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.
“Ranchettes!” Tankersly spat into the long grass and rode on. “Risa’s brought us home a wrecker. A limp-wristed, stab-you-in-the-back-and-smile wrecker. I don’t call that breeding stock.”
Joe sighed to himself. Not a cloud in all the clear blue sky, but it was gonna be a stormy summer. Two mule-headed Tankerslys with opposing notions…
“You find a replacement for that boy?” Tankersly demanded, changing the subject abruptly. One of their haying crew had gashed his leg from knee to toe cutting hay yesterday. Joe had driven down into Trueheart last night, seeking a replacement.
“Nope.” Haying was sweat-soaked, backbreaking drudgery. And hardly the safest of jobs, with all that whirling machinery.
