"When Chance Carter, general manager of a TV station, gets a telephone call that his grandmother's health is failing and that he must do something about her, he knows only that he is the only heir to a million-dollar ranch and that his grandmother may have killed his grandfather and the man who was perhaps his father. His idea of a Texas ranch comes from television, and he does not know what he will have to do to slide Rista Wyler off her land and into a nursing home.

Nor does he know that the only cowboy Rista has left is Pug Caldwell, an old man who has worked for her since he was a teenager and may want the ranch for himself. Reluctantly Chance leaves behind the world of the Florida TV station, where he is in control, and also leaves Shana, the women he loves but to whom he cannot quite commit. He finds himself more than a world away on the Texas ranch where he has no television, no phone, no contact with the outside world. And the food is monotonous and not very good.

As Chance watches for certifiable signs of senility in Rista and plans what he'll say to a judge, she puts him to work mending fence and doctoring calves with Pug. In chapters that alternate between the past and the present, Rista reveals the tangled story of her life. Gradually she introduces Chance to people and events that his mother had distorted in the telling. He finds out why Rista still searches the ranch for the undiscovered grave of her aunt, killed by Indians; he comes to know his grandfather, Odis, and even his great-grandfather, Claris, men of different temperament and different loyalties.

And he learns about Stoddard, the newspaperman Rista loved but could not marry. He even learns some bitter truths about his mother, Cassie, and her hatred for the ranch."--BOOK JACKET.