“I…”

      She made a little moan deep in her throat, but she didn’t pull away. Her lashes shivered; the color swept over her breasts, a dawning of desire.

      He fingered one swelling rosebud—leaned to adore it with tongue and mouth, felt her heart thundering against his cradling palm. Ah, marry me, Risa, and we’ll do this every night of our lives! He raised his head to replace his lips with his coaxing fingers. Perhaps it was male instinct that would brook no denial. He would have her surrender. “Say yes!” he demanded, his voice husky with emotion. “Only leap, Risa-Sonrisa, and I will catch you!”

      “Truly?” She flattened a hand against his heart. “¿De veras? You really want me?”

      More than all the oil in the world. He caught her slender waist and lifted her to kneel astride his lap. “You’re all that I want!”

      But that…that was a lie he’d pay for.

      Dear Reader,

      I still remember the first oil well my geologist father took me out on. It was some place in the Big Thicket country of East Texas.

      What a circus of sights and sounds for a six-year-old! The towering rig, the massive machines bellowing and roaring—spinning and rising and falling. The muddy, greasy men performing their dangerous balletic feats up on the drilling platform. The rig lit up at night like a Christmas tree.

      The trailer where my dad and others studied the wavering, intricate lines on long scrolls of paper as the drill bit gnawed its way down to black gold—or a dry hole that cost a fortune.

      Big, drawling male voices, lots of laughter, the underlying tension and excitement. Back then in my preprinting days I never dreamed that someday I’d want to write about these men. I just knew that, looking up from buckle level, they all seemed like heroes to me.

      So here I give you my latest hero, Miguel Heydt, a seeker, a searcher, who comes to Trueheart, Colorado—to Suntop Ranch—looking for treasure.

      Thanks for coming along for his ride!

      Peggy Nicholson

      The Wildcatter

      Peggy Nicholson

      DEDICATION

      This book is for the first and last wildcatter

       in my life: Erwin Grimes, of Kerrville, Texas— the man who taught me to dream big; to dare to back my dreams with action; and to come back smiling…even when a well comes up dry. Because there’s always the next time, the next dream, isn’t there? And thanks so much, Dad, for all your advice and background on this story— couldn’t have done it without you!

      And in memory of Yaffa.

       She came; she saw; she conquered. We wept when she left.

      CONTENTS

      PROLOGUE

      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

      CHAPTER FIFTEEN

      CHAPTER SIXTEEN

      CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

      CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

      CHAPTER NINETEEN

      CHAPTER TWENTY

      CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

      CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

      CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

      CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

      CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

      PROLOGUE

      The Present

      MIGUEL HEYDT TURNED the flattened wedding ring that rested on his palm. Not much thicker than a piece of tinfoil, the golden, metallic shape looked like a starburst. Or maybe a sunflower with the center shot out of it.

      Shallow, crescent-shape gouges in the gold showed the imprint of whatever tool had been used to make this final statement. Flip it over, and the pebbled texture suggested that the object had rested on concrete at the time of its smashing.

      Looking down at the ruined marriage band he’d carried in his wallet for eleven years, Miguel Heydt had to smile—even as all the other old emotions roiled within him.

      Emotions like anger.

      Disappointment.

      Hot desire and biting humiliation.

      Maybe even a touch of wistful sorrow?

      But the first emotion this battered ring always evoked in him, on the rare occasions when he allowed himself a look, was reluctant admiration. Aren’t you something, though?

      For Risa Tankersly Heydt, without wasting a single word, had sent him her message, loud and clear: “You can kiss my sweet ass goodbye!” Miguel murmured ruefully. That’s what Risa was telling him when she mailed him his ring back from Las Vegas.

      At the time she’d dropped it into an envelope and passed it to a postal clerk to postmark, he and Risa had been married for roughly eighteen hours.

      Had to be one of the shortest marriages on record.

      A marriage eleven years in the past, yet still he could close his eyes and taste her—taste that kiss he’d claimed at the altar, with Risa’s father, her family and all her fine, fancy world to witness. She’d tasted like hot golden coins dipped in honey. Like a poor boy’s dream of triumph.

      “Ah, Risa.” She’d annulled their marriage in Las Vegas—then married another man the day after. The happy couple lived far away from Trueheart, or so Miguel had been told.

      Risa-Sonrisa. He didn’t think about her often. A man couldn’t look back and stay a man. A man walked forward into his life, with long strides in big boots.

      But 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