The Widow and the Wildcatter: A Loveswept Classic Romance Page 2

  He cocked a cynical eyebrow. “Okay, lady, I give. What’s this got to do with me?”

  As briefly as possible then, Joni told him about that long-ago day when his grandfather had visited her grandfather’s farm.

  Chance McCoy stood perfectly motionless, but he felt a dizzying sense of déjà vu. His grandfather, for whom he was named, had told him this very same story.…

  Like old soldiers and others who have walked the razor edge of danger, the oil witch had loved to reminisce. Many’s the night he’d gotten into his cups and brought out choice fragments of memory, ornamenting them with imaginative details for his audience of one.

  Black gold gushing a barrel a minute from the earth, boomtowns springing up overnight, oil rigs growing like sunflowers across the Oklahoma red beds—young Chance had seen it all through his grandfather’s eyes.

  Just when it seemed that the sky was the limit, decreasing gas pressure and declining crude prices had brought on the bust. Debts piled up like dust, and the Great Depression that followed made panhandlers of millionaires and laughingstocks of oil spiritualists.

  Those yarns—true in all the essentials but prettied up for the spinning—had fueled a burning ambition in the boy. Driven by the knowledge that the world is mainly dependent on exhaustible energy resources, and determined to redeem his grandfather’s good name, he enrolled at Oklahoma University and earned a degree in geology.

  Unfortunately, the oil witch died two weeks before commencement. Cirrhosis of the liver, his death certificate read. The night Chance graduated he got roaring drunk; the next morning he sobered up and signed on with an independent oil producer. If he wanted to be a wildcatter, he had to learn the business from the ground up.

  He’d roughnecked for a while, working at every job from stabber to supervisor. Men who’d been riding the derricks down for more years than Chance was alive respected his degree but came to rely on his nose for oil. He could smell the stuff, they said, and that wasn’t a skill that could be booklearned.

  At the height of the oil and gas boom, he’d rounded up some investors and struck out on his own. He hit pay dirt his first time out, and there’d been few dry holes since.

  Oil royalties rushed in like the tide, but the money was more the means to an end than an end in itself. Everywhere he drilled, from the Andarko basin to the Sandstone hills, he was following his elusive dream.

  “How did you find me?” Chance demanded now.

  “Believe me,” Joni answered, “it wasn’t easy.”

  As she explained how she’d tracked him down, driving from one drilling site to the next and pumping strangers for information, he shook his head in amazement.

  “Remember,” she said in summary, “all I had to work with was your grandfather’s name and my grandfather’s memories.”

  “That wasn’t much to go on, considering the amount of time that’s passed.” He really had to admire her gumption. Given his erratic schedule the last few months, it was a wonder she hadn’t thrown in the towel.

  “I was ready to call it quits, when fate led me here.”

  “What do you mean?” His green eyes focused on her hands, and he wondered what kind of a sorry s.o.b. would let his wife work her fingers to the bone like that.

  Not knowing what she’d done to earn his disdain, she looked down at her broken nails and skinned knuckles. All right, so she could use a manicure and a bottle of Jergen’s. But did he have to rub it in?

  The silence lengthened, and Joni rushed to fill it. “After the banker rejected our application for a drilling loan, he said a man he didn’t know from Adam had stopped by a couple of weeks before and told him our exact same story. Needless to say, you could’ve knocked me over with a toothpick when he showed us your business card. And when he told us you were drilling right here in Redemption County … as I said, fate led me here.”

  “Whatever’s fair.” Chance didn’t believe in fate. Which was why he’d spent so much of his free time the last few years talking to small-town bankers and other old-timers who might have known his grandfather in his heyday. If he wanted to drill where the oil witch had dropped, he had to spread the word.

  Clouds scudded through the blue skies of her eyes as she glanced at the telephone on his desk. “I called the number on your business card nearly every day for two weeks, but I couldn’t get past your answering machine.”

