Praise for Dixie Browning:
“There is no one writing romance today who touches the heart and tickles the ribs like Dixie Browning. The people in her books are as warm and real as a sunbeam and just as lovely.”
—New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts
“Dixie Browning has given the romance industry years of love and laughter in her wonderful books.”
—New York Times bestselling author Linda Howard
“Each of Dixie’s books is a keeper guaranteed to warm the heart and delight the senses.”
—New York Times bestselling author Jayne Ann Krentz
“A true pioneer in romantic fiction, the delightful Dixie Browning is a reader’s most precious treasure, a constant source of outstanding entertainment.”
—Romantic Times
“Dixie’s books never disappoint—they always lift your spirit!”
—USA TODAY bestselling author Mary Lynn Baxter
BECKETT’S FORTUNE
Where the price of family and honor is love…
Don’t miss the continuation of this exciting new series from Silhouette Desire and Harlequin Historicals:
BECKETT’S BIRTHRIGHT
HARLEQUIN HISTORICALS 11/02
BECKETT’S CONVENIENT BRIDE
SILHOUETTE DESIRE 1/03
Dear Reader,
Dog days of summer got you down? Chill out and relax with six brand-new love stories from Silhouette Desire!
August’s MAN OF THE MONTH is the first book in the exciting family-based saga BECKETT’S FORTUNE by Dixie Browning. Beckett’s Cinderella features a hero honor-bound to repay a generations-old debt and a poor-but-proud heroine leery of love and money she can’t believe is offered unconditionally. His E-Mail Order Wife by Kristi Gold, in which matchmaking relatives use the Internet to find a high-powered exec a bride, is the latest title in the powerful DYNASTIES: THE CONNELLYS series.
A daughter seeking revenge discovers love instead in Falling for the Enemy by Shawna Delacorte. Then, in Millionaire Cop & Mom-To-Be by Charlotte Hughes, a jilted, pregnant bride is rescued by her childhood sweetheart.
Passion flares between a family-minded rancher and a marriage-shy divorcée in Kathie DeNosky’s Cowboy Boss. And a pretend marriage leads to undeniable passion in Desperado Dad by Linda Conrad.
So find some shade, grab a cold one…and read all six passionate, powerful and provocative new love stories from Silhouette Desire this month.
Enjoy!
Joan Marlow Golan
Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire
Beckett’s Cinderella
Dixie Browning
DIXIE BROWNING
is an award-winning painter and writer, mother and grandmother. Her father was a big-league baseball player, her grandfather a sea captain. In addition to her nearly eighty contemporary romances, Dixie and her sister, Mary Williams, have written more than a dozen historical romances under the name Bronwyn Williams. Contact Dixie at www.dixiebrowning.com, or at P.O. Box 1389, Buxton, NC 27920.
To the wonderful and caring staff
at Britthaven Nursing Home in Kitty Hawk, N.C.
You’re the best!
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
One
Just before his descent into Norfolk International Airport, Lancelot Beckett opened his briefcase, took out a thin sheaf of paper and scanned a genealogical chart. In the beginning, all they’d had to go on was a name, an approximate birthplace and a rough time line. Now, after God knows how many generations, the job was finally going to get done.
“What the hell do I know about tracking down the descendents of an Oklahoma cowboy born roughly a hundred and fifty years ago?” he’d demanded the last time he’d stopped by his cousin Carson’s restored shotgun-style house outside Charleston. “When it comes to tracking down pirates, I’m your man, but cowboys? Come on, Car, give me a break.”
“Hey, if you can’t handle it, I’ll take over once I’m out of this.” Carson, a police detective, was pretty well immobilized for the time being in a fiberglass cast. Now and then, even the Beckett luck ran out. About two months earlier, his had. “Looks like something you can do on your way home anyhow, so it’s not like you’d have to detour too far off the beaten track.”
“You know where I was when Mom tracked me down? I was in Dublin, for crying out loud,” Beckett had explained. They were both Becketts, but Lancelot had laid down the law regarding his name when he was eleven. Since then, he’d been called by his last name. Occasionally, tongue-in-cheek, he was referred to as “The Beckett.”
“I had to cancel a couple of appointments in London, not to mention a date. Besides, I’m not headed home anytime soon.”
What was the point? Officially, home was a two-room office with second-floor living quarters in Wilmington, Delaware. It served well enough as a mailing address and a place to put his feet up for a few days when he happened to be back in the States.
As it turned out, the place where the Chandler woman was thought to be hiding out was roughly halfway between Wilmington and his parents’ home in Charleston.
Hiding out was probably the wrong term; relocated might be closer. Whatever her reasons for being in North Carolina instead of Texas, she’d been hard as the devil to track down. It had taken the combined efforts of Carson’s police computers, a few unofficial sources and a certified genealogist to locate the woman.
And with all that, it had been a random sighting—something totally off-the-wall—that had finally pinned her down. Grant’s Produce and Free Ice Water, located on a peninsula between the North River and the Currituck Sound, somewhere near a place named Bertha, North Carolina. Hell, they didn’t even have a street address for her, just a sign along the highway.
Beckett tried to deal with his impatience. He was used to being on the move while his partner stayed in the office handling the paperwork, but this particular job had to do with family matters. It couldn’t be delegated. The buck had been passed as far as it would go.
He’d allowed himself a couple of hours after leaving the airport to find the place and another half hour to wind things up. After that, he could go back to Charleston and tell PawPaw the deed was done. Any debt his family owed one Eliza Chandler Edwards, direct descendant of old Elias Matthew Chandler of Crow Fly, in what had then been Oklahoma Territory, was finally settled.
The genealogist had done a great job in record time, running into a snag only at the point where Miss Chandler had married one James G. Edwards, born July 1, 1962, died September 7, 2001. It had been police research—in particular, the Financial Crimes Unit—that