
“For one infraction?” Katherine asked sharply.
He nodded grimly. “Hilda left a sealed letter, naming a new heir, with the will. I have instructions to open it only if you choose not to accept the terms of the will or you can’t fulfill Hilda’s stipulations. If you are able to complete the year without a problem, the letter will be shredded and the ranch is yours.”
Glancing from Buck to each of his sisters, the older man lifted a grizzled brow. “Well? What do you think? Is this an impossible task for the four of you or do you think you can pull it off?”
“Pull it off?” Priscilla exclaimed. “How can we? I don’t know about everyone else, but I don’t want to live in the wilds of Colorado! There can’t be any decent clubs there. And they drink ice in their tea, for heaven’s sake. How barbaric is that?”
Elizabeth grinned. “They also drive on the wrong side of the road!”
“Oh, God, you’re right,” Katherine groaned. “We’ll have to buy an American car and learn to drive all over again. We’ll have to take a driving test, won’t we? On the wrong side of the road!”
“Don’t blame the roads.” Buck laughed. “You’d have a hard time passing the test here at home again.”
“Just because I like speed—”
“Don’t fight, children,” Clarence said dryly. “That’s not why you’re here.”
“He’s right,” Buck agreed. “You’re all worrying about nothing. You can stay here. I’ll go to America.”
“Forever?”
Buck had to laugh at Priscilla’s horrified tone. “I’m not going to the moon, Pris, just Colorado. You know I’ve always wanted to see the ranch. This is my chance.”
“What about Melissa? Don’t you think you should discuss this with her first?”
At the mention of his fiancée, he smiled. “Melissa was all set to go with us to the ranch before Hilda died. I don’t think she’ll have a problem with the move. She’s been wanting to visit the States for a long time.”
The girls exchanged a speaking look, but none of them pointed out that visiting a country and moving there to live were two different things. Instead, Clarence arched a thick gray brow and said, “Then you agree to accept the terms of the will?”
Buck looked at his sisters. “Well?”
Priscilla hesitated, but in the end, she nodded, along with her sisters. “If you need a break and need someone to come and stay for a while, we can take turns flying over.”
The matter settled, Buck said, “When do we have to be there?”
“By Friday.”
“Friday!”
When they all spoke in unison, he grinned. “I’m just following the instructions in Hilda’s will.” Reaching into the top drawer of his desk, he pulled out a set of keys and handed them to Buck. “Joshua Douglas, Hilda’s lawyer in Colorado, forwarded these to me, along with the copy of her will. If you have any problems when you arrive in Colorado, he will be happy to help you.”
“As long as we’re not absent from the ranch for more than two consecutive nights,” Elizabeth pointed out. “Then he’s going to evict us and hand the place over to someone else.”
“I have every confidence that between the four of you, you’re not going to let that happen.”
“No, we’re not,” Buck said grimly. “My grandfather told me stories his father and grandfather told him about growing up on the ranch. And they all left written records of their life on the Broken Arrow. We’re not going to be the generation that loses it.”
Chapter 1
Broken Arrow Ranch, Colorado Four Months Later
“We’ve got another problem. The back-up generator’s not working.”
In the process of replacing a dripping faucet in the kitchen, Buck looked up at his foreman with a quick frown. “You’re joking, right?”
Even as he asked, he knew he wasn’t. David Saenz wasn’t the kind of man who joked about much of anything. In fact, Buck had hired David four months ago, right after he’d arrived in Colorado and discovered the condition the ranch was in, and in all that time, he’d only seen David crack a smile a handful of times. Not, he admitted, that there was a lot to smile about. The family homestead that he’d been so anxious to claim as his and his sisters’ inheritance was falling down around his ears.
Needless to say, he’d been appalled when he’d first seen the place. It was in drastic need of paint and repairs, not to mention a good old-fashioned cleaning, and he blamed the previous foreman for that. Hilda was eighty-four when she died and had obviously not been able to take care of the place for quite some time. Her foreman should have stepped forward and made sure, if nothing else, that basic maintenance was done on the house, barns and equipment. Instead, the man had, apparently, collected his paycheck and done little else except take advantage of a little old lady who’d had no family to protect her. For no other reason than that, Buck had fired him.
When he’d put an ad in the paper for a foreman, David was the first man to answer. Buck would have hardly described his personality as sparkling and David had had no experience as a ranch foreman. He had, however, spent the last twenty years working as a handyman for a string of apartment complexes in Denver before he was laid off after being injured in a car wreck. He was healthy again and ready to work, and when he was able to easily fix a loose handrail on the stairs, Buck hired him on the spot.
Buck was the first to admit that working around the house wasn’t his field of expertise. He was a stockbroker—or at least he had been until he quit to accept his inheritance. Over the course of the last four months, however, he’d come a long way when it came to working around the ranch. With David’s guidance, he’d worked on the house and barn and vehicles and learned more than he wanted to about repairing leaky faucets and toilets and crumbling old fireplaces that needed new mortar. He didn’t mind the work—in fact, he enjoyed it—but there was no time to appreciate the progress he and David had made. Something different seemed to break every other day, and the to-do list got longer and longer and longer. It was damn frustrating.
And they hadn’t even begun to deal with the more serious problems that were threatening to tear the ranch in two. Fences were down, cattle were missing, and lately, he’d noticed signs of trespassers on the ranch. And he knew immediately what they were after. Gold.
Oh, he knew about the lost Spanish gold mine. Who didn’t? Tales of the lost mine had been circulating in the area for well over two centuries, ever since the mine was lost in a landslide in the eighteenth century. Even his great-grandfather had written in his journals about how Spanish explorers had discovered an incredible vein of gold in the wilds of what was now the Broken Arrow Ranch, but they’d been forced to abandon it after an avalanche covered the mine’s entrance and forever changed all landmarks in the area. According to legend, the massive amounts of gold the Spanish had taken from the mine were nothing compared to what was still buried deep in the mountains.
Not surprisingly, fortune hunters, adventurers and geologists had been looking for the mine for centuries, without success. Buck knew as long as the mine’s location remained undiscovered, he would have to deal with trespassers who had no respect for what belonged to him and his sisters. For the moment, however, he had more immediate concerns.
Setting down the pipe wrench he’d been using on the kitchen faucet, he regarded David with a frown. “What seems to be the problem with the generator?”
“I think it’s just given up the ghost. It’s at least twenty years old. It should have been replaced years ago.”
“How often is it used? Do we really even need it?”
“We’re a long way from town, and it doesn’t take much for the lines to go down. Ice in the winter, hailstorms in the spring and summer. And then there’s brownouts. Whenever the electricity goes out, everything shuts down—the freezer and fridge, the air, the heat…”
It was that time of year, late spring, when the temperature could be in the nineties one day and it could be snowing the next. Last night, the temperature had dropped to seventeen degrees. Record highs were predicted for later in the week. Whatever the weather did, he planned to be prepared. “Then I guess we’d better replace it.”
“I’ll check around and see what kind of price I can get on one.”
“What about the truck? How’s it coming?”
The older man grimaced. “I’m charging the battery right now. If that’s not the problem, then it probably needs an alternator.”
