PROLOGUE
“Her.”
The white-haired man in the black suit pointed from his carriage to the beautiful young redhead who’d just emerged from the mercantile.
The burly man standing beside the carriage frowned. “That’s a problem, Mr. Pew. That’s Maggie Dunne.”
Pew scowled at his henchman. “And soon she’ll be Maggie Pew. Go get her.”
“With all due respect, sir, she’s more trouble than she’s worth.”
The old man’s eyes stared greedily at the young woman’s flaming red hair and shapely form. “She looks like she’s worth an awful lot of trouble to me.”
“Her daddy wore the blue.”
“What? The traitorous scum.”
“If you pick her, sir, you’re gonna have the bluebellies after you.”
Isaac Pew growled with frustration. “All right, all right.”
Then the shop door opened, and a smiling brunette emerged and joined the redhead. She wasn’t as beautiful or bosomy asthe Dunne girl, but she was still a lovely young thing and looked healthy and full of life and laughter.
Ensconced grimly within the gloom of his black carriage, Isaac Pew pointed a crooked finger at the new girl’s smiling face. “That one, then.”
CHAPTER 1
Will Bentley was a tall, narrow-hipped man with powerful shoulders and big hands. The twenty-four-year-old’s square-jawed face was rugged, like a thing hewn of granite, not so much handsome as strong.
He radiated confidence as he turned the heavy rock in his hands, nipping at it with the hammer, shaping it to his will.
“You’re from Texas?” Bobby asked, sounding impressed from a few feet away.
Will nodded and dropped his hammer and placed the stone and stepped back to study the wall he was building. It looked good.
All he had to do was cap it. Then he could help the other stonemasons finish their work, and it would be on to the next job, a two-hundred-foot-long, four-foot-high retaining wall surrounding the mansion of a silver baron.
“Were you a rebel, then?” the young laborer asked with awe.
Will looked at him. One of the things Will liked about the Western frontier was how few questions people asked.
But Bobby was only eleven or twelve, just a boy.
“Yes, I wore the gray. Most everybody back home did. Not Mr. Dunne, though.”
“Who’s that?”
“He was my neighbor. He owned a nice ranch beside our small farm.”
“And he fought for the Union?”
“That’s right.”
The boy seemed to think about that for a moment. “Did you fight him?”
Will grinned, thinking this boy clearly did not understand the scope of the war. “No. I never fought Mr. Dunne.”
“You hated him, though?”
