Hearts of Dust 1: Hearts of Dust

By Elena Martin

Do you like sweet historical romances?

Betrayed by her husband and left barren because of his deceit, young widow Sarah Barlow is looking for a new beginning during the Oklahoma Land Rush. The last thing she needs is another man in her life. Can handsome cowboy Tony Rossi change her mind?

This sweet historical romance has a hard-won happy ending.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elena Martin
• Release date: Nov 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781502215093

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Sarah Barlow sat under a tree near her tent as far away from the others as she could get. She had her rifle hidden underneath her skirt and her campfire blazing. She was twenty-two years old, and just over two years ago she had been a newlywed on her way to a fabulous life. She smiled as she remembered how naïve she had been such a short time ago. It wasn’t a happy smile. It was one wrought with the cynicism born of realizing just a little too late that things that seemed perfect, rarely were.

Sarah had been sitting in this spot, under an old oak tree since early afternoon the day before. Since she had first reached the train station, and then paid a man who was at the train station picking up those who wanted to go to the border for a fee. She had paid him twenty five dollars to take her the one hundred or so miles to the border and she had found her spot. Along the way she had admired the land and thought that the Indians had well named this place Beautiful Land. Throughout the landscape of the rolling grassy uplands and beautifully green river bottoms were clumps of trees growing in what looked like fertile meadows.

Her original plan had been to make it to Oklahoma just in time to catch the train at the Arkansas City, Kansas station that would drop people at every possible stop across the State as soon as the law said it was okay. She had become emboldened however when she realized how many people were camping out along the border in order that they may be there to get in line at the sound of the first trumpet. She had bought a few supplies so that she wouldn’t starve while she waited before leaving Kansas, and then once at the border, she had parked her little campsite there under the tree.

There were so many people here that she thought they must have surpassed the population of Shannon County Missouri, where she had come from already. There were people like Sarah, who rode the train and now would go the final distance of the journey on foot. People who had come in wagons or the ones who had enlisted their fastest and strongest horses. And there were people who had begun and would end their journey on foot. They were camped just like Sarah in the tall grass and dusty knolls of the prairie, just on the verge of the line they would cross to begin their new lives.

The U.S. Cavalry stood guard on the line those first few nights to make sure no one left early and illegally staked out a lot. So far, things seemed rather pleasant. It just so happened that it was Easter Sunday so people were in good cheer in celebration of the rising of the Lord. They had even held services earlier in the center of the encampment. Sarah wasn’t good at making friends, and she had over the past two years come to be a bit distrustful of others, so she hadn’t joined in on any of the revelries. She had just sat near her tent and watched from afar. Now that the sun had gone down Sarah looked around at the faces she could see reflected in the camp fires and the moonlight and thought, These will be my neighbors.

According to the newspaper article the bugle would blow at noon, alerting them all to the opening of the land office. At that time, and not a moment before, people would be allowed to stake their claim. Plots of land in 160-acre parcels had been marked off. She had been anxious when she’d left Miss Millie’s. But now that she was here and she had seen the beauty of this simple land, she began to feel in her heart that she somehow belonged here, and maybe this was where life had been leading her all along. Tomorrow she would have something that was hers alone. Something that no one could ever take from her.

Sarah had led a charmed life up until the age of fifteen. He mother had died when she was three years old, but she had been blessed with the best father in the world. He had become successful in copper mining and he loved Sarah more than anything