My salute to Westerns started with a childhood desire to head out west and with romantic notions about cowboys and cattle ranches and life in the saddle. My musings led to setting several of my historical novels in the west of my imagination.
I freely admit my old west is based as much on the lore portrayed in old movies and paperbacks as on the gritty reality of life on the range or the hard demands of making a go at a ranching or surviving in one of the mushrooming towns on the frontier. My Western novels are my salute to that wonderful world, real and imagined, and the magnificent spirit of all those who tamed it.
Theodora Gamble, the heroine in Devil Moon has that high spirit. She’s a woman who picks her own roles in life and lives them on her own terms. She isn’t much for compromise and isn’t easy to live with when she’s forced into one. Rhys Delmar learned that the day they met.
His new business partner wasn’t exactly what he was expecting…
“Where is this Teddy Gamble?” Rhys Delmar asked as he got out of the stagecoach. His fine leather valise, along with its contents, was shot through by no less that three bullet holes. “I need to tell the man he’ll be required to replace my entire wardrobe. ” A lad in the crowd pointed.
Teddy Gamble, attired in fringed buckskin trousers and shirt, and with tightly laced leggings that rose to her knees, had her back to the Frenchman. Rhys looked at the slight form with the masculine clothes and feminine curves and assumed he had discovered the reason for the Gamble Line’s shortcomings. No man with that build was much of a man. Rhys stood and stared. Before he could voice his observations his friend Lucien put them into words.
“N’est-ce pas?” the manservant whispered. “This Monsieur Gamble has the look of an effete, a sissy.”
“At best,” Rhys said moderating his voice too late.
On top of the attack on the stage it was too much. Teddy spun around like a hot desert whirlwind.
“At worst,” she said eyes blazing, voice crackling. “I’m a gal who’s got as much use for a pair of tinhorn, foreign, starched-shirts as I have for a pair of buzzards.”
Rhys’s gaze went to the swell of her breasts. “You are a woman!”
He could not have invited more trouble if he had lit the fuse on a stick of dynamite and tucked it in his pocket.
“Well, thank you for clearing that up.”
“Mademoiselle Gamble,” he said, with the smooth, deep voice that had weakened many feminine knees. “My apologies. It seems we have gotten off to a bad start.”
“You bet your ass we have!”
. . . And that is only the beginning . . .
Please join me in a tip of the hat to the Old West.
Devil Moon is slated for release in November and joins Delilah’s Flame as a Guns and Garters Western Romance. To share the adventure with Teddy and Rhys, keep an eye out for the stage and for announcements of the release of Devil Moon.