The Proposal & Solid Soul - Brenda Jackson [4]
Before leaving Savannah she had reminded her parents that she was twenty-five and old enough to make her own decisions about what she wanted to do with her life. And as far as she was concerned, the trust fund her maternal grandparents had established for her, as well as this ranch she’d now inherited from her paternal grandfather, made living that life a lot easier. It was the first time in her life that she had anything that was truly hers.
It would be too much to ask David and Melissa Bostwick to see things that way and they’d made it perfectly clear that they didn’t. She wouldn’t be surprised if they were meeting with their attorney at this very moment to come up with a way to force her to return home to Savannah. Well, she had news for them. This was now her home and she intended to stay.
If they’d had anything to say about it she would be in Savannah and getting engaged to marry Hugh Pierce. Most women would consider Hugh, with his tall, dark and handsome looks and his old-money wealth, a prime catch. And if she really thought hard about it, then she would be one of those women who thought so. But that was the problem. She had to think real hard about it. They’d dated a number of times but there was never any connection, any spark and no real enthusiasm on her part about spending time with him. She had tried as delicately as she could to explain such a thing to her parents but that hadn’t stopped them from trying to shove Hugh down her throat every chance they got. That only proved how controlling they could be.
And speaking of controlling…her uncle Kenneth had become another problem. He was her grandfather’s fifty-year-old half brother, whom she’d met for the first time when she’d flown in for the reading of the will. He’d assumed the ranch would go to him and had been gravely disappointed that day to discover it hadn’t. He had also expected her to sell everything, and when she’d made the decision to keep the ranch, he had been furious and said his kindness to her had ended, and that he wouldn’t lift a finger to help and wanted her to find out the hard way just what a mistake she had made.
She sank into the porch swing, thinking there was no way she could have made a mistake in deciding to build a life here. She had fallen in love with the land the first time she’d seen it when she’d come for the reading of the will. And it hadn’t taken long to decide even though she’d been robbed of the opportunity to connect with her grandfather in life, she would connect with him in death by accepting the gift he’d given her. A part of her felt that although they’d never met, he had somehow known about the miserable childhood she had endured and was giving her the chance to have a way better adult life.
The extra men she had hired to work the ranch so far seemed eager to do so and appreciated the salary she was paying them which, from what she’d heard, was more than fair. She’d always heard if you wanted good people to work for you then you needed to pay them good money.
She was about to get up to go back into the house to pack up more of her grandfather’s belongings when she noticed someone on horseback approaching in the distance. She squinted her eyes, remembering this was Denver and people living on the outskirts of town, in the rural sections, often traveled by horseback, and she was grateful for the riding lessons her parents had insisted that she take. She’d always wanted to own a horse and now she had several of them.
As the rider came closer she felt a tingling sensation in the pit of her stomach when she recognized him. Jason Westmoreland. She definitely remembered him from the night of the charity ball, and one of the things she remembered the most was his warm smile. She had often wondered if he’d been as ruggedly