Charlie could lose her ranch with a Cattle Baron breathing down her neck. She vows to fight back and finally secures the help of the very gunslinger hired to drive her off.
A gun slung low on his hip, Mitch Fallon returns to Montana after the murder of his beloved Celia by white men who hated her Sioux heritage. He’ll work for anyone who’ll pay him, and he’s hired to help greedy land baron Colonel Dunkirk drive out all the small ranchers and grab the land for his own. Dunkirk doesn’t care who gets hurt and Mitch doesn’t either. He becomes the enemy of Charlie Houston, the beautiful owner of the Double H Ranch. She will fight to keep her land and the ranch her father loved, even if it means battling the brutal men hired by the colonel.
Mitch is drawn to the woman who dances by lamplight in her cabin and sings to calm the milling cattle on roundup. The words to her song bring tears to the tough man’s eyes.
“And high on the hill where the wild wind blows, she sits her strawberry roan. And cries to the wolf in the moon’s white glow, her heart turned hard as stone.”
When Charlie’s foreman is murdered, she believes Fallon to be his killer. This man who makes her heart beat fast and sets fire to her desires rides for the enemy and she must stay away from him at all cost. Even as she accuses him of these things, he knows one thing for sure. He cannot allow men like Dunkirk to hurt her.
Late each night he rides out to keep an eye on her. Filled with a desire she doesn’t understand, she awakens to flee across the prairie, clothed only in a thin white gown. Mitch watches, a passion long forgotten igniting in the coldness of his heaorn between his need to hunt down the men responsible for his wife’s death and to protect Charlie, he rides a narrow line that puts himself in danger. To do that he must remain a hired gunslinger.
Charlie’s nightmares, longings and loneliness draw her to this man. No matter what hegood sense tells her, she can’t resist him. But he belongs on the other side, and there is the ranch to save. Their coming together is inevitable. Will Mitch change sides to help her? And will she ever believe he is not her enemy?
The finale of the Montana series.
The battle begins and nearly gets them killed. Can Charlie manage to hold on to the land and the man she loves?
Velda Brotherton 