Читать книгу The Wildcatter - Peggy Nicholson - Страница 7

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.