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Page 376

| established our sheep station for more reason than because it was available and prime land for raising sheep. Not far from it is the hiding place of the chest. Although I had not ever wanted to see it again, for some strange reason I felt as though I should at least be near it." |

| Sasha laughed softly. "Ashton, you are a scheming man," she said, locking her arm through his as they walked farther and farther from their sheep station. She cast him a mischievous look. "Or should I call you Lawrence Proffitt?" |

| "Should I call you Spike?" Ashton teased. |

| Again Sasha laughed. "Touché," she murmured. |

| They walked on, leaving the burned fence that had once bordered their sheep station behind them, on past skeletal remains of trees, to a sandy terrain that was even now being whipped by the wind. |

| Ashton's footsteps faltered as he gazed with a furrowed brow around him. "Damn it," he grumbled, stopping to take in the terrain more closely with his eyes. Everywhere he looked, things seemed unfamiliar to him. All identifying points that he had chosen for the chest's burial spot had been changed. What the fire hadn't ravaged, the wild winds had. |

| "What is it?" Sasha asked as Ashton stepped away from her, poking his shovel here and there in the hills of sand and ash. |

| "Never in a hundred years can I find the burial spot now," Ashton said, his voice strained. "Nothing is as I remembered it. It's changed even since the time I came to check on the land for squatting." He threw the shovel down and yanked the saddlebag from his shoulder, tossing it angrily to the ground. |

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