Roz Fox - Wide Open Spaces

Summer Marsh had suddenly appeared in the café.

Colt deliberately shut his eyes, then opened them again. She hadn’t gone. And she wasn’t alone. A child, a boy Colt guessed to be six or seven years of age, stood with her. The kid wore a too-big cowboy hat that rested on slightly jug ears. Colt grinned. Otherwise, the boy was pretty ordinary. But his body language suggested he wasn’t happy to be going out to dinner with his mother.

Colt realized Mrs. Marsh hadn’t seen him yet. An older waitress named Helen greeted Summer, grabbing a pair of menus. “How did the hearing go?” Helen asked as she directed them to the booth right behind Colt.

“Oh, fine, I guess,” Summer murmured. “The judge gave me six months to come up with money to buy out my ex.” She shrugged, looking dejected. “But the buyout’s based on an inflated price. To keep the Forked Lightning, I’d have to pay Frank three point eight million.”

They’d drawn abreast of Colt’s booth, and Summer stopped abruptly. “Mr., ah, Quinn, isn’t it?”

Colt rose politely. He’d been eavesdropping on her conversation with Helen. What Summer Marsh had said about the results of the hearing interested him a great deal.

“You two know each other?” Helen exclaimed. “Well, isn’t that nice. I hate seeing anyone eat alone.” Without fanfare, the waitress plunked Summer’s two menus on the table opposite Colt’s coffee mug.

Dear Reader,

The strangest things prompt writers to create a story. Of course, my primary goal as a Superromance author is to tell a love story that has a happy ending. To me, that’s the heart of my stories. The backbone often comes from obscure news articles, overheard conversations or a passing comment. In the case of this book, it was a small ad in the back of a conservation magazine.

The ad was titled “Buy into Conservation” and went as follows: “Wanted, buyer for an 18,600-acre oasis in beautiful Oregon’s high desert. Abundant wildlife includes pronghorn deer and bald eagles. The property comes with more than 25,000 acres of public grazing and allotments and three home sites along the river.” It ended with “Conservation buyers purchase property for their private use with certain restrictions on their development activities. By doing so, the buyer helps safeguard imperiled landscapes.”

As a former Oregonian, I remain passionate about land in its natural state. I’m someone who loves clean air, clear streams and unobstructed mountain views. Someone who routinely bemoans encroaching development on the beautiful desert near where I currently live, in Arizona. So this ad nagged me. It whispered and shouted and nudged until I dreamed up Summer Marsh, a cattle rancher in danger of losing her beloved ranch. And Coltrane (Colt) Quinn, a horse breeder. While serving his country on foreign soil, Colt lost his land when his greedy wife had him declared legally dead.

I don’t know whether anyone bought the Oregon ranch I saw advertised. I hope so. And I hope my readers agree that it should end up in the hands of people like Summer and Colt.

Roz Denny Fox

P.S. Write me at P.O. Box 17480-101, Tucson, Arizona, 85731 or e-mail me at rdfox@worldnet.att.net.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Karen and Paul Belt, and Carol and Alvin Roy,

who know what it’s like to sink roots into family land

and coax a living from the soil year after year.

To Sharon and Bob Nistler, who own and operate the

granary in my old hometown and who have preserved the

historic railroad depot for future generations.

You all thought we were having a reunion,

but if you recall, I warned you I was researching a new

book. Any mistakes herein are mine. However,

you’ve all known me since we were knee-high

to a harrow, so the fact that I have a big imagination

shouldn’t come as any great surprise.

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

EPILOGUE

COLTRANE QUINN STOOD at the rear of a horse trailer still attached to his Dodge Ram pickup. He was talking to Myron Holder, the local vet, discussing a pulled tendon on his favorite gelding. This was Colt’s second visit to Holder’s clinic, and he appreciated talking horses with someone who knew them as well as Holder did. Colt was cut off in the middle of a sentence by a big Ford dually and trailer bearing down on him. It seemed to be traveling way too fast. Dust and gravel engulfed Colt as the oncoming vehicle squealed to a stop inches from his rig. He caught a fleeting glimpse of a woman at the wheel, sitting to the right of a window sticker that read Badass Ladies Don’t Drive Mercedes. A moment later, she jumped from the cab and was obliterated by a cloud of grit.

“Fool woman,” Colt choked, waving away flying particles with both hands.

“Hardly,” Holder said. “Summer Marsh is one of least foolish women I know. Something’s wrong.” Already in motion, the old vet rushed toward the back of the woman’s single-horse trailer. She joined him, flinging down the trailer’s ramp.

Well, well, well! Colt was about to get his first look at the woman his boss had sent him to Callanton to assess. He’d been hanging around town for a week, enjoying the still-pleasant October weather of eastern Oregon while he filled a notebook with information on Frank and Summer Marsh. Finally, he was about to meet the wicked witch of Forked Lightning Ranch face-to-face.

Needing time to get a grip on his automatic hostility, Coltrane shook dirt off his Stetson. Eventually, he sauntered up alongside the battered trailer. The way it lurched back and forth, he figured the Marsh woman couldn’t handle a horse any better than she managed her life.

“Hey, Quinn,” Holder yelled, his voice hollow from inside the covered trailer. “Give us a hand.”

Colt stepped into the trailer’s opening, then dived back as some screeching thing hit his shoulder and knocked his hat clean off his head. “What the hell?” He ducked, squinting to see into the dim interior of the horse van.

“Grab her” came a woman’s frantic voice. “Oh, please! She’s going to injure her good wing if we don’t subdue her soon.”

Colt saw then that the Marsh woman and Doc Holder were wrestling a full-grown eagle boasting the widest wingspan he’d ever seen. One of the shrieking bird’s wings, he realized, trailed at an odd angle. Dark, rusty blood stained the white tips of the feathers. The eagle fought her captors valiantly with her other wing. Nor was she a slouch when it came to her beak and deadly talons.

Closing his mind as to why Summer Marsh might have an injured bird in her horse trailer, Colt jumped into the fray to do what he could. Dodging behind the flapping eagle, he threw his arms around her and clamped down for dear life.

He wasn’t a soft man by any means, thanks to special-forces training in the military. If only he’d had the sense to stay out of covert operations after he left the service, he’d be in better shape now. Instead, he’d let friends talk him into an occasional private rescue mission. The five years spent as a captive in that South American hellhole, had taken their toll. The few months thereafter, which he’d spent trying to drown in whiskey, had also contributed to his current breathlessness. But hell, he’d climbed out of the gutter and now worked out regularly again. Yet his arm muscles quivered and ached as he went down on one knee to add more leverage so he could hold the bird whose heart tripped faster than Colt’s own.