  “We’ve been working round the clock since we made hole.” He recognized her husky twang from the tape, and he’d planned to call her back as soon as he got the time.

  “This morning I climbed in my truck and told Grandpa I was going to find you or die trying.” Her freckle-dusted nose wrinkled as she smiled triumphantly.

  But he frowned, bothered by something she’d mentioned earlier. “Would you mind telling me why you were making application for a drilling loan?”

  “To pay for casing and … such.” She bit her lip, debating whether or not to elaborate, then left it at that.

  “But the driller buys those things.”

  “That’s what Jesse James said.”

  He stared at her with utter bemusement. “Jesse James?”

  “One of Grandpa’s nicer names for the banker.” She felt ridiculously breathless when he returned her smile.

  “What else did the robber baron tell you?” Chance’s play on words reminded her of the problem at hand.

  “That you’d pay us a landowner’s royalty for drilling rights.” Joni saw that she was going to break her barrette if she didn’t quit playing with it, and stuck it into her jeans pocket.

  “Three dollars an acre,” he confirmed.

  Her spirits dropped as she mentally multiplied their hundred and sixty acres by three. “But that’s only four hundred and eighty dollars!”

  “You also receive an overriding interest in the proceeds if the well is a producer,” he pointed out.

  She eyed him speculatively, thinking this was more like it. “What’s an overriding interest worth?”

  “One-eighth of the—”

  “Moneywise, I mean.”

  “Mercenary one, aren’t you?” His retort wounded her pride.

  “I didn’t drive all the way out here just to have you poke fun at me, Mr. McCoy.” She reached for the recipe card. “If you won’t take me seriously, I’ll simply take my business elsewhere.”

  “Like hell you will.” With the speed of summer lightning his hand lashed out and caught her wrist before she could grab the card. She had him over a barrel, and he knew she knew it. “What do you want from me, lady?”

  “My name is Fletcher,” she supplied with chilly dignity. “And I want a landowner’s royalty of twenty thousand dollars.”

  “Twenty thousand dollars?!” His roar of disbelief thundered off the trailer walls.

  She tried to pull her arm free; failing that, she went for broke. “I also want half the proceeds if our well is a producer.”

  His mouth tilted into another one of those sardonic smiles. “Our well, Mrs. Fletcher?”

  She gave him tit for tat. “From where I’m standing, Mr. McCoy, my map and your money make it exactly that.”

  Furious to think she’d beaten him at his own game, he released her as suddenly as he’d grabbed her. “What do you think I am—a walking wallet?”

  Fearing she’d pushed him too far, she decided to make a clean breast of it. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but with our farm going under and Grandpa’s medical bills piling up—”

  His eyes sliced to her left hand, and her throat sealed over like a tomb. “What’s the matter with your husband that he can’t provide for his family?”

  An anger that she hadn’t even realized she harbored suddenly raged inside her. But she shut the barn door on the forest fire of her emotions and dredged up her voice. “My husband is dead.”

  Two

  Chance did a double-take that nearly tore his neck off. “What?”

  “My husband is dead,” Joni repeated, bracing herself for the obligatory “I’m s
orry” that still, after all this time, left her lost for a reply.

  “You led me to believe you were married,” he said instead. “Widows wear their rings on their right hands, Mrs. Fletcher, not their left.”

  She knuckled away the tears that suddenly threatened and struck back venomously. “I don’t need etiquette lessons, Mr. McCoy; I need twenty thousand dollars.”

  “Another farmer crying poormouth.” he said snidely.

  “Spoken like a true toolpusher,” she said, exhausting her knowledge of driller’s jargon with the vicious little jab.

  “Come again?” he challenged her, smiling that killer smile.

  “You can take the crude out of the ground,” she returned sarcastically, “but you can’t take the crude out of the—”

  “I get the picture,” he cut in roughly.

  During the emotional meltdown across the desk, they’d begun to see each other in a new light. Now they took each other’s measure.

