Chapter 1

Will Rance sat on the porch of his sprawling ranch house and lifted the bottle of Fighting Cock whiskey to his lips, draining a third of it with the ease of long practice. People who saw Will now, in his emaciated and drunken state, wouldn't have recognized him as the fat and affable eighteen year old that won the largest lottery jackpot ever, just five years previous. On his eighteenth birthday Will had, for the first time ever, gambled, purchasing two lottery tickets. One for the Powerball, and the other for the mega millions jackpot.

The following Monday Will had checked his tickets, and found he was the sole winner of a combined pretax total of six hundred and four million dollars. Within days his downward spiral had begun, and it wasn't due to self indulgence. Will had found that the large percentage of highly religious people in both his family and among his friends had wanted nothing to do with 'sin money', nor the devil's servant who had it. Those who hadn't seen gambling as a sin, and those were few, had sided with their friends and family against Will, or so it seemed to him.

Will snorted in disgust and old pain as he thought of all his friends that had treated him as a pariah. Taking a smaller slug of whiskey Will's mind drifted to those few people who had still talked to him. Those few had all had one thing in common; investment ideas. Will's lips twisted in a bitter smile as he recalled the outrage when he'd started calling the BBB on most of them to check them out, at his financial advisor's urging. It had turned out that most of the so called investments were scams, and Will had either shut down or run off close to a dozen 'business men' in the town of Abingdon.

A few however were legitimate, and those Will had enough sense to jump on. One was buying up land and the mineral rights that went with it. Will had put a sizable chunk into opening Reclaimed Inc. and loved the idea of planting a native forest on his native land. With the proceeds from various low risk investments flowing into the company Will had founded, Reclaimed was the proud owner of nearly half of southwestern Virginia's 'new growth', as the newspaper had dubbed it. Specializing in fruit and hardwoods, Reclaimed Inc. worked to restore the old growth that was so often being cut down by lumber companies.

Will wondered what his family would say if they knew he was the sole owner of most of the forest they were so sure was God rewarding them by allowing them to live in amidst it. Will shook his head and sat down the now empty bottle of whiskey, picking up a beer to drink instead.

With the help of his financial manager Will had also started Southern Rainbow Searching. A company that found and bought the land, and developed safe ways to extract the various gems found in the southern part of America. Will had placed retired geological professor George Brent in charge, and let him do his thing.

At the first meeting after a year with Brandy Miller, Will's financial wizard, he was amazed to find that old George had managed to obtain several plots of land, and open several family dig sites. Sites where, for ten dollars a person, you were given hand tools, buckets, and a place to dig for buried treasure. Southern Rainbow sorted and cleaned the gems, and took a thirty or forty percent cut, depending on if you wanted raw stones or polished ones. The best thing in Brandy's mind was that people were paying to do the often back breaking labor.

After having set up those, and other investments, Will found himself the new owner of an eighty acre plot of thick timber not fifty miles from his birthplace, with a half acre cleared and a large brick ranch house set smack in the middle. Will was filthy rich, utterly alone, and quickly found himself having to pay extravagant fees for the few whores who could bother to provide company for him. Will often didn't want sex, just someone to talk to about something other than money. Even that had dried up lately, and Will had fallen deeper into both the depression and the bottle. Will was smart enough to know it, but so far hadn't found a reason to really care.

Will's mental wandering, not to mention his third beer, was interrupted by a limo pulling up the driveway and stopping just in front of the porch where he was sitting. Will stood and took several unsteady steps, grabbing the porch post and railing to keep himself upright, but his voice was clear when he snarled. "Go the fuck away, and leave me in peace. I'm not bothering nobody." Turning, Will lurched back to his Adirondack chair and collapsed back into it. The warm wood feeling good on his bare back. He was brought out of that drunken thought when the limo not only didn't leave, but a tall statuesque blonde woman got out, and headed onto the porch where Will was drinking.

She gave Will plenty of chances to look as she slowly swayed her way up the three steps onto the porch and walked slowly over to him. She was easily six feet tall without the three inch black stilettos. Will could see what seemed to be miles of tan legs that disappeared under a short blue skirt, and he discovered as he raised his eyes that the only upper part she was wearing was the blazer. Will's eyes bugged out as he saw flashes of pierced nipples with every step the woman took. Will forced his drunken gaze upward before he shot his load in his pants, and found that he was staring into a pair of hard green eyes set into a beautiful, but fiercely disgusted and scowling face. That face did more to sober Will up than anything else that day.

"What you after lady? I'm not buying, renting, or playing with a pro anymore." Will never saw the slap coming. Before he could even register the sound, he found himself turned halfway around, as both he and his favorite chair hit the porch with a clatter. The hard arm of his chair dug into Will's alcohol bloated stomach and caused him to vomit explosively. Will forced himself to ignore both the snapping of the woman's fingers, and her heavily accented orders to someone else that he could hear running up onto his porch as he fought to contain his temper.