The locket was small, oval, and scratched with age. Its delicate hinge had been repaired, and a tiny mark resembling a star had been carved into the back.
The cowboy held it toward her.
“I've carried this for eighteen years.”
She frowned.
“What is it?”
He opened the locket.
Inside lay a faded strip of brown ribbon.
Three uneven white stitches crossed one end.
The woman stopped breathing.
She knew those stitches.
She had sewn them herself on a freezing afternoon when she was fourteen years old.
Her hand rose slowly toward her mouth.
“No,” she whispered.
The cowboy's eyes filled.
“Yes.”
Her gaze moved from the ribbon to the scar beneath his collarbone.
Then to his green eyes.
A memory she had buried beneath eighteen winters suddenly came rushing back.
A frozen river.
A frightened teenage boy.
Blood staining the snow.
A narrow trail through the mountains.
And a fourteen-year-old girl who had refused to leave a stranger to die.
The cowboy closed his fingers around the locket.
“You saved my life once,” he said.
The woman began to cry.
He moved closer.
“And I've spent eighteen years trying to become the sort of man who would never make you regret it.”
But before she could answer, three violent knocks struck the cabin door.
The cowboy turned.
Outside, someone shouted his name.
Then came a voice both of them recognized.
The wealthy merchant who had publicly rejected her six weeks earlier had returned.
And this time, he was not coming to laugh at her weight.
He was coming for the land that belonged to her.
Six weeks earlier, the woman had arrived in a small Montana Territory town called Cedar Run, carrying two leather trunks, a battered traveling bag, and the remains of a hope she had spent eleven months carefully nurturing.
The year was 1886.
Cedar Run sat between wooded hills and wide stretches of cattle country, where the mountains rose blue against the western horizon and the streets became rivers of mud whenever rain passed through.
A general store occupied the busiest corner of town.