The Bride Wore Spurs

Kathleen Lacey O'Carroll steps off the stage in Wyoming expecting a husband. She is a mail-order bride, and the man she has come to marry, John Winterhawke, never sent for her. Her future, uncertain from the start, grows more so the moment she learns this.

Hawke is a fiercely independent man of half-Indian heritage, and he wants no wife. A high-spirited, eager Irishwoman who knows nothing about surviving on the harsh prairie is the last thing he needs, and he makes that plain. Nothing about him suggests he will make room for her in his life, let alone his heart.

Lacey is not easily turned away. Beneath his forbidding manner she senses a rough kindness and a banked hunger, and she decides to answer his dark passion with her own.

The book is a historical western romance built on a reluctant-lover dynamic, with a spirited heroine pursuing a guarded man. Lacey wants Hawke's heart, but only on her terms, and she has to prove she can last on a prairie that offers her no welcome. Whether he will let her in is the question that drives every page.