Sam was staring at Claire with about the same amazement as his brother had shown. Claire didn’t seem to realize it, or else she was too preoccupied to think of it, but she was the second thunderbolt that had fallen on this long-hidebound household in as many days. First one of the hated race of doctors had been shoehorned in on them as the only thing that might get them out of an already nightmarish situation, and now this matter-of-fact slip of a girl had pushed into it of her own accord. They must have felt like the world was coming down around their ears.

The lass was no damsel. He’d prepared himself for a hard sell, one that might require a few extra knee-weakening smiles, perhaps so much as a seduction, but he’d never in a million years expected the disaster that landed his arms. The disaster named Alison Ross.

People spend their entire lives at those lower altitudes without any awareness that this high country exists.

It's a lot like the Wild West out here... Just with tea shops instead of saloons. Wild West Sahara, that is.

The world we suggest is a new wild west. A sensuous evil world. Strange and haunting, the path of the sun….

Samantha imagined that in another life, she and Alison could have, indeed, been friends. Had she not been about to rob the train.

You shut your door to these poor women,' he said so they could hear him, 'and you'll answer for it the rest of your lives. You won't sleep. You'll choke on drinks. The food you eat'll block up your bowels and you'll die of your own shit.

People entered the park and became polite and cozy and fakey to each other because the atmosphere of the park made them that way. In the entire time he had lived within a hundred miles of it he had visited it only once or twice.

Why should I mind?” She drummed her fingertips against his knee. “Because you got asked to play baseball, while I got a lecture on circumspection, Jezebels, and leading men into sin?” “Did you really?” He managed to sound annoyed, fascinated, and amused all at once.“It’s not funny.” “Of course it’s not.” He was quick to try and placate her. “But we can do something about those lectures real quick. All you have to do is marry me.”Coyote Bluff had too many secrets that weren’t hers to share. She couldn’t put him in that position. He was a federal marshal. And she’d seen what all the lies her father told had done to her mother. She’d died hating him.The last remnants of her earlier contentment vanished. “I like my independence.” “Then I guess you’ll have to get used to the lectures, Sheriff Jezebel,” he replied.

Experience should have taught ye by now that denying me what I want only makes me more relentless.