The Contract at Blackwood Ranch

Josie Calder has spent four years holding her family's ranch together with baling wire and stubbornness. Now the bank wants its money, the creek's been diverted upstream, and the man who owns the water is standing at her gate in a Range Rover that costs more than her herd. Whit Blackwood bought twelve thousand acres to disappear. He didn't count on the woman next door, her failing ranch, or the clause in his grandfather's trust that requires a wife by his seventieth birthday. He offers Josie a deal: eighteen months, her land free and clear, and his lawyers on her water rights. She marries him in the county courthouse in her father's old boots. He learns to muck a stall. The developer offers her two million to call it fraud — and Josie tears the paper up in front of the clerk. Eighteen months was never going to be enough.