LITMIR.BIZ

       www.mirabooks.co.uk

      To my

       Aunt Betty Stierwalt

       and

       Aunt Gerty Urlacher

       For gracing my life with their incredible gift for love and laughter

       I love you both

       Prologue

       September

      Bernard Clemens was dying and he knew it, despite what the doctors—all those fancy specialists—had said about his heart. He knew. He was old and tired, ready for death.

      Sitting in the den of the home he’d built thirty years ago for his wife, he closed his eyes and remembered. Maggie had been his great love. His only love. Delicate and beautiful, nearly sixteen years younger, she could have had her choice of husbands, but she’d chosen him. An aging rancher with a craggy face and work-roughened hands. A man who had simple tastes and lacked social refinement. And yet she’d loved him.

      God help him, he’d loved her, loved her still, although she’d been gone now for nearly twenty-seven years.

      Her love had been gift enough, but she’d yearned to give him a son. Bernard, too, had hoped for an heir. He’d purchased the Triple C as a young man, buying the land adjacent to his parents’ property, and eventually he’d built the combined ranches into one huge spread, an empire to pass on to his son. However, the child had been a girl and they’d named her Margaret, after her mother.

      The pregnancy had drained Maggie and she was further weakened that winter by a particularly bad strain of the flu. Pneumonia had set in soon afterward, and before anyone realized how serious it was, his Maggie was gone.

      In all his life, Bernard had never known such grief. With Maggie’s death, he’d lost what he valued most—the woman who’d brought him joy. When they lowered her casket into the ground, they might as well have buried him, too. From that point forward, he threw himself into ranching, buying more land, increasing his herd and consequently turning the Triple C into one of the largest and most prosperous cattle ranches in all of North Dakota.

      As for being a father to young Margaret, he’d tried, but as the eldest of seven boys, he had no experience in dealing with little girls. In the years that followed, his six younger brothers had all lived and worked with him for brief periods of time, eventually moving on and getting married and starting families of their own.

      They’d helped him raise her, teaching her about ranching ways—riding and roping … and cussing, he was sorry to admit.

      To this day, Margaret loved her uncles. Loved riding horses, too. She was a fine horsewoman, and more knowledgeable about cattle than any man he knew. She’d grown tall and smart—not to mention smart-mouthed —but Bernard feared he’d done his only child a grave disservice. Margaret resembled him more than she did her mother. Maggie had been a fragile, dainty woman who brought out everything that was good in Bernard.

      Their daughter, unfortunately, revealed very little of her mother’s gentleness or charm. How could she, seeing that she’d been raised by a grief-stricken father and six bachelors? Margaret looked like Bernard, talked like him and dressed like him. It was a crying shame she hadn’t been a boy, since, until recently, she was often mistaken for one. His own doing, he thought, shaking his head. Had Maggie lived, she would have seen to the proper upbringing of their daughter. Would have taught their little girl social graces and femininity, as mothers do. Bernard had given it his best

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