Failure or success in a life is often calculated on what a man owns. A man with nothing, no steady job, not even a driver's license, is judged a failure to the rest of the world. When Dayton Sandoval lands unexpectedly in a small New Mexico town, he knows he will earn a few dollars, learn a few names, and be gone before entanglements hobble and hold him. It's a familiar pattern, what he does, how he survives. But it doesn't work out that way -- not at all. Because of an old woman, a rank horse, and the child who loves him . . . and a distant and fearful lady. As Dayton Sandoval allows these three women to need him, as he learns to love and care for them, he will pull apart the devastation of his past and find a completed and whole man where he thought lay only ancient, unhealing wounds.
Northern McKendrick was an orphan sent to live with the family he didn't know.Key Larkin was the son of the local whore -- a young man on his way to an outlaw life of wild horses and wilder women.They met in a brawl and became friends despite that. They became best buddies -- each other's protector.Until North's cousin Neelie fell in love with Key.Neelie's family wanted better than Key Larkin for their daughter. They did everything they could to fight her infatuation with him. But it was nothing: she loved him, or seemed to . . . until a family secret revealed itself, exploding and destroying the everything that deceit and lust had created. . . .
A failed government agent resigns and heads out cross-country on horseback, away from the world of spies and assassins to where he belongs, the western grass lands and family ranches. James Straw doesn't even own his name; it has been given to him by the unnamed agency.In the northeastern part of New Mexico, the drifting cowboy finds a place to hide in a brush-covered canyon and a old miner's cabin. Eventually Straw is driven out by hunger and the needs of his horses and finds himself in the middle of a growing fight over water rights and real estate expansion. Hired by a local small rancher, Straw finds himself drawn into the intimacy of a family, and questions about the origins of the rancher's water rights.A young lawyer, New Mexico-born and well-versed in issues about water rights, is hired by the land developer. She flies from Albuquerque to the ranch in the company of an eastern representative, and in the confusion of a trail ride and a mountain lion, the drifter is mistaken for the rancher, Tim Wofford. James Straw goes along with the deception, needing to know what the land developers are scheming relative to procuring water enough to create an artificial lake and attract more investors. The Wofford clan is pitted against the investors with the withdrawn and suspicious James Straw caught in the middle.Money and power cannot sway Tim Wofford, nor can the attraction Straw feels toward the female lawyer change his loyalty to the Woffords and his determination to keep the Wofford ranch in the family.Violence on a solitary mesa, dirt roads, and healing herbs belong to the past yet are a challenge to the powers. Those who would steal waters rights and threaten lives in order to control the land and its profits cannot destroy the small ranchers and their values of family and honor.
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