Buch lesen: «Fortune Hunter's Hero»
Fortune Hunter’s Hero
Linda Turner
MILLS & BOON
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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.”
Buck didn’t know if he wanted to laugh or curse. If. God, he was learning to hate that word. If the termites hadn’t gotten to the studs in the bathroom wall, just the paneling would have to be replaced. If the sick cow that died that morning in the barn didn’t have mad cow disease, the rest of the herd was probably going to be all right. If the well hadn’t run dry, then the problem might be the pump.
And if the jackass Hilda hired as a foreman had done his damn job and not taken advantage of an old lady instead, Buck thought irritably, then he wouldn’t be bankrupting himself now to put the place back on its feet!
Quit your whining, a voice drawled in his head. It’s not the ranch that’s really bothering you, and you know it. It’s Melissa.
He couldn’t deny it. What a fool he was, he thought bitterly. He’d believed that she loved him enough to follow him to the ends of the earth. Fat chance. She hadn’t loved him—she’d loved a stockbroker who vacationed in Switzerland and Monaco and rubbed shoulders with the rich and powerful in London. She’d wanted nothing to do with the wannabe cowboy in the wilds of Colorado. She’d dropped him like a hot rock.
Forget her, he told himself coldly. She’d shown him who she really was, and he was better off without her. Besides, he had more important things to worry about—like keeping the ranch that had been owned by his family since before the American Civil War.
He couldn’t argue with that. In spite of all the problems he’d run headlong into, he didn’t regret leaving London and moving to the ranch. He loved the place, loved the untamed wildness of the mountains and canyons, the isolation. Not for the first time, he wondered how his great-grandfather had ever found the strength to walk away.
Buck had only been here four short months and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else…except when the pipes rattled and doors stuck and the roof leaked.
How many things could be wrong with one house? he wondered, a reluctant grin tugging at his mouth. After working on it from the moment he’d arrived at the beginning of January, he and David hadn’t made a dent in anything except his bank account. If he was going to restore the ranch to its former glory—and he was determined to do so—he was going to need to win the lottery. Or find the lost gold mine…if it existed.
Grimacing at that word again—if—he sighed. “I’ll check prices on a new generator and see what I can find. You might as well make a parts list for the truck, too.”
“Good,” David grunted. “Brake shoes need to be first on the list. They’re just about shot. Oh, yeah, and fan belts. I don’t think they’ve ever been changed.”
“Make me a list,” Buck said as he turned his attention back to the sink. “I should be finished here in about an hour.”
Taking him at his word, David returned an hour later with a list that turned out to be pages long. Buck spent the rest of the afternoon tracking down parts and prices, and the final results weren’t pretty. And it was only a partial list!
Sitting back in his chair at the massive antique desk that dominated the ranch office, staring at the outrageous sum he’d come up with, Buck found himself once again thinking of the lost gold mine. Maybe finding it really was the only solution. The ranch was turning into a money pit, and he’d hardly even tackled the ranching problems: downed fences, lost cattle, feed to get the animals through dry summers and long winters.
How the hell was he going to do this? he wondered, scowling. What little money Hilda had had at her death had gone for her funeral—the land was all she’d had to leave. He had his own money, of course, but the ranch wasn’t his and his sisters’ yet. Not for a year. He felt sure the four of them would be able to live up to the stipulations of Hilda’s will, but he couldn’t be absolutely certain of that. He’d already invested some of his own money in the place. How much more was he willing to risk?
Lost in thought, his eyes focused inward, he suddenly realized his gaze had fallen on the built-in bookshelves across from his desk that contained a number of books on the history of Colorado and life in the Old West. Several included references to the Broken Arrow and the lost Spanish mine—he knew because every time he got a spare moment, he read everything he could get his hands on about the ranch and its secrets.
Was the mine really out there somewhere, lost in the mountains? he wondered, frowning. Or was it just a rumor, a half truth that, over the centuries, developed into a fantastic story that was too good to be true? He didn’t doubt that there probably was a mine that had been lost in an avalanche—there was too much historical evidence to dispute that—but how much gold had actually been taken from the mine? If it really was as rich as the rumors claimed, surely someone would have found it in the last two hundred years. He’d read reports from the geologists the Wyatts had brought in over the years—they were inconclusive. Was there any supporting evidence to back the rumors? Surely there had to be something….
Pushing to his feet, he strode over to the bookshelves that lined the entire east wall of the office, studying the titles of the books he hadn’t yet read, and pulled out the oldest one. It wasn’t until he dropped into his favorite easy chair to read that he realized that book was actually a journal written by Joshua Wyatt, his great-great-grandfather and the pioneer who first settled the ranch. Seconds later, he was totally lost in one of the most fascinating stories he’d ever read.
Rainey Brewster wasn’t a woman who was prone to nerves. She’d been too many places, seen too many things. As a child, she’d traveled the world with her father, moving with the wind wherever whimsy and fate took them, searching for treasures that had been lost down through the ages. She’d slept in tents and castles, traveled by everything from car to plane to camel, and thanks to the teachings of her father, she recognized a two-legged snake when she saw one.
When her father died six months ago, she’d continued to run the business as he had, and though she missed him terribly, she couldn’t imagine ever doing anything else. There was just something incredibly appealing about looking for buried treasure. Especially when she was hunting for one of those rare finds that the rest of the world had long since given up hope of finding.
The lost Spanish mine on the Broken Arrow Ranch was just that kind of treasure. And she was almost positive she knew where it was.
