Property of the Renegades

Cora Bethune drives four hours out of Dust Creek to a beige hospital break room to tell her sister that the will is being read tomorrow. Tessa still keeps a blue Jolly Rancher in her pocket for the kids, because they help with the nausea. Tessa also has lupus, an empty refrigerator and treatments she is paying for herself, and she has no intention of going back to the ranch. *Bo Travers has been circling that land like a buzzard for three years.* They go anyway. The gates are chained with a padlock that is not theirs, there are motorcycles against the porch rail, and a man is sitting in her grandmother's rocking chair with his boot heels hooked over the railing. Cora gets out with a steel pipe wrapped in electrical tape and is told, flatly, that her uncle owed money. *Twenty-three thousand dollars. Plus interest. He put the deed up as collateral.* Vance Hollister has the paperwork. *Lien. Filed with the county. Your uncle signed it eighteen months ago.* He also has a bad leg, a scar along his jaw, and no intention of leaving. He moves into the shed by the fence line, because the lien gives him the right to protect his collateral, and because a woman alone on a ranch with a sick sister is about to be picked apart by people with more money than she has. What Cora does not know yet is what Vance is carrying. He walked out of the Hellions three years ago with a bullet in his leg and a promise about what would happen if he came back. A federal agent named Dorn has been working him for six months and does not believe he is finished with the club. What neither of them knows is where the deed went. The fireproof safe in the back of her grandfather's closet was empty when she came home for the funeral, and everyone who wants this land - the developer with the hunting resort plans, the cousin with the bolo tie and the reassuring smile, the men her uncle borrowed from - is already circling. The thing under the dirt turns out to be worth more than the dirt. A closed-door biker romance set in a drought-bitten Texas town, about water rights, a debt that predates the heroine, and two people who keep choosing to stand on the same side of a gate.