out here in the middle of nowhere.
Blake answered on the second ring, sounding anxious. “Well?” he asked.
“I’m set. I’m going in,” she told him. “You know what to do?”
“If I don’t hear from you by dawn, I call your friend in the mining department at the university and we come find you,” he promised. “Paige, are you sure this is safe? I couldn’t stand it if anything happened to you.”
“The mine’s been there for a hundred years. Travis Foley let a group of archaeologists in there last year to document the petroglyphs on the walls. I got a copy of their report. The place is stable as can be—”
“Still, isn’t it dangerous to go in there alone?”
They’d been through this. They’d agreed. No one else could know. Too much was at stake.
Blake merely claimed things were difficult right now financially for the jewelry stores, but that he was handling it. Which is likely what Paige’s proud, stubborn, determined oldest brother would say if the world was about to come to an end. He’d be sure he could save it all on his own.
And she was just as determined to help him.
She didn’t think the world was coming to an end, just that the problem with the stores was a serious one, and one problem to do with her family that she could actually solve. And she was determined to do just that. Solve it.
“Blake, I’m working on my PhD in geology. I know what I’m doing. Besides, I was in that mine myself weeks ago, just to make sure the reports were right and to make sure I had the equipment I’d need. Trust me. Everything will be fine.”
Actually, if her cowboy was the one who caught her, Paige didn’t think she’d mind all that much. She was confident she could talk her way out of trouble, if she had to, and she’d be long gone before the news ever got back to Travis Foley that anyone was here.
“I heard the Foleys are having some big family meeting this weekend, which means Travis Foley should be on a plane headed for Dallas by now. So you shouldn’t have to worry about him.”
“Good.” He was one person Paige really didn’t want to run into.
“But what about the weather?” Blake asked. “There are some nasty storms predicted from that hurricane in the gulf—”
“Storms that aren’t supposed to arrive until tomorrow in the area north of here. I checked the weather radar myself this morning. I’m going in now, and I’ll be out before the storm hits tomorrow,” Paige told her brother. “You worry too much. I’ll be in touch by morning.”
Travis Foley got back on his horse and headed up the rise to the rock overhang that hid the entrance to the old mine at the far corner of the 6,500-acre ranch he called home.
It had been his grandfather’s before him, his absolute favorite place to be as a child. Out here where he could breathe, where in the quiet he could think and find some peace and do an honest day’s work.
The rest of his family, the Foleys, just didn’t understand him, and honestly, Travis didn’t understand them.
They were oilmen and politicians, big shots out in what they thought was the real world.
This world, to Travis, was real.
It was all the life he wanted, right here.
He wished they’d all just leave him the hell alone and let him enjoy it.
But ever since that old Spanish shipwreck had been found in the Gulf of Mexico, people had gone nuts looking for the Santa Magdalena Diamond, a rock that was supposed to rival the Hope Diamond in size and value.
One of Travis’s ancestors, Elwin Foley, had been on that ship when it sank in the 1800s, supposedly along with the diamond and a treasure chest full of old Spanish silver coins.
No one was sure exactly what happened after that. Either the diamond went down with the ship or one of the survivors got away with it. The stone had never been found.
Travis’s ancestor survived, bought the ranch on which Travis now lived and started mining for silver. Elwin Foley certainly hadn’t lived the life of a man who possessed a fortune in diamonds, working hard on the ranch until he lost his life in a mining accident before ever finding any silver.
His son, Gavin, had even worse luck—raised by his mother alone, barely getting by on the ranch and as a man, developing a gambling problem that led to him losing the ranch and the deed to the old silver mines in the late 1890s in a card game to a man named Harry McCord.
Travis was disgusted just thinking about it and how much the old feud was still alive today between his family and the McCords.
His ancestor, Gavin, had always claimed the poker game was fixed, that Harry McCord was a card cheat. And the McCords had the nerve to strike it rich on the silver mines not long after supposedly winning the deed to the ranch and the mines.
Travis really didn’t give a damn. His family had gotten rich in the oil business a few years later. None of them were hurting for money. He didn’t begrudge the McCords the fortune they’d built in the jewelry business over the years, a fortune that started with the discovery of silver in the mines.
But he sure begrudged the loss of the ranch.
Because while he lived on the ranch now, as his grandfather had before him, worked it, sweat over it, bled over it, made this place his life, he could never own it.
The McCords did, thanks to a bad hand of poker more than a hundred years ago or a card cheat, depending on which version of the legend a man believed.
Twenty years ago, in an effort to end the bitter feud, Eleanor McCord had offered a long-term lease of the land to the Foleys, which Travis’s grandfather had accepted, then come here to make the ranch his own.
Travis had spent the best days of his childhood here and had taken over the ranch when his grandfather died ten years ago. But it wasn’t the same as owning the land, and that still had the power to burn a hole in Travis Foley’s gut when he let himself think about it too long.
Which was hard not to do when all the hoopla over the stupid diamond and the feud had sprung up again.
Explorers had found the sunken Spanish ship, along with a cache of old Spanish diamonds.
But not the Santa Magdalena.
Which fueled speculation all over again that someone who survived the shipwreck had gotten away with the diamond, and it had long been rumored that person was Elwin Foley, who’d founded the ranch and lived out the rest of his life there.
Which had even more people thinking that the most likely place to find that diamond was right here on Travis’s ranch.
Now treasure hunters, gem collectors and even jewel thieves were just showing up here, looking for that cursed diamond. Didn’t the damned fools know everyone who’d ever owned it had come to a bad end? Not that it had kept people from looking.
As if Travis didn’t have enough to do on a 6,500-acre ranch in November besides keep people from hurting themselves,
