The Rancher's Surrender

Prologue

Zoe Martin squeezed her foster sisters' hands tightly, but only because she thought Delia or Maddie might be scared of the dark.

She wasn't scared, she was scared of nothing. Nothing at all.

A cricket burst into melody, and she nearly leaped out of her skin.

Delia and Maddie scooted closer, until they were practically in one another's laps, reminding Zoe she wasn't alone. They were all the same age: the quiet withdrawn Maddie, the bossy Delia, and herself. And they were all very different. But the three of them had pledged to be sisters forever, and that was all that mattered now.

Cranking her neck back, Zoe stared at the city sky littered with fog and pollution, and forgot her six-year-old bravado. Forgot that her eyes burned from lack of sleep due to bad dreams, her cheek burned from where she'd been smacked by an older child in their group home, one of the bullies.

She forgot everything but what she and Delia and Maddie had crept out here for-their dream.

As they huddled on the damp grass, holding on to one another, she stared at the faint stars and offered up her one and only wish-that they would be kept together, forever.

One thousand miles away in Idaho, Constance Freeman hung up the phone and sighed deeply with painful regret. If her heart felt as though it were cracking open, she knew it was no one's fault but her own.

She'd let her son get away, though that wasn't what tore at her now, for he'd been mean, dishonest and selfish. A bad seed.

What she regretted with all her heart was that he'd gone without telling her the one thing she so desperately needed to know.

Where her young granddaughter had been taken. For six years, since the birth of the child, Constance had been begging her son for information. Cruelly, he'd withheld it, saying only that his ex-girlfriend, the child's mother, had vanished. And so had the child. Tracing her was difficult, for her son hadn't married the girl's mother, and Constance had no idea what the mother's name was. Heaven only knew what name was on the birth certificate.

But Constance would find her, she vowed with renewed determination. She'd search everywhere if she had to, spend every last penny she had. It would be worth it.

She'd find that child and shower her with all the love and attention Constance was so certain she wasn't getting now.

She'd leave that child her legacy, though she knew others might not see it as a legacy so much as a burden. Certainly her own son had felt that way.

But Constance's ranch, Triple M, was her one true love, and she wouldn't be happy until she knew she'd taken care of both its future, and her granddaughter's.