Judy Proctor came back to the ranch because there was nowhere else that felt real. The city didn’t work. When her parents died, the decision made itself: the ranch needed her and she needed it in equal measure. The life is physical and unforgiving. Branding cattle in dust that gets into everything. Cutting wire in frozen fields when your fingers stop working properly. The sound of coyotes carrying across the dark at night. Her company is Somegood, a cow dog who understands work, and Useless, a mottled mutt who doesn’t care about his name.
Kathleen Romero arrives to write a story. She’s a journalist looking for a piece about ranch life, about the West, about something authentic. What she finds is harder to leave than a finished article. The land pulls at her. The work—the actual physical exhaustion of it—becomes real in ways she didn’t anticipate. And Judy, who belongs to both the land and the work, who moves through it like she was built for it.
Peck doesn’t soften anything. The plains are genuinely wide and empty. The community’s prejudice is genuine—these are people who’ve known Judy her whole life and have clear opinions about what she should be, what women like her should be. The romance has to build in full view of that. There’s no hiding in a small community. There’s no privacy in it either.
The dirt is real. The calluses on hands are real. The risk of staying, of building something with someone in a place where everyone watches, is genuinely consequential. It reads like a Western because it is one—the landscape is as much a character as either woman, demanding and unforgiving and worth fighting for.
Details
| ISBN: 9781939062871 |
| Subtitle: |
| Genre: Romance; Western |
| Subject(s): Contemporary; Fiction; Lesbian; Lgbtq+; Romance; Western; Westerns |
| Publication Date: 2015-04-15 |
| Original Publication Date: |
| Publisher: Sapphire Books Publishing |
| Language: English |
| Format: Paperback |
| Pages: 194 |
| Rating: |
| Notes: |
| Book_ID: 106129 |