Fortune Hunter's Hero. Linda Turner
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