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“Nice to see you again, Countess.”
For an instant she froze. After what she’d told Clint Lonigan last night, the first response that came to her mind was, How dare you? But people were watching. The last thing she wanted was to make a scene.
“It’s Mrs. Townsend,” she said in a chilly voice. “And it’s nice to see you too, Mr. Lonigan. Now, if you don’t mind, I have some purchases to pay for.” She turned toward the clerk. “I’ll have two peppermint sticks for the children, please.”
“Coming right up, Countess.”
She frowned. “As I just told the gentleman, it’s Mrs. Townsend. This isn’t England and I’m certainly not royalty.”
“But still a very proper lady.” Clint Lonigan’s voice had taken on a teasing tone.
Ignoring him, Eve signed for her purchases, gave each of the children a peppermint stick and reached for her basket. “I’ll be taking my leave of you now, Mr. Lonigan. Good day.”
As a little girl I loved playing cowgirls and cowboys. My cousins and I would cut willows from the canal bank and ride them like horses, whooping and chasing all over the neighbourhood. In the small mountain town where I grew up we couldn’t get a TV signal until I was in high school. But we didn’t need TV. We had our imaginations—and the movies we looked forward to every weekend.
My favourite movies were Westerns, with great stars like John Wayne, Alan Ladd, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, and wonderful Maureen O’Hara. And I loved Western books, too. By the time I was thirteen I’d read every Zane Grey book on the shelf at the town library. No wonder that when I became a published author I turned to writing Western romance. For me, writing a Western is like going home.
The Countess and the Cowboy is an old-fashioned, rip-roaring Western with a little spice thrown in. Clint is all cowboy and all man, fighting for the rights of small ranchers against the evil cattle baron who burned his ranch and killed his wife and unborn child. Eve is everything Clint isn’t—a gently reared English lady who wants nothing more than to raise her sister’s children in peace. Instead she finds herself in the middle of a range war, torn between her beloved children on the one side and her irresistible cowboy on the other.
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The Countess and the Cowboy
Elizabeth Lane
ELIZABETH LANE has lived and travelled in many parts of the world, including Europe, Latin America and the Far East, but her heart remains in the American West, where she was born and raised. Her idea of heaven is hiking a mountain trail on a clear autumn day. She also enjoys music, animals and dancing. You can learn more about Elizabeth by visiting her website at elizabethlaneauthor.com
For Walter and Sadie, who wake me up laughing.
Contents
Northern Wyoming, August 1888
The stagecoach, a canvas-covered mud wagon that had seen better days, rattled over the washboard road. The final leg of the run from Casper to Lodgepole was blessedly short, but the horses were already lathered from the afternoon heat. Dust billowed from under the wheels to settle like fine brown velvet on the driver, the guard and the three passengers inside—two women and a man.
Clint Lonigan sat directly across from the veiled woman. Pretending to doze, he studied her through slitted eyes. He’d already guessed who—and what—she was. Ten days ago, when he’d left Lodgepole to sit with a dying friend, the town had been abuzz with the news that an honest-to-God countess, the widow of an English earl, was coming to live with her sister, Margaret Hanford.
Clint had paid scant attention to the gossip. Mrs. Hanford seemed like a nice enough woman, but her husband, Roderick, was the most arrogant, pretentious piece of cow manure in the whole county. Clint wouldn’t have been impressed to hear that Queen Victoria herself planned on dropping by the Hanford ranch for a damned spot of tea.
But here