The Dangerous Jacob Wilde

What looked like a zillion “old friends” had gathered in the enormous great room at El Sueño.

El Sueño. The Dream.

Addison hid a wry smile in her wineglass as she lifted it to her lips.

In Spanish or English, that was a pretty fanciful name for half a million acres of scrub, rolling grassland, flower and vegetable gardens, dusty roads, expensive horseflesh and gushing oil wells, but one of the things she’d discovered during the time she’d been here was that Texans could wax poetic about their land as easily as they could raise a sweat working it.

Even Charlie, who had not been a Texan at all, but like her was a born and bred Easterner, though from a very, very different background, even he had somehow let the poetic part draw him in.

Not the sweat part.

It was impossible to imagine Charlie had ever raised a sweat on anything more labor-intensive than his stock portfolio.

Addison sighed.

Perhaps if he had, if he’d flown down to take a hard look at the Chambers ranch, ridden its seemingly endless dusty acres instead of relying on a picture-book spread in a fancy real-estate catalogue, he wouldn’t have bought it.

But he had bought it, sight unseen, and died a week later.

Losing him had just about broken her heart—and then had come the shock of learning he’d willed her the ranch.

She’d done nothing about it for a while. Then, because the place had obviously been important to Charlie, she’d done what he hadn’t.

She’d strung together all the vacation time she hadn’t taken in two years, added this year’s allotment and flown down to see it.

What she’d found wasn’t a ranch at all, not if you watched old John Wayne movies on late-night TV.

The Chambers place was umpteen thousand acres of scrub, outbuildings that looked as if a strong wind would topple them, a ranch house that had its own wildlife population, half a dozen sorry-looking horses and not very much else.

Which was the reason she had the Wildes as her advisors and—

“Now, little lady, how come you’re drinkin’ red wine when there’s champagne flowin’ like a stream to the Rio Grande?”

A big man wearing an even bigger Stetson, a flute of champagne in each oversize paw, flashed her a big smile.

Oh God, she thought wearily, not again.

“Jimbo Fawcett,” he said. “Of the Fawcett Ranch.”

How could somebody manage to tuck an entire pedigree into six words? Another Jimbo Fawcett look-alike already had, with the clear expectation that she’d want to spend the rest of the evening listening to him explain—with some modesty but not much because, after all, this was Texas—how incredibly lucky she was that he’d picked her out of the herd.

Except for the Stetsons, big-shot New York attorneys and Wall Street tycoons did it much the same way, so she was used to it.

“How nice for you,” she said pleasantly.

“You jest got to be Addie McDowell.”

“Addison McDowell. Yes.”

Fawcett gave a booming laugh. “We’re not so formal down here, little lady.”

What the hell, Addison thought, enough was enough.

“Mr. Fawcett—”

“Jimbo.”

“Mr. Fawcett.” Addison gave him a bright smile. “In the next couple of minutes, you’re going to tell me that I’m new to Wilde’s Crossing and what a sad thing it is that we haven’t met before.”