True Love Ranch. Elizabeth Harbison
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poured unsteadily.
“Dear, did you see that Joe is here, too?” Hank Cox asked from across the room.
Anthea Cox looked up. The teapot shifted position but continued to pour, now onto the table, as she said, “Well, Joseph, how nice—”
“Excuse me, Anthea,” Darcy said, reaching for the teapot. The older woman apparently didn’t hear her, because just as Darcy was about to grasp the teapot Anthea shifted both her gaze and the teapot back to Darcy.
“Mr. Beckett would have been so pleased that you’ve come back at last,” she said faintly to Darcy, who was frantically setting empty tea cups under the trickling stream.
Joe walked over and took the pot from Anthea Cox, saying, “I was just telling Darcy myself what a shame it was that she waited so long to come back.”
Darcy looked daggers at him. She wanted to tell him that the responsibility for her absence was not hers alone, but she knew it would sound petty. If he remembered that she’d given him her virginity, it certainly didn’t seem to mean much to him now. “Well, our past doesn’t mean that much to me, either,” she contended, looking down at her shoes. She didn’t realize she’d spoken the words aloud until she looked up.
Three surprised gazes landed on her like bugs.
“What do you mean, dear?” Anthea asked.
A long moment of silence followed.
“I mean,” Darcy stammered, “I mean that the past is the past, and there’s no point in regretting it now.” She leveled her gaze on Joe. “No matter how much I might want to.”
“Quite so,” Anthea agreed. “Quite so.”
There was a strained silence, but before the awkwardness became torturous a man walked into the room wearing a fine gray pinstripe suit and carrying a thin leather briefcase. “I’m sorry I’m late.” He gave a cursory nod to everyone in the room, then settled his gaze on Darcy and Joe. “I’m Edward Connor, Mr. Beckett’s attorney. You must be Ms. Beckett and Mr. Tyler.”
They both nodded.
“Good. Then we’ll sort out the future of the True Love Ranch.”
“The True Love Ranch?” Darcy repeated incredulously. “What’s that?”
“This is that,” Joe answered. “Didn’t you know?”
“The T.L. Ranch...you’re saying that stands for True Love?”
Joe looked at her strangely. “Yeah. You must have known that.”
She shook her head, trying to make sense of the sentimental name her grandfather had given to his home. “I can’t believe it.”
From the top shelf Joe took the baseball that had been signed to her grandfather by Babe Ruth and tossed it in the air. “It’s absolutely true.” He caught the ball.
“Does anyone know where the name came from?”
“Well, yeah. He named it in honor of his wife,” Joe said simply.
“What?”
“Your grandfather. He named it in honor of your grandmother.”
“You must be mistaken.”
Joe shook his head and tossed the ball again. “Nope. He told me so himself. Why the shock? Can’t you believe the old guy loved his wife?”
“Frankly, no.”
“Come on, Darce,” Joe said, using the old nickname he’d given her.
“I never thought he loved anyone.”
Joe’s look hardened. “He loved you, and you know it.”
She gave a wry laugh, ignoring the increasingly impatient lawyer and the increasingly confused Coxes. “That’s why he refused to speak to me when I married a man he didn’t approve of.”
“He was right, wasn’t he?”
“That’s not the point.”
“No,” Joe agreed, apparently no more concerned about the others in the room than Darcy was. “It’s not. He was worried about you. I think it was the only way he could think of to make you reconsider your decision.”
“At some point he must have realized it wasn’t working.”
Joe shrugged. “You Becketts are so inflexible sometimes. He probably didn’t know how to approach you anymore than you knew how to approach him.”
Just then the lawyer cleared his throat. “Excuse me, I just have some papers here for your signatures, and then I think we’ll be ready to go,” he said.
“Not that all of that is any of my business,” Joe went on to Darcy, “but—”
Darcy’s reply was pointed. “No, it isn’t any of your business.”
The lawyer went to a broad rolltop desk that Darcy remembered from childhood. It was an impressive piece of artistry, walnut stained to a deep amber sheen. Inside, she knew, it had all sorts of secret drawers and shelves. As a child she had loved playing with it.
No one spoke as the lawyer unsnapped the fasteners on his briefcase and pulled out a pile of papers.
“Mr. Tyler, Ms. Beckett, Mr. Beckett left the sum of $20,000 to Mr. and Mrs. Cox for their years of faithful duty. That is the whole of Mr. Beckett’s liquid assets. What remains, however, is this property, consisting of the house and everything in it, and one thousand acres of surrounding property.”
Darcy slipped a peek at Joe. What was he really doing here? Was there a token bequest of some favorite paperweight or money clip or something? How close had he and her grandfather become before the older man had died?
That question was quickly replaced by another, more fearful one: What had she been asked here for?
Grandfather couldn’t have left anything to her. Some cruel part of her mind told her that maybe he’d left her some final token of disapproval, but that wouldn’t have been like him. He’d been a hardheaded man, sure of what was right and what was wrong to his way of thinking, but she couldn’t believe he’d ever deliberately set out to hurt her. He certainly wouldn’t do that now, as his final act.
Darcy found herself kneading her hands in her lap. She wished the lawyer would just get on with it.
“Now for the rest of the estate,” Edward Connor continued, as if in answer to her thoughts. He looked from Darcy to Joe, and back again. “Mr. Beckett left the property to the two of you—Mr. Tyler, Ms. Beckett—to be shared equally.”
Darcy gasped.
Joe dropped the baseball.
“What do you mean ‘shared equally’?” Darcy asked.
The attorney gazed at her impassively. “As of this moment, you each have an equal share in True Love Ranch.”
Chapter Three
“Wait a minute,” Darcy interrupted. “The ranch is going to the two of us? Joe and me? That has to be a mistake.”
“It doesn’t sound right to me, either,” Joe said, exchanging a quick glance with Darcy. “This is Mr. Beckett’s granddaughter. I was just a friend. An employee, in fact. Are you sure you’ve read that correctly?”
The lawyer looked at them both through hooded eyes. “I don’t make mistakes.”
Darcy privately thought the mistake might be that a share in the ranch had been left to her at all.
The lawyer continued as though he hadn’t just dropped a bombshell. “The property has been left to both of you, with some conditions attached.”
“Conditions?” Darcy echoed.
He