High Country Hero. Lynna Banning

      She wasn’t “plain.” She was…well, tall. With a high forehead, a nose she’d always wished were a bit shorter, and a mass of hair the color of a muddy horse trough. “But my eyes are nice,” she said aloud.

      Anyway, what difference did it make what she looked like? She was a good doctor. A very good doctor.

      “I have studied for years!” she announced to the empty street.

      A horse tied up in front of the hotel lifted its head and gazed at her with one large dark eye. “Well, I did,” she reiterated. The horse lowered its muzzle into the feed bag lashed to the rail.

      Sage moved on across the road, settled herself in one of the rocking chairs in front of the mercantile and snapped open the newspaper again.

      Well. Well! “Oh, for pity’s sake!”

      Women should be wives and mothers…steadfast at the cradle, happy at the hearth.

      “Cooks and nursemaids, is that it, Mr. Stryker? Laundresses and seamstresses and teachers, but not physicians?”

       Why not?

      She rocked furiously back and forth, then jumped to her feet, crumpled the sheets of newsprint into a ball and retraced her steps to the newspaper office as fast as she could. Before she cleared the doorway, words were tumbling past her lips.

      “I thought you were my friend, Mr. Stryker! I thought you—”

      Friedrich Stryker leaped from his desk chair and backed away.

      “—liked me! Believed in me!”

      The man looked stricken. “Well, I do, Miss Sage. I do.”

      “But you don’t think I should be a doctor, is that it?”

      “Yes, ahem. Exactly my thoughts. You’re a woman—”

      She gave him no time to finish. “So what if I am female? I want to be a physician, not a nurse. I’ve wanted to be a physician ever since I was ten years old and my baby brother died. A nurse could not have saved him. A doctor would have known what to do.”

      “Well, now, Miss Sage, that is partly—”

      She pinned him with her oh-yes-I-can look. “You’re just like my professors at medical school. ‘Take up nursing,’ they advised. ‘Get married. Bear children.’”

      “Miss Sage, don’t you aim to get married at all?”

      “No, I do not,” she snapped. “First of all, nobody has asked to marry me. And even if someone does, I’ll turn him down. A doctor, especially a woman doctor, scarcely has time for her own needs, let alone those of a family.”

      “Well now, that’s just my point.” His voice was steadier now.

      Sage warmed to her subject. “There are women doctors all over this country—in Massachusetts and Indiana and Missouri and even Idaho. Just who do you think you are, telling us what we can and cannot do?”

      The editor put a trembling hand to his face. “I—I’m a journalist, Miss, uh, Dr. West.”

      “Why on earth would you write such claptrap?” she demanded. And after all those lemon drops…

      A guilty look crossed Mr. Stryker’s face. “Newspapers have been selling pretty good lately,” he said in a tight voice. “That’s why.”

      “Then this town is more backward than I thought.” She heaved the balled-up newspaper across the counter at him, gathered up her peach-sprigged muslin skirt in both hands and exited with as much decorum as she could manage.

      The door did not close properly. She reversed direction, reopened it and this time made sure it shut with a satisfying slam.

      Outside, she clenched her fists at her sides and began to count. By the time she reached sixty she had stopped shaking and regained power of speech. She walked on past the mercantile and Essie Ramsey’s millinery shop, her shoes hitting the boardwalk so hard her feet tingled. The purple-feathered hat beckoned. She rather fancied it. Was it too ostentatious for a country doctor?

      A woman country doctor? She was the first female physician in the entire county. She had been the only woman enrolled at Western Reserve, and she had graduated at the top of her class. At this moment she felt she could do anything.

      She marched into the millinery shop.

      Ten minutes later she emerged with the purple-feathered hat securely pinned to her dark hair. It was a badge of sorts, she acknowledged. She was a doctor who could handle scalpels and forceps, and she was a female, and females wore bonnets! She would wear it each and every single day, with pride.

      When she reached the end of the boardwalk, she continued along the well-worn path that led down to the river, her muslin skirt brushing the black-eyed Susans bordering the road. Four houses down, she turned onto Maple Falls Lane and headed for the trim white house that served as combination professional office and residence.

      A saddled gray horse stood outside the picket fence, nibbling her Belle of Portugal roses.

      “Stop that!” she admonished. “Move along now. Shoo!”

      The horse, the same one that had eyed her outside the hotel, lifted its head, whickered and went back to the pale pink blooms. Sage stepped up and slapped her reticule against its rump. “Shoo!”

      “No use, ma’am,” a voice called. “Sugar never moves once I drop the reins.”

      Sage looked up to see a pair of dusty black leather boots propped on her front porch railing. From behind the boots the voice came again. “Been waiting for you.”

      “Oh? Do we know each other, Mr.—?”

      “We don’t.”

      She leaned to one side, trying to see past the boots. All she could make out was a tanned, angular face and longish dark hair. “Who are you?”

      “Name’s not going to mean anything to you, ma’am.”

      “It might. My uncle’s the marshal. I read all the Wanted posters.”

      Sage caught a flicker of something in his eyes, but it was gone in an instant.

      “Name’s Lawson.”

      She inclined her head. “Mr. Lawson.” She pushed the gate open and stepped inside. “What do you want? Besides my roses, that is.” She gestured toward the mare.

      “Sign on the fence says Dr. West lives here. That your father?”

      “No. My father is the mayor. He lives three miles outside of town. I am Dr. West.”

      Her announcement was met with silence.

      The man stood up and descended the four steps to her level. He was tall, a good head taller than she was. Lean and oddly graceful. He moved with a disconcerting sureness, and his boots made absolutely no sound. A prickle went up her backbone.

      “Dr. West?” His voice had a determined edge to it. He extended his hand.

      “Y-yes,” she acknowledged. She waited for more, but he said nothing, just gripped her fingers and held them, waiting. A flame licked where his skin touched hers.

      “Mr. Lawson, was there something you wanted?”

      He released her hand. “There is, yes. I rode three days to get here.”

      “Well, you are here now. What is it that you came for?”

      “You.”

      Sage stared at the man, noting the hip-hugging faded blue jeans, the travel-stained tan shirt, the red bandanna looped inside the open neck.

      “Me?” She tried to keep the alarm from her voice. “Why?”

      “You’re