The sky was just beginning to lighten and there were birds singing when Kate Tucker got up at four-thirty on a May morning, as she did every day. A tall, leggy blonde, she unwound herself from the sheets, and went to get a cup of coffee. Her days were long and started early, working on her father’s ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley. They had moved there from Texas thirty-eight years before, when she was four years old. Her mother had died the year before, a few months after her youngest sister, Caroline, was born. Her father was a ranch hand. He had decided to come to California with his meager savings, his truck, and his three little girls, Kate, Gemma, who was a year younger than Kate, and Caroline, who was one.
Jimmy Tucker, JT, had heard about the Santa Ynez Valley, and it sounded like heaven to him. He had gotten a job on a modest but respected ranch, and had brought his experience and skill from Texas. He was only twenty-six years old then, and quickly proved his worth to the ranch owner who had given him a chance, and a cabin for him and his three little girls to live in. The foreman’s wife ran her own daycare in town, and had given Jimmy a “family discount” for his girls. And her teenage daughters sometimes babysat for him when he had to work at night.
It had been rugged at first trying to make ends meet. There was never any money for anything extra. He got their clothes in the hand-me-down basket at their church, and some of the other ranch hands’ wives gave him whatever their children had outgrown. He managed to feed and house his daughters, and worked hard at his job. He saved every penny he could, thinking of the future. Jimmy Tucker was a man with dreams, and the rancher he worked for thought he would go far. He had a fire in his belly like few men his boss had known.
Kate didn’t remember the hard times in the beginning, and neither did her sisters. When the foreman retired four years after they’d arrived, JT was made foreman, at thirty, and ran the ranch. And when the owner died ten years later, he left a decent sized piece of land to Jimmy, which he had added to over the years. Now, at sixty-four, Jimmy owned ten thousand acres, and the most successful ranch in the Valley. They raised cattle, bred horses, and had a small dairy. And at forty-two, Kate helped him run it. She had grown up on a horse and in her father’s shadow.
Jimmy couldn’t imagine living anywhere else in the world, nor could Kate. She had everything she wanted right here, a beautiful place, a job she loved, and she liked working with her father, though he wasn’t easy. He was larger than life, and had a powerful personality. He valued what she did for him, but rarely said so. He was a man of few words, but he knew how to run a ranch better than anyone in the county, and had taught her everything she knew. They had thirty-five employees on the ranch, who respected her just as they did JT.
Pleasing him was all-important to her, but earning his praise wasn’t easy. He rarely acknowledged how hard she worked. She was an important part of his operation, and she knew it. She was a born country girl, unlike both her younger sisters, who had fled, Gemma at eighteen to L.A., and Caroline for college.
Caroline was a beautiful blonde, smaller than her two older sisters. She was thirty-nine, three years younger than Kate, married, and had two children. Neither Kate nor Gemma was married. Caroline had gone to UC Berkeley to get a teaching degree, and stayed on to get a master’s in English literature. She’d started writing young adult books in grad school to make ends meet, while working as a teacher and a waitress. She made a respectable living now with her books.
It was the life Caroline had longed for growing up and her father and sisters had never understood. She had an unquenchable thirst for books, knowledge, and culture, none of which was available in the Valley, or not to the degree she wanted. She read everything she could lay hands on, while Kate had a natural instinct for horses and learned everything she could about the ranch. All Gemma wanted was to leave and