LITMIR.BIZ

      This story is dedicated to those victims of abuse by an adult in their lives. Such actions still remain as a painful memory in these men and women. Child abuse is not a thing of modern times, but has existed for centuries in our world. Today it is still an issue that must be faced and obliterated. May each of you find joy, as did Katie in my story.

      And most of all, this book is dedicated, as is everything I accomplish, to the man in my life, Mr. Ed, who loves me.

      CONTENTS

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER TEN

      CHAPTER ELEVEN

      CHAPTER TWELVE

      CHAPTER THIRTEEN

      CHAPTER FOURTEEN

      CHAPTER FIFTEEN

      CHAPTER SIXTEEN

      CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

      CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

      CHAPTER NINETEEN

      CHAPTER TWENTY

      EPILOGUE

      CHAPTER ONE

      Eden, The Dakota Territory

       February, 1890

      SURELY HER OWN MOTHER had not lived such a life. Through the window of the Dogleg Saloon, Katie watched the women who roamed the smoke-filled area, seeking out men upon which to try their skills. Hair upswept, makeup all too obvious and dresses too gaudy to be believed all added to their allure.

      Or so they apparently believed. “How sad.” The words were but a whisper as the young woman watched the parade of females conduct their pursuit of the cowhands who worked on outlying ranches and farms and assorted married men from the town of Eden, in the Dakota Territory. That she could ever live in such a manner was something she would never have considered during the days of summer, when the warm weather protected her slender body from the cold winds. When she did not bear the shame of a mother who had once worked in this place. Or so she’d been told by the couple who’d raised her, reviling her with a tale of a woman gone bad, bearing an illegitimate child.

      She’d found that the parents she’d thought were her own, were but unkind strangers who had taken her into their home as an act of charity. And if what they had done in the name of charity were known among the townspeople, they might not be able to hold up their heads in Eden.

      But a young girl would not be believed when her word was placed next to an upstanding pair who posed as ideal parents of a girl who had turned out badly. And Katie was that girl, if her foster parents were to be believed.

      In that same home dwelt a second child, a younger female, the abandoned daughter of a relative of Agnes Schrader, who had been given the privilege of schooling at the town’s one-room schoolhouse. But Katie was not so fortunate, for with a background so filled with disgrace and shame, she wasn’t considered worth the trouble to educate.

      She had been whipped and treated as a slave for twelve years, was now approaching her eighteenth birthday, yet had done the work of a woman while still a child. Taking her courage in both hands, she’d left the farm where she’d lived in servitude and set out to find shelter. Shelter for a weary body and sanctuary for a mind confused by the perils life had dealt her. Most of them derived from the man who had become a threat to her on another level over the past weeks, for Jacob Schrader had attempted to crawl beneath her quilt on three occasions. She feared him more than she had thought possible.

      Tonight, his words of sly entreaty had brought chills to her flesh, his looks of dark anger and the flashes of masculine power he’d brought to bear upon her were enough to find her running for her very life. The thought of his hands on her body was enough to force her to flee.

      She’d walked for three miles, shivering in the ragged clothing she wore, wrapped in a shawl she’d taken without permission from a hook by the back door of the farmhouse, desperate for a safe place in which to hide. Any rude shelter would do, so long as it provided surcease from the north winds that promised snow, sweeping across the plains of

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