A Walk on the Wylder Side (The Wylder West) by Laura Strickland, Book 3 in The Wylder West Series
Blurb:
Outspoken, rebellious Cissy Arkwright was sent west from her Chicago home to work at a boarding house in Wylder, Wyoming. The last thing she expects is friendship with the handsome new boarder, a man with an air of danger and the power to make her smile. Buck Standish is on the run from his past. He'd like to put aside the life of a gun-for-hire, especially once he meets Cissy. But experience tells him the past has a way of catching up, pistols in hand. He's lost his heart to Cissy—should he protect her by hitting the trail again? Or stay in Wylder and fight for their future?
Excerpt:
He wore a gun. No, two of them, one on either hip.
Cissy still hadn't got used to that. People in Chicago owned guns, sure. And unsavory elements there went about performing even more unsavory deeds, with the help of those firearms. But they didn't strut around with pistols strapped to their sides the way men—and some women—did in Wylder, Wyoming.
This man wore his weapons low, like some sort of gunslinger, and looked more than prepared to use them. Or maybe he just sought to shield them from the deluge of water.
Apart from that, he wasn't one of Mrs. Culpepper's roomers, all of whom Cissy recognized. He looked about thirty, a tall man and lean with it—those hips certainly were lean—with a well-sculpted face now expressing extreme shock. He wore black—black trousers with a black shirt and leather vest. His hair was also black, longish in the back, and at the moment sodden.
For an instant frozen in time, Cissy stared at him and he stared back at her as if nothing—no one—else existed.