  If the truth be told, Chance liked everything he saw. The freckles gave her skin a velvety look that made his fingers tingle, while her generous mouth bespoke a woman of spirit.

  His eyes dropped briefly to the chambray shirt that shrouded her slender frame, and he wondered if it might have belonged to her late husband. Whatever, she looked sexy as hell in the man-sized shirt.

  It was her coloring that really intrigued him, though. With that bonfire of red hair and those sparkin’ blue eyes, she reminded him of a wild well just begging to be tamed. And anyone with a lick of sense knew that was a challenge no “oilie” could resist.

  Joni could feel the powerful drive of the drill bit shaking the trailer floor, touching off the craziest vibrations in the craziest places as she studied Chance with the same thoroughness he was using on her.

  To her, he fit the mold of the independent oil man—a rough and ready gambler who played by his own rules. His form-fitting T-shirt displayed a sinuous body with long, fluid muscles that came from lifting pipe, not pumping iron. Years of working in the Oklahoma sun had tanned him to perfection.

  Despite the rumpled black hair and the two-day growth of beard that shadowed his daredevil face, she couldn’t help but notice the network of lines flanking his kinetic green eyes—lines that told her how often he laughed and how much he enjoyed the risky business of discovering oil.

  Nor could she ignore the frankly sensual mouth that shocked her into realizing that her first impulse was to kiss him.

  Guiltily she glanced down at her wedding band, remembering a June bride and her farm boy vowing to love, honor, and cherish “till death us do part.” She strove to recall Larry’s round, serious face, but her mind’s eye refused to cooperate. All she could see was that dimly lit barn and a pair of scuffed work boots—

  “How did he die?”

  Joni raised her head in confusion, her three-year-old screams still echoing in her ears. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Your husband.” Chance had a gut feeling the guy had done a real number on her. “How did he die?”

  “What difference does it make?” She swallowed hard, drowning out those horrible screams. If only she could eliminate the nightmares that easily. “Larry’s gone and you’re my last hope.”

  He started to tell her not to go pinning her hopes or anything else on him—he had enough trouble without that. But before he could speak the door opened, admitting all the outside noise and an oil-smeared Tex.

  “Good news, boss,” the roughneck said to Chance. “We’ve found the pay in the Redfork formation.”

  Chance welcomed the interruption as much as he did the news. Maybe more. He picked up the drilling record and got down to business. “Let’s get a sample and get it logged.”

  “Right,” Tex replied.

  Joni could feel the sudden charge in the air. It was as if a hot wire had just sent an electric spark through the trailer.

  It seemed like eons since she’d been a part of something good, something exciting, and she would have given her eye teeth to stay and see what happened next. But fearing she would only be in the way, she reached for the recipe card that now lay on the desk.

  “No.”

  The quiet command stopped her cold. She drew her hand back quickly and looked curiously at Chance.

  He gave the log to Tex. “Mrs. Fletcher and I have some unfinished business to take care of, so go ahead without me. You know what to do.”

  The roughneck’s grin gleamed whitely in his blackened face as he reached to pull the door closed behind him. “Consider it done.”

  When he was gone, Chance picked up the card and carried it to the window, studying it intently in the lemony light that seeped through the blinds and trying to sort through feelings that had been a long time in coming.

  It was a damned difficult thing to do, dividing past from present and separating emotion from experience. On the one hand, this could be the pot of gold at the end of that rainbow he’d been chasing; on the other hand, it could be the beginning of the end of his lifelong dream. Either way, he couldn’t rush the process.

  Until now, Joni had been too busy making her case to really size up the man she’d been searching high and low for. Given this breather, though, she realized she just might be getting in over her head.

  He wore his hair a bit longer than was considered the fashion, as though he didn’t give two hoots in hell what anybody else thought. But the black strands looked so springy and inviting, it took every ounce of willpower Joni possessed not to reach out and touch them.

