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Prologue

George Clayton Sr did three things before he died He made his peace with God He sold the Lucky Lady Silver Mine to a fella out of Denver named Gabe Wesson And he wrote a will

Now, it was the will that brought the si boil The way old George figured it, soot to fester before it can heal

And fester it did

Chapter One

Gabe Wesson was a desperate man

Inside the aptly nae of western types and various other townsfolk gathered at the long, For Gabe joined the counter crowd, his toddler son perched on his knee

In a few short weeks, he’d discovered that if aor spread any news in the town of Clayton, Colorado, the Cowboy Café was the place to do it Today, what he neededwas a nanny for his son, AJ Funny that he could run a corporation with dozens of e suitable child care in this tiny Rocky Mountain town

He was a gambler of sorts, a speculator Soh he always left a place better than he’d found it

He’d found Clayton to be a sleepy cootten With an abandoned railroad track slicing through town and an equally abandoned silver mine perched in the nearby hills, the toas just about dead

It was the “just about” that had brought Gabe here He had a knack for sniffing out near-dead businesses and bringing theift froroceries to the head of his own Denver corporation by the age of thirty-three

But unless he found a nanny soon, he would be forced tohe did not want to do At least not now, not when the weight of the past two years was starting to lift