Driscoll's Lady

Leatrice Meredith, tall, beautiful, self-poised, and rich, is in love with Seth Driscoll, a Montanan horse rancher of modest means. Seth's conception of eastern women is stereotyped, especially regarding wealthy, idle women. Not at all what he is looking for in a wife. Give him a woman of the land, Montanan bred. In a bizarre arrangement, Leatrice becomes his housekeeper. Seth is sure that a few weeks of work will disillusion her. But as they work together, meet obstacles, share holidays and hardships, her true character emerges. Yet proving herself may still not be enough, when she learns that Seth has already chosen a "woman of the land, Montanan born and bred." ....
EXCERPT: ...On the landing at the bottom of the stairs Leatrice paused. The door to her study was open. Seth Driscoll stood waiting, turned slightly toward the French doors. His sandy-colored hair was ruffled as though he had run a nervous hand through it. His grey-green eyes were pensive and fixed on the outline of snowcapped mountains in the distance. His lips were pressed together, his square jaw tight, raised as if in anticipation not to his liking. The front of his lambskin shearling coat was open, revealing a wide, trunk neck above the plaid shirt that was tucked-in haphazardly into his heavy-weight denims, as though he’d dressed more for comfort and necessity than looks. He held his battered Stetson at his side, the curled brim clenched tightly in his large, sun-tanned fist. His feet in heavy dusty riding boots were set slightly apart as if at any moment he might open the French doors and stride out. But it was not the vast pastures shading to soft fawn with the coming of winter, or the snowcapped mountains shrouded in pale blue mist that Driscoll saw as he gazed out the French doors, but the records at the courthouse proving Leatrice’s claim. The present clerk could find no copy of a bill of sale from the previous owner of the Bar LB for the five thousand acres known as the Triple R Division. The deed Seth and his lawyer had accepted as valid at the time of the sale had been forged. Leatrice was the current owner of the Bar LB; consequently, his land now belonged to her. Everything he had worked for, his security for the future, his one hold on life, had all been for nothing. Upstairs that scheming she-devil must be congratulating herself for having dropped the ground from under him.
Seth loved the land he rode daily, as his father had loved it before him. He had scraped and saved from the pittance paid for cattle doctorin’ and punchin’, fixin’ fences, and occasionally rodeoing, and he achieved his goal. He bought the Triple R, five thousand acres of lush grassland, buttes and rising hills. He began with four broodmares and a stallion. Fifteen years later his horse count numbered in the hundreds, pure breed quarter horses that cattle ranchers who could not afford to raise their own remudas for rounding up cattle, or simply horsemen in need of sturdy steeds, bought at top dollar and praised highly. A tingling sensation in the nape of his neck made him turn. Leatrice had entered the room. It was the same each time he saw her, the gut feeling that he wanted her. He had to pull hard on the reins to keep from succumbing. She was too tall for a woman, too broad of shoulder, too intelligent and shrewd, too rich and used to getting her own way, too presumptuous and arrogant for a female according to his book. A usurper, a schemer, an Easterner coming to his country a year and a half-ago not knowing a heifer from a steer, or a stallion from a gelding. He was glad of the added height nature had bequeath him. It gave him the advantage of looking down at Leatrice, of being able to withstand the rock hardness, the authoritative and indomitable pull of those blue eyes. They would fell a lesser man. Alone in the study, Seth and Leatrice faced each other, neither sure of where to begin....