  She had a slim view of a profile that could have been carved by the restless wind, but mostly her view was restricted to his long, sinewy back. The heat had plastered his T-shirt to his muscled skin, making her conscious of the way his wall-to-wall shoulders tapered to a trim waist and taut buttocks.

  He flipped the card over suddenly and read the other side, then turned to face her and asked, “Ever make it?”

  “M—make what?”

  “Buttermilk pie.”

  “Oh, no.” Embarrassed by her momentary lapse, she hastened to clarify. “I got the card out of Grandma’s apron pocket only a couple of months ago. See, she died giving birth to my daddy that day, and Grandpa had kept her things in the cedar chest in the attic. I didn’t even know it existed until he sent me up there to dig it out.”

  A smile graced her lips as she studied the small card in his large hands. “I’ve been meaning to make one, but what with taking care of Grandpa, tending my tomatoes, and trying to find you, I haven’t had time.”

  Chance took in her worn clothes and work roughened hands, wondering when she found time for herself, and Joni realized she looked like something the cat dragged in.

  Her blue chambray shirt had belonged to Larry. She’d stayed up late one night altering it down until it was only a couple of sizes too large for her. Her jeans were stiff with mud, and her waffle stompers … well, they’d seen better days.

  As the silence thickened, she began twisting her wedding band in a nervous gesture that, for some reason, irritated the hell out of Chance.

  “Tell me something,” he demanded tersely. “How much life insurance did your husband have?”

  She went pale as a ghost. “What’s that got to do with our oil well?”

  “You asked me for twenty thousand dollars, remember?” He felt like a real heel, putting her through this, but he had her dead to rights. “I’m just trying to make sure I won’t be throwing good money after bad if I decide to drill on your land.”

  “If you doubt my integrity, Mr. McCoy—”

  “You haven’t answered my question, Mrs. Fletcher.”

  “Nor will I.” She squared her narrow shoulders determinedly and put her hand out, palm up. “Now, if you’ll give me back my card, I’ll get out of your hair.”

  Chance looked at her, all earth and fire and sky, and braved the elements with a smile. “You don’t like me, do you?”

  Joni had the grace to blush. “Let’s just say that we don’t have much in common
and leave it at that.”

  “I think you’re wrong,” he challenged her laconically.

  “I don’t.” She wiggled her fingers impatiently.

  He kept the card firmly in hand. “You’re aware, aren’t you, that the oil industry is just now starting to come out of its worst price slump since the Depression?”

  She kept a tight rein on her temper. “And you’re aware that while the price of oil was going up to thirty dollars a barrel a few years back, the price of corn was going down to a dollar fifty a bushel?”

  “You’ve had price supports.”

  “And you’ve had tax breaks.”

  He tried another tack. “The main reason I’m in business today is that I had enough revenue from my stripper wells to carry me over the hump.”

  She cut him off at the pass. “Well, the main reason we quit growing corn last year is that we were losing fifty dollars an acre.”

  Their eyes met, and they engaged in a visual battle of wills that made their verbal skirmish seem tame by comparison.

  Chance began to notice things about her that he hadn’t noticed before. That her nose had an aristocratic bent, but her slightly squared jaw could have belonged to a pioneer. That her sadly neglected hands were as fragile and fine-boned as those of an ascetic. That for all her slight build, she had the heart of a fighter.

  Little did he know that Joni was fighting her budding attraction to him as fiercely as she was fighting to save her farm.

  He simply felt the determination radiating from her every pore and called a truce. “There’s no use in our even discussing that twenty thousand dollars until I’ve run some tests on your land.”

  She dropped her hand but held her rising elation in check. “What kinds of tests?”

  “Rock and soil samples, for starters.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “A week.” He shrugged those massive shoulders, causing his muscles to ripple beneath his T-shirt. “Two at the most.”

  “That’s cutting it pretty close.” She didn’t mean to sound pushy, but she was running out of time. “Our bank note comes due three weeks from today.”