Approaching the front door of the Wyatt-family homestead, she smiled at that familiar tingling feeling she always got when she was closing in on a treasure. It seemed as if she’d been waiting for this day forever. During the last five years of her father’s life, the two of them had, whenever they were in Spain, spent all their spare time researching the mine, checking state and private libraries all over the country, looking for any references to it, regardless of how small. It wasn’t until three months after her father died that she stumbled across what the two of them had always dreamed of finding: irrefutable proof not only of the mine’s existence, but of its location. Now all she had to do was convince the new owner of the Broken Arrow Ranch that she could make him rich beyond his wildest dreams.
Knocking sharply on the scarred wooden door that appeared to be original to the house, she assured herself that convincing Buck Wyatt to work with her was going to be a piece of cake. After all, he was British, educated, and according to the gossip she’d picked up in town, quickly running out of money. He’d already had a fortune in property fall in his lap. Surely he wouldn’t turn his back on the gold mine sitting in the middle of it.
Determined to make him see reason, she squared her shoulders and once again lifted her hand to knock, but a split second later, the door was jerked open and suddenly, she forgot to breathe.
She’d done exhaustive research on not only the mine, but the Wyatt family, as well, and there was no question that the man who stood before her was a Wyatt. The Willow Bend library had worlds of data on the local ranchers, including pictures of the Wyatt family all the way back to the 1800s, and Buck had the same sharp eyes, the same rugged face and tall, rangy build as every Wyatt man who’d owned the ranch for the last hundred years. He might have been born and raised in England, but he had rancher written all over him.
“Do I have a fly on my nose?”
Jerked out of her musings, she blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“As well you should,” he retorted, amused. “You’re staring at me like I have a bloody fly on my nose.”
Mortified, she could do nothing to stop the hot color that bloomed in her cheeks. “I’m sorry. Really. I don’t know what I was thinking.” Abruptly sticking out her hand, she forced a smile. “You must be Buck Wyatt. I’m Rainey Brewster. I was wondering if we might talk.”
He did not, as she’d expected, take her hand. Instead, he studied her with midnight-blue eyes full of suspicion. “Obviously, you didn’t stumble up my driveway by mistake, and you’re not part of the welcoming committee. They were here four months ago, and you weren’t with them—I would have remembered. So why are you here, Ms. Brewster? What do you want?” His accent had turned clipped and very British, and for the life of her, Rainey didn’t know what she had done to earn his suspicion. “I’m sorry,” she said quickly, dropping her hand. “I should have called first, but what I have to say to you isn’t something you discuss on the phone. If you have the time, I’d like to talk to you about the lost Spanish gold mine on your property.”
“Really?” he retorted dryly. “And what business is that of yours?”
“I’d prefer not to discuss it on the doorstep…if you don’t mind.”
For all of ten seconds, Buck seriously considered shutting the door in her face. He didn’t know who she was or what she wanted, but he had no intention of discussing the mine or anything else that belonged to him with a stranger…even if she was the cutest woman he’d met in a long time. If she thought she could use her looks and that sweet, dimpled smile to talk him around, she was in for a rude awakening. He wasn’t so easily taken in.
“Actually, I do mind,” he retorted. “I don’t invite just anyone into my home. State your business, Ms. Brewster, and be quick about it. I’m busy.”
He was being a hard-ass and wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d called him a jerk and walked away. But the lady was tougher than that. When her chin shot up and her blue eyes glinted with irritation, he found himself impressed. She was a gutsy little thing.
“My business, Mr. Wyatt, is the mine. I’m a treasure hunter and would like the opportunity to discuss the mine’s location with you.”
Disappointed—God, another treasure hunter out to con him!—he groaned, “Not another one! Do you know how many people like you have knocked on my door over the last four months, Ms. Brewster? The family’s been looking for the mine for well over a hundred years. My office is full of yearly reports from geologists and archaeologists and even Indian shamans who swear they know where it is, and there’s no sign of gold anywhere. What could you possibly know about the mine’s location that all of the experts missed?”
“More than you obviously think,” she retorted. “The reason they haven’t been able to locate the mine is because they’re looking in the wrong place!”
Far from impressed, Buck laughed. “You know, for a moment, I actually thought you were serious. Nice try, love. Now that you’ve had your little joke, I suggest you leave. I’ve got work to do.”
“Wait!” she cried when he started to shut the door in her face. “I’m serious!”
“Mmm, hmm,” he said as he continued to shut the door. “You probably know where the Holy Grail is, too.”
“Don’t be an ass,” she retorted. “I’m trying to help you! If you’d just listen—”
“To what? Another half-baked story about where the mine is? I’ve heard them all. Did you have a dream or what? One lady told me an angel appeared to her and told her. Then there was the drifter who claimed he heard it on the wind. Wow. So, tell me…why should I believe you? Oh, wait, I’ll bet I know. You’re psychic! You looked in your crystal ball, and there was the mine, right there in front of your eyes.”
Heat burned her cheeks, but to her credit, she stood her ground. “You’ll apologize to me in the future for that, Mr. Wyatt—”
“I don’t think so, Ms. Brewster. But then again, I’m not psychic.”
“Obviously not,” she said, her blue eyes glinting with triumph, “or you would know that I’m not, either. I discovered the whereabouts of the mine in some private papers in Spain.”
Far from impressed, he just looked at her. “Really? And you expect me to believe that even though people have been looking for the mine for centuries, you found papers that no one else even knew existed?”
Rainey couldn’t blame him for his skepticism. Her claim did sound outrageous. “If you’ll just take a look at what I have, you won’t regret it,” she assured him. “All I need is ten minutes.”
For a moment, she thought she had him. He hesitated, studying her consideringly. Then his jaw tightened. “I don’t know what you found in Spain, Ms. Brewster, or what you paid someone to create false documents, but you wasted your money. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do—”
Lightning quick, she stuck her foot in the door. When he gave her an arch look, she merely held out her card. “When you change your mind, call me. I’ll be in town for another week.”
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