The Untamed Heart. Kit Gardner

      What little money Richard Thorne hadn’t invested in his quest for the big strike was now gone. Any sane person would pack up and move on to a town where enterprise flourished and money was being made hand over fist. A town like Deadwood Run. Her pa hadn’t, no matter the temptations or the trials. Then neither would she, no matter how desperate she became.

      Six months ago she’d been desperate enough to pin all her hopes on a handsome East Coast businessman passing through. He’d promised to return to Prosperity Gulch and make her his wife. Six months later she’d realized his promise had been made after he’d taken her to that grassy knoll beside the river and laid her on the blanket he’d stowed in his shiny black buggy with the red-spoked wheels. The sun had been warm that October day, heating her skin when the tears of shame had spilled to her cheeks and splashed to her bosom. She’d been a fool to believe Brant Masters would keep his promise and come back for her, even the part about him staying on at the farm once he’d returned East to tidy up some business. She might not have believed him if Mama had still been with them.

      Harkness slowly shook his head. “If any of those miners or cowboys even breathe wrong around you, by God, I’ll—”

      What was left of his promise was driven from him when Willie threw her arms around his neck and nearly toppled him from his bar stool with her vehemence. Harkness’s huge hands caught her around the waist to keep his balance.

      “Nothing’s going to happen,” she promised, pressing a smacking kiss on Harkness’s cheek. “I know you don’t like trouble in your place. Not one glass will be broken.”

      “That’s what your pa used to say when he’d bring your brothers in on Saturday nights and break damn near every glass. Hell, Willie, he’d have skinned me alive years ago if he knew one day I’d let his only daughter serve whiskey in my saloon.”

      Willie reached for her glass. “I took care of four wild brothers for over nine years by myself. I know how to handle whiskey and men.” Not all men, a voice in her head whispered as she drained the whiskey. “Besides, I always have this.” Bending, she slid the pleated hem of her dress up past her silkstockinged knee and a frilly white lace garter. Tucked into the garter was a short-barreled Colt Peacemaker.

      She grinned up at Harkness, expecting his nod of approval. After all, the man had taught her how to drink whiskey and shoot like a man to defend herself while her father and brothers were away at the mines all day and night But his look was far from approving. His usual soft brown eyes were hard, fixed on the gun strapped to her thigh, and his squared jaw flexed with a rhythmic tick that typically boded trouble.

      Willie’s brows quivered. “You don’t think I can get to it fast enough, is that it? Well, I can. These stockings are made of silk and they’re very slippery. See, they come up clear to here—” She turned sideways, lifting her hem past the point where the stockings rode high around her thigh. “Damned uncomfortable things—”

      She glanced up when Harkness’s chair scraped against the wooden floor. With long, lumbering strides he moved down the length of the bar toward the back room.

      “Where are you going?” she shouted at him, planting her hands on her waist. In reply she received a grunt Shrugging, she turned to finish polishing glasses. Some men just couldn’t abide an enterprising woman. Funny, but she’d never thought J. D. Harkness to be one of them.

      * * *

       The frontiersmen are freeing America from stifling European models and laying the groundwork for a flourishing democracy destined to climax in national greatness.

      Sloan had penned those words in his leather-bound journal somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic aboard the steamer he’d boarded in Bristol. The words had flowed effortlessly from his pen, his theory fired by the tales told of the triumph and majesty of the great American West, and his thirst to discover and record it all on paper.

      It seemed his theory had soared a bit high in the cushy and comfortable trappings of first-class stateroom accommodations, thousands of miles away. High, maybe, but he refused to believe it unrealistic. No matter that his pocket had been picked in New York and again in Omaha, both times by young boys who looked as if they hadn’t seen a bath or a meal in weeks. No matter that he’d had to throw a man from a train to save himself from the same fate.

      Triumph and majesty, innocence and spectacle. Not tragedy, wretchedness, guile. Pocketing his journal and drawing off his spectacles, Sloan stepped down from the wagon and squinted against the late-afternoon sun blasting from out of the snowcapped mountains, straight down Prosperity Gulch’s single dirt street. On either side of the street, weather-beaten storefronts huddled together, looking as if their builders had slapped them up haphazardly in anticipation of disassembling them just as quickly. Only a handful of pedestrians lingered on the street A livery stable marked the edge of town not fifty yards to the east. Beyond that the street seemed to run off into an endless sea of yellow grass.

      At the farthest point west, a small building crouched. Three men on tipped-back chairs with boots braced on the hitching post loitered beneath a sign that read Jail. One dozed with his chin on his chest. The other two watched Sloan. Gun belts rode at their hips. Sunlight glinted off the star pinned to the burly man’s vest.

      “This is it, mister.” The toothless wagon driver extended a thumbless palm at Sloan and squinted up at him from beneath the dusty brim of his hat. The man looked and smelled as if his body played host to an appalling number of lice and fleas. At regular thirty-second intervals he let fly from his lips a stream of brown spittle that Sloan assumed was the remnants of whatever he jawed with lazy circular chews. Grimy fingers snapped closed over the coin Sloan pressed into his hand.

      “Cain’t yet figure why you English folk come all the way out here ‘cept to hawk the railroad or shoot buffalo. Course, there’s no more sport or danger or skill in shootin’ a buffalo than in shootin’ an ox. Ain’t no tellin’ the English folk that. They come fer the sport. But there ain’t no buffalo no more in Prosperity Gulch, mister. Or men, neither. They’s all been kilt.”

      “Where can I find accommodations?” Sloan asked.

      The driver deepened his squint “Nobody comes and stays in Prosperity Gulch ‘cept the folks who’s fool enough to live here. You sure you ain’t lost, mister?”

      “A hotel would suffice.”

      The driver scratched his head, glanced off down the street then gave a toothless smile. “Anythin’ a man be wantin’ he can git in a saloon. Try the Silver Spur. Couple paces up the street. Maybe you’ll find a bed that don’t squeak an’ a saloon gal who don’t mind bein’ rode hard. Most don’t mind atall, ‘specially by a fine-lookin’ mister like yerself.”

      Both men turned at the sudden rumble of horses’ hooves, preceded by a wall of dust billowing down the street. Hoots and howls accompanied the revelry as a dozen or more men reined their mounts in just twenty paces up the street Dismounting, several fired their guns skyward, startling the horses. Others lifted bottles to their lips, tipping their heads back to drain what remained of their brew. In a dust-choked, animalistic surge, they entered the double doors of one building.

      “Cowboys is here,” the driver said, wiry brows arching when yelps and yowls suddenly erupted from the establishment. He spat into the dust. “Gertie must be workin’ tonight. That’s one helluva fine lookin’ woman. More than enough there ta keep a man warm at night. I first saw her at the Silver Spur after she lost her husband when the mine blew. She’s right particular, though.” The driver shook his head, as though amply impressed. “It ain’t every night she takes a man up to her room.” Slitted eyes flickered up and down over Sloan’s travel-weary attire, settling on the stickpin at his throat “You just might be the lucky one tonight, mister, in a room fulla hard-ridin’ cowboys.”

      Something about the odd glitter in the man’s eye stirred a faint wariness in Sloan. Tenderfoots provided great sport for frontiersmen. Sloan had to wonder how often strangers wandered down the sun-bitten streets of Prosperity Gulch.

      Retrieving his valise