Tough, taciturn and wounded in ways that no one else knows about, Marietta rancher and part-time Deputy Sheriff Logan Tate is a man in total control of his life. After her run-in with Deputy Hardass, Charlie Foster is ready to ride her thumb right back out of Marietta the very next day. Can a man who lives by the rules fall in love with a woman who breaks all of his?
The stretch of I winding down the mountain pass into Marietta was one of the prettiest stretches of highway in the whole of Montana. Hell, the whole of the USA. With Yellowstone fifty-four miles to the south and Bozeman twenty-four miles to the north, the two-lane road crossed over the Marietta River and had the towering snow-capped peak of Copper Mountain staring down on it like a slumbering giant in hues of purple and gray as the sun sunk toward the horizon.
But especially the inches that snaked through Copper Canyon, and then hit the lowland, as the Douglas firs gave way to Ponderosa pines and grasslands. His hands tensed on the steering wheel of his squad car as he came round the bend in the road near where Harry Monroe had died one dark, rainy night during Labor Day weekend while changing a tire for an elderly couple on the roadside.
Nothing good had ever come of driving down this damn road, for Logan. The moment when the lights of the ambulance just ahead of them had stopped flashingβand his daddy had started cussing, with tears leaking out of his eyes.
Lyle had started bawling because he was scared and tired and only four years old. And Logan had been left frozen, terrified to cry in case it made his daddy even madder. Logan knew his mommy would be mad to hear his daddy talk that way. Or why his daddy had gotten him and Lyle out of bed in the middle of the night. Or how his mommy had looked so pale and still as the men in navy pants and button-up shirts had carried her into the ambulance.
