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Sager has a score to settle and when neighbor Jack Douglas sends him out to fetch the man’s daughter, Rachel, from the wagon train she’s coming out with, Sager sees his opportunity. Rachel’s been promised to his half brother, Logan Taggert, as a bride to settle the hard feelings between the two families caused from someone’s rustling. His father is counting on the wedding and if his father’s counting on it, then Sager’s going to destroy that hope, just like his father destroyed his Shoshone mother.
Rachel Douglas has to get to her father. Life with her uncle and aunt in Virginia has been one long misery. She hasn’t seen her father since she was too young to remember, but living with him has got to be better than living under her uncle’s dominance. And hasn’t he called her to join him. When she finds out her father has actually sent the cold, hard-as-steel gunslinger known as Sager to bring her home, she bites back her fear of the man and follows him.
Sager believes he can seduce the guileless Rachel into his bed, saving him from having to use other means. But as he learns more about her past, more about her innate courage and aching vulnerability, something like a conscious stirs inside of him. What he doesn’t expect is to lose his heart to such an innocent female.
Rachel fights against the strange and new feelings that Sager awakens in her. She’s had so much disappointment and misery in her young life she can’t take much more. Learning her father only wants to use her as a chit in a range war adds to her burden. But for Sager’s presence, she’d sink into despair. Yet, can it be that he’s used her too?
Elaine Levine makes a sterling debut with a novel filled with wonderfully complex characters set in the hard-scrabble western frontier where the line between right and wrong doesn’t run so straight or clear. Sager is almost an anti-hero—hard, vengeful and filled with a deep-seated hatred. Yet, he saves a child from a wolf, tenderly ministers to Rachel’s wounds and shields her from the censure of others. His slow ascent into finding his conscience and his heart has the reader rooting for him. And the sensuality that electrifies Rachel and Sager’s relationship is wonderfully described. Not since Elizabeth Lowell’s Only His have I read such an intense love scene set in a pool of water. Looking forward to Ms. Levine’s next western historical romance.
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