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Well, he wouldn’t rise to the bait. He wanted the truth and he had the feeling it was worse than it seemed, more than one man scamming another out of a lot of money.
“Explain, then,” he said gruffly.
Alyssa touched the tip of her tongue to her lips.
“Everything you’ve heard is true. My father offered this ranch to your grandfather, and your grandfather agreed to buy it. But—”
“But?”
“But,” she said, her voice suddenly low, “your grandfather—your grandfather wanted to purchase something more. And my father agreed to sell it to him.”
She fell silent as thunder roared over the house. The scent of ozone, of anticipation, hung in the air. A streak of jagged light sizzled just outside the window; thunder clapped overhead. It lent an air of melodrama to the scene.
And yet, Lucas thought, this was no melodrama. Whatever was playing out here was real.
Once, kayaking down a wild river, his craft had been poised at the lip of a class four rapid for what had seemed an eternity, enough time for him to look down into a whirlpool he knew had claimed many lives.
His heart had missed a beat as he hung above it, caught somewhere between exhilaration and terror.
That was how he felt now, looking at Alyssa McDonough, waiting for her to finish telling him what he had come all this distance to learn.
“And?” he said softly. “What’s the ‘something more’ your father agreed to sell to my grandfather?”
An eternity seemed to pass. Then Alyssa shuddered and raised her eyes to his.
“Me.”
CHAPTER FIVE
THE look of horror on Lucas Reyes’s handsome face was exactly what Alyssa had expected.
She recalled feeling just as horrified when Thaddeus first told her about what he kept calling the “stipulation.”
“It’s a joke,” she’d insisted. “It’s not legally binding. A clause like that is absolute nonsense.”
“It isn’t that simple,” Thaddeus had said carefully. Marriage contracts, he explained, could be legal and binding. They were still in use in parts of the world, especially in royal families.
Alyssa had snorted with derision.
“I have news for you. We don’t sell human beings in America.”
“No one is selling a human being. I keep telling you, it’s—”
“A marriage contract. It’s still illegal. Tell Prince Felix I said so. And if he argues, tell him where he can shove that stipulation!”
“Read the contract before you make a decision, will you? It calls for the Reyes to restore the land and use it, in perpetuity, for ranching. Otherwise, the bank will seize it and you know what that means.”
She knew, all right. A local developer was panting for all these rolling acres, eager to turn them into soulless tracts of cheap housing.
It was a sobering realization. Losing her mother’s land was bad enough. Losing it to a developer was worse but being married off to a stranger…
“How could you have drawn up such a document?” she’d demanded.
Thaddeus admitted that he hadn’t. Prince Felix’s attorneys had done virtually all the legal work. He had done nothing but, in his words, crossed a few t’s and dotted a couple of i’s.
She was still groaning over that when he’d dropped the next bit of news.
Felix’s grandson, the prince who would permit his grandfather to buy him a bride, was on his way to finalize arrangements.
