The Ranch Stud
Автор
Cathy Gillen Thacker
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Prologue
Dear Patience,
The older I get, the more I see my options dwindling. So…do you believe an arranged marriage can be as successful as the more traditional counterpart?
Sincerely,
Desperately Seeking a Mate
Dear Desperately Seeking a Mate, Only if the bride and groom do the arranging. Contrary to popular wisdom, arranged marriages never work! Hang tough and shoot for the whole ball of wax, not just an itty-bitty part.
Looking for True Love, Too,
Patience
“Are you all right?” thirty-eight-year-old Trace McKendrick asked his younger sister as he parked in front of the Silver Spur Ranch horse-breeding complex. It had been just twenty minutes since the reading of their beloved Uncle Max’s will, and both were not only reeling with grief over their loss but stunned speechless by the highly unusual terms of their eccentric uncle’s bequests.
“I could ask the same question of you,” Patience McKendrick replied. She’d thought by now that she’d heard just about everything, but even ten years of writing an advice column to the lovelorn, peppered with stalwart western homilies, had not prepared her for this.
Trace shook his head. “I can’t believe Uncle Max did this to us.”
Patience reached over, squeezed his arm and commiserated grimly. “Tied all three of our inheritances to these incredibly foolish, hopelessly romantic—”
“Not to mention ill-advised—” Trace added with a discerning lift of his wheat blond brow.
“Unions!” Patience concluded emotionally.
“And, to top it all off, added a stipulation that we must marry within forty-eight hours or lose everything.”
Patience sighed, ran a hand through her shoulder-length hair, the same shade as her brother’s, and tried her best to look on the bright side. “I suppose it could be worse,” she murmured finally as she smoothed the circle skirt of her long denim dress. Though she wasn’t sure how.
Trace rolled his eyes, his displeasure unabated. “Yeah, we could be in little brother Cody’s shoes and be expected to marry a woman Uncle Max had handpicked from his Western Ranch Wives video matchmaking service, a woman who, as far as we can tell, Uncle Max had never even met!”
In Patience’s view, she wasn’t much better off than her younger brother, Cody, though Max had selected someone he had met for her—the Silver Spur Ranch veterinarian, Josh Colter. Worse, Max expected Josh Colter to help her make the baby she had been wanting for as far back as she could recall. Max hadn’t made that particular demand on her two brothers or their prospective mates, she thought resentfully.
“I don’t even know how long my intended has been working at the ranch.”
“Two months, I think,” Trace replied. “I haven’t met him yet, but my secretary saw him in town and said he was extremely fine in the looks department, in that distinctly rough-hewn, Montana-cowboy way.”
“Well, who cares what he looks like!” Patience fumed.
Trace grinned. “You say that now,” he teased. “But once you lay eyes on him—”
“Once I lay eyes on him nothing!” Patience shot right back, successfully fighting a blush. “At least you know your intended, Trace,” she declared. “Unlike me, who has never even laid eyes on the Silver Spur Ranch employee I’ve been paired with!”
“Just because Susannah and I were married for three short months seventeen years ago does not mean I know her,” Trace shot right back, bristling at the idea he had it any easier than his two siblings. “But you’re right,” he told Patience. “You do have it worse than I do, in that you’ve never met this ranch stud Uncle Max has hooked you up with.”
“Nor am I sure I want to know Josh Colter.” Patience scowled at the stud barn in mounting apprehension and sighed. As much as she hated to go in to face him, she knew she had no choice. Like it or not, it was time to play the cards she had been dealt.
