The Widow and the Wildcatter: A Loveswept Classic Romance (2 page)

The wildcatter sloshed heedlessly through the mud puddle that had formed directly beneath the narrow metal step that led up to the trailer door, but Joni hesitated, hating to get her jeans any dirtier than they already were.

Unfortunately, she either had to go through the mud or jump over it. Judging the puddle to be about the length of a yardstick, she put her left foot forward, reared back on her right, and jumped.

She made it, but the step was slippery as oil and there was nothing for her to grab hold of. Nothing but …

At the same time the wildcatter extended a helping hand, Joni got a death grip on the front of his T-shirt. His patronizing grin drooped into a pained grimace when she seized a fistful of his chest hair in the process.

“Hey, lady, let go!”

“I’m afraid I’ll fall!”

The fingers encircling her upper arm tightened, but the fierce expression on his face warned her she was pushing her luck. As did his ominously soft tone. “Let … go.”

Joni got his message loud and clear. Either she let go or he did. She relaxed her grip and tried to collect her scattered wits while he rubbed that rock-solid chest with his free hand.

“Are you all right?” he asked. When he wasn’t yelling, his voice was deep and just a shade raspy.

“Yes.” She looked everywhere but into those eyes of April green, feeling like a big fool. “Thank you.”

He released her arm. “So what do you want?”

She blinked, taken aback by his blunt demand. “I want to talk to you.”

“I’m all ears,” he said. But his muscular body said he was all man, and the step suddenly seemed half again as narrow as it had only moments before.

Swallowing nervously, she reached for the doorknob. But strong brown fingers beat her to the draw. She nodded her thanks and preceded him into the trailer, preparing to beard the lion in his den. Boar’s nest would have been a better description.

Joni came to a halt not three feet beyond the threshold and stared around her in disbelief. In all her born days she’d never seen such disorder.

Blobs of red mud had been tracked across the linoleum floor and left to dry. Empty beer bottles and ashtrays filled to overflowing littered every available surface. A pinup girl wearing nothing but an Indian-style headband and a smile decorated an out-of-date wall calendar. The top of the desk looked fairly neat, but the sunlight that trickled in through the dusty blinds illuminated several nicks and one deep cigarette burn.

The wildcatter closed the door, shutting out most of the drilling noise, then pulled off his hard hat and hooked it on a wall peg. Combing his fingers through hair as black as Oklahoma crude, he crossed to the mini refrigerator in the corner and took out a beer.

“Beer for breakfast?” she asked, resenting his silence.

He turned to her then, his gaze raking over her with insulting thoroughness. “You got something better to offer?”

Joni was a little slow on the uptake, but when his words finally did sink in, her jaw dropped open in fury.

She yanked off her hard hat, aiming to give him a piece of her mind. The metal brim hit her ponytail holder, knocking it out of her hair and onto the floor. She turned to hang up her hat, thinking things couldn’t get any worse, and found out how wrong she was when she accidentally kicked the barrette under the junkheap of a sofa that sat just a few feet away.

Her hair raining down her back like flames, she knelt beside the sofa and began rooting around underneath it.

“Get a move on, lady.” The wildcatter’s caustic tone made it clear that he had better things to do than to watch her imitate a demented anteater. “I happen to be busy.”

“So I’ve heard,” she muttered facetiously as she reached a mite farther and snagged the hair clip.

“You heard right,” he retorted even as he eyed the captivating rear view she’d presented him. As a rule, he preferred bodies by Venus. But that tight little tush and those American beauty legs more than compensated for what she lacked in voluptuous curves.

Suddenly seeing the wedding band on her finger, he set his still full beer bottle on the desk and
spun away to retrieve the well log. He wasn’t long on scruples, but he was loyal to one. Never with a married woman.

“Listen, lady,” he needled her, dropping the drilling record on his desktop for emphasis, “I’ve got a lot of work to do and I’d really like to catch some Z’s before I go back on tour …”

For just a fraction of a second Joni entertained the notion of telling him exactly where he could go. But she needed him. And though he didn’t know it yet, he needed her.

She killed the notion and came to her feet, facing him squarely across the desk. “I’ve got a proposition for you.”

He scanned her summarily, his eyes a wintry green. If she had the seven-year itch, she could damn well scratch it with someone else.

“A
business
proposition,” she clarified, gleaning his thought.

He assumed an impatient stance. “Look—”

“No,” she interrupted him, reaching into the pocket of the man’s shirt she wore and pulling a rectangular card out for his inspection. “You look.”

He gave her a lazy, amused smile. “A recipe card?”

She bridled at his mocking tone. “A map.”

Intrigued in spite of himself, he looked a little closer at the fading pencil lines and saw that it was, indeed, a map.

“My grandmother drew it over fifty years ago,” she explained, laying the card atop the open drilling log on the desk.

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.”

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 sorry” 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.