The Last Outlaw, - Rosanne Bittner
Foreword
When Outlaw Hearts was published in 1993, I wanted to write a sequel, but because of circumstances involving the publishing industry, it just didn’t happen. Sourcebooks finally gave me the opportunity, and Do Not Forsake Me came pouring out of my heart where it had rested for all those twenty-plus years. When I finished that book, I knew I wasn’t ready to leave my beloved Jake Harkner, outlaw, lawman, and (in the third book, Love’s Sweet Revenge) rancher.
His story wasn’t finished. Jake needed closure over the fact that he’d killed his own father, the driving emotional force that had affected every decision and reaction in his life—the powerful event that sent him floundering into a world of lawlessness in the first book. Then came Miranda, the woman who awakened Jake’s longing for a normal family life. Miranda handed him that gift, and two children, but that dark past always haunted Jake—that incredible abuse that caused him to overprotect his own children and eventually his grandchildren, which led to a near-hanging in Love’s Sweet Revenge.
In this fourth book, The Last Outlaw, Jake still wrestles with his past. The trauma still keeps him on that thin line between sanity and insanity, between peace and chaos, between his incredible love for his family and equally incredible hatred for the man who murdered his mother and brother. I knew Jake had to come to some kind of reckoning to live out his elder years in true peace with the woman he loves beyond words—his rock, his salvation, his hope.
To Jake, Miranda is forever twenty years old, forever beautiful, forever gracious and sophisticated. He will feel forever that she’s too good for him. She is the antithesis of all he’s been and has stuck by him in spite of all the heartache, all the reckless living, all the running, years in prison, and all the times he tried to leave her because he thought she’d be better off without him.
If this is the first book you pick up in this series, you can certainly read it on its own. But you will want to read Jake’s story from book one, Outlaw Hearts, through Do Not Forsake Me and Love’s Sweet Revenge. I hope you enjoy the entire series, and I suspect you will have trouble forgetting these characters. They will always live in your heart, representing all the emotions humankind can both suffer—and celebrate.
—Rosanