Phenomenal.
My jaw hit the floor during the prologue, which it tends to do when a man is having a bad night playing poker with a gang of comancheros, knowing he can’t cover his losses, and offers his wife to cover his debts. If ever a man deserved killing…
His widow, however, does not deserve having a gang of outlaws turned in her direction. Three days after giving birth, Laura is trying to dig a well on her Colorado homestead, haul water from a crick to keep her vegetable garden from withering, and worrying about why her baby is sick and fretful. The creepy leader of the comancheros shows up to bring news of her husband’s fatal “accident,” and decides to return with his gang to grab her, take turns with her, and then sell her in Mexico. By a stroke of fate, they can’t find her when they return and steal her baby instead.
With three cents to her name and no sense of direction, Laura manages to find Denver, begging the townspeople for help to no avail. The sheriff advises her to hire a tracker to find the baby thieves, and the best tracker is Deke Sheridan, a white man raised by the Cheyenne who happens to be in town at the end of a cattle drive. Laura has fine manners and an exemplary education from her privileged childhood in Boston, and the grungy, half-wild savage she finds in a local saloon repulses her. He’s not impressed with her either and refuses at first, but after catching her in a vulnerable moment changes his mind and asks how much she’s willing to pay. She promises a lot but has nothing in hand, so offers him ANYTHING to help her…and he’s not interested.
She had just offered herself to him. Offered herself, like so much baggage. And he was turning her down, flat. To add insult to injury, he had referred to her as a piece of ass. As though she were a thing and not a person. Not even a very tempting thing, from the sound of it. Humiliation brought tears to her eyes. To stoop that low, and then be turned down. And by the likes of him? She felt filthy—the sort of filth that might never wash away.
I was slow to warm up to Laura—she had a lot of prejudices, pretty widely held in this time and place—and she applied many of those prejudices to Deke, but she’d also survived a rough time with her toad of a husband and I admired her determination to get her baby back or die trying. She was so standoffish to Deke that I couldn’t quite fathom why he was admiring her, and I thought, “This is not going to work. This author will not be able to convince me these two fall in love with each other.”
Boy, was I wrong. Spectacularly wrong. Each moment between them on the trail moved them a little closer. Patience begat understanding. Tenderness wove a magic spell. Healing permeated the very air around them. Each answered a loneliness in the other, and the wonder of it bound them together.
It was his turn to blink. When he did, a bit of moisture slipped onto his cheek, and he made an angry swipe. “Can we back up? I’m gettin’ the feelin’ we ain’t talkin’ about the same thing here.”
“That’s because you’ve been doing all the talking and won’t let me say three little words.”
“Laura, when the day comes you can get anything said with only three words, I’ll eat my boots.”
“You don’t own any boots. But I’ll settle for watching you eat your moccasins. This is one time three words will do me. I love you, Deke.”
He swiped at his cheek again, sniffed, and then closed his eyes. Laura could see he was struggling with everything he had not to lose his control.
“Deke?”
He rubbed at his cheek again, then planted his hands on his hips. After taking a deep, bracing breath, he opened his eyes, looked at her through a suspicious shimmer of wetness, and said, “That’s four words, Boston. You lose.”
I wasn’t tempted to skim a single time. There was not a single dull moment. And never have two characters felt more destined to find a way forward together.