Once Struck

By Lynn Michaels

Nebraska, 1873

 

Peach MaCauley has only 49 acrees of wheat standing between her and becoming a poor relation. On the eve of the harvest a storm threatens her crop--and her independence.

 

Only one mans steps forward to help her. A man she isn't sure she should trust. 

 

Kit Taggart is no longer the dirt poor boy with soulful brown eyes who kissed her behind the church at the Fourth of July social. Now he's a handsome and hard-edged ex-soldier.

 

His price for saving Peach and her crop is one night with her. All night, from dusk to dawn. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lynn Michaels
• Release date: Oct 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215642290

Lynn Michaels

Lynn Michaels lives and writes in Tampa, Florida where the sun is hot and the Sangria is cold. Lynn is the newest addition to Rubicon Fiction, and she loves reading and writing about hot men in love.

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Once Struck

Lynn Michaels

Published by Lynn Michaels, 2022.

This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

ONCE STRUCK

First edition. October 17, 2022.

Copyright © 2022 Lynn Michaels.

ISBN: 979-8215642290

Written by Lynn Michaels.

Also by Lynn Michaels

Captain Rakehell

The Duke's Downfall

The Cat Before Christmas

Once Struck

Aftershock

Molly and the Phantom

Second Sight

The Patriot

Nightwing

Remembrance

Watch for more at Lynn Michaels’s site.

ONCE STRUCK

By

Lynn Michaels

Copyright © Lynn Michaels

All Rights Reserved.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 1

Lynchburg, Nebraska

June 1873

The buzzards were beginning to circle. Old Blue’s carcass was still warm, and already they were floating in high, lazy spirals. Two of them. A mating pair, most likely.

Peach McCauley sat watching them from the hill overlooking her forty acres of ripe winter wheat. Her hands were splattered with blood, her ears still ringing from the report of the Colt pistol she’d used to shoot Blue.

She wanted to cry, but it was too hot for tears. So hot she could scarcely breathe, even in the shade of the drought-yellowed hackberry tree behind her. The sweat on her back had long since stuck her brother Will’s faded gingham shirt to her shoulder blades.

Blue’s stablemate Red grazed nearby. The reins of the harness Peach had cut him out of with the Confederate bayonet Will had brought home from the War trailed the brittle, heat-killed grass. She needed two mules to pull the reaper, but Blue still lay in the field where he’d fallen. Peach was too stunned and stricken, and Red too exhausted to move him.

The Colt lay beside her in the dusty grass, its barrel finally cool. So was Peach’s horror and her panic. She wouldn’t stick the gun in her mouth and pull the trigger like Will had almost a year ago. She’d get this crop in, some way, somehow, then she’d sell the two hundred and thirty acres her grandfather had hacked out of the Nebraska prairie. Her father had turned the farm into the showplace of Lynch County – and Will had nearly driven it back into the sod with his gambling and drinking. Then she’d take Aunt Bethel up on her offer to come live with her in Omaha.

But she wouldn’t just sitting here, watching the buzzards circle Blue’s carcass. Peach took a deep breath and pushed to her feet, gritting her teeth at the throb in her head and the shriek of her muscles. She’d slept only five hours in the last two days, but she’d managed to cut and bind fifteen acres before Blue stepped in the gopher hole that had snapped his right foreleg.

Her future hinged on the twenty-five acres of uncut wheat stretching before her, top-heavy and nodding in a stifling breath of wind. Selling the farm would pay the last of Will’s debts. Selling the wheat would buy her independence. Without it, she’d land on Aunt Bethel beholden for every scrap of food she ate.

Peach would sooner rot in the field with her wheat than take charity, but she had no choice. It was beg or borrow another mule or a team of horses – or end up a poor relation. Peach was glad her parents were dead. She tightened her hands into fists and almost wished Will was alive so she could shoot him herself.

Some folks said the hill Peach stood on wasn’t a hill at all but an Indian barrow. Find a few arrowheads, her father had said, with a wink and a grin and a slow shake of his head. Peach still carried the one he’d given her in the pocket of her trousers: Will’s trousers, cut off and rolled above her boots and cinched at the waist with a frayed scrap of rope. She carried the arrowhead for luck, when half the county said nothing good would ever come of it.

They still said the same thing about Kit Taggart.

From her vantage point, Peach could see the Taggart place and a fair portion of northeastern Lynch County. Most of the fields still rolled ripe and uncut beneath the scorching mid-afternoon sun, but Kit Taggart’s hundred acres lay flat and stubbled against the heat-whitened sky. His wheat was already in, sold at a tidy profit and loaded in a railcar on the Lynchburg spur.

Bought his self a fancy team of hosses and one of them newfangled headers, Jed Taylor had told her just yesterday, when he’d stopped by on his way to the thresher, his wagon spilling over with bundled wheat shocks. Sure as it ain’t rained since May Day, Miz Peach, your brother Will, God rest him, and every other fool crazy enough to get near Taggart with a pack of cards in his hand paid for ‘em.

Peach knew better but she hadn’t said so. His drinking and gambling debts were the only ones Will had paid – he’d left her saddled with the rest. She hadn’t found a single IOU written to Kit Taggart, but a fistful made out to Ben Wilkins, Junior, Will’s so-called friend.

Peach could see the thresher from here, on the Wilkins place at Three Corners. She could also see a fresh load of trouble Kit Taggart didn’t need. Or deserve.

The pall of dust and wheat chaff kicked up by the eight-horse team that powered the thresher was the only cloud Peach had seen in weeks. Wheat ripened early in dry weather, which suited her fine – the sooner she got out of Lynchburg, the better – but it made harvesting twice as hard, because the wheat grew short. Peach had read about the newfangled header in Prairie Farmer Journal, marveling at how wide and close to the ground it cut, how easily it caught stunted wheat a reaper rolled right over.

What Peach wouldn’t give for a header. And what she wouldn’t give to forget she’d once felt the same way about Kit Taggart. She’d been fifteen and foolish. Too young to be drawn into the moonlit shadows behind the church at the Fourth of July Social, backed against a hickory tree and kissed the way nineteen-year-old Kit had kissed her. He was thirty-one now, she twenty-seven, but just as foolish as she’d been all those years ago, standing here mooning over a boy who had gone off to war and come back a man. A hard, barb-edged man by all accounts.

Peach hadn’t laid eyes on Kit since he’d come home to Lynchburg a year ago, scarce a month before Will shot himself in the barn. At first, she'd hoped – no, she’d prayed – that he’d come calling, but he never did. She wondered if Will had warned him off, as she suspected her father had that long-ago summer just before the War. If the town tabbies had told him the McCauleys had fallen on hard times. If he’d ridden by and seen for himself the sagging fences and empty pastures where curly red steers had once grazed by the score.

She’d waited for Kit to call after the Fourth of July Social, but he’d never come. Her father had told her Kit Taggart didn’t covet her near as much as he coveted the McCauley land. She wondered if he was right. And sometimes, late at night, she still wondered if he’d turned Kit off.

Right busy feller, young Kit is, Jed Taylor had told her soon after Will’s funeral. Says he’s gonna clean up that place a’his and make it pay. He’s a Taggart, sure enough. Dumb as rocks, the whole lot of ‘em.

Rocks weren’t dumb.