Beckett's Birthright by Bronwyn Williams

Author:Bronwyn Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2013-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

During a long, sleepless night, Eli went over Jackson’s offer again and again in his mind, examining it from every angle to see if he might have mistaken the meaning.

No mistake. The sorry bastard had laid it out plain as day. All he had to do was marry Lilah and sign a contract agreeing to stay on as general manager and he would inherit the entire estate once Jackson was dead.

“Jesus,” he muttered reverently. In all his years of hell-raising and hard working, rich and poor, he had yet to meet a man like Burke Jackson. If the man had ever possessed a heart, it had withered along with the rest of his body. According to his own testimony, he had built the Bar J up from nothing. Which meant he’d once had a functioning brain.

Shriveled up like a dried walnut. Had to be, to come up with a scheme like that.

Scowling at the mirror, Eli twisted his jaw to one side, examining his face for stray whiskers. After one final stroke, he slung the shaving soap from the blade and rinsed it in the washbowl. Most of the men he knew wore either a full beard or a goatee, with a mustache and sideburns, plus any number of combinations. Eli preferred not to have to trim around any such adornments.

The face that stared back at him from the mirror was nothing to brag about, with or without whiskers. There was a touch of gray at his temples now, but the rest of his hair was still the same dead-grass color it had been since he’d outgrown towheadedness. It was still thick, but certainly nothing to set a maiden’s heart aflutter. As for his face, it was permanently weathered from too many years spent outdoors, his features no more than ordinary. A big nose that had been bent out of shape a time or two, a jaw that had all the delicacy of a Brahma bull. Ordinary eyes of no particular color set in a bed of squint lines that came from having worked most of his life under a merciless sun. At the age of twelve he’d been working cattle for a man who lived on the other side of Crow Fly. Earned good money, too, until his grandpa had caught him out and sent him back to the one-room school some six miles away.

He had also collected a few scars over a long and colorful career. Add that to the fact that he was big enough to intimidate most men, let alone women, and it was no wonder Abbie had chosen Lance over him.

Lilah was another matter entirely. There was definitely something between them, something powerful enough to stomp the breath right out of his body. Ever since that day he’d kissed her out on the back lane, he’d woken up every morning hard as a hickory fence post.

It occurred to him that as he was in no position to explore the situation, it might be a good time to move on, before he forgot why he’d come east in the first place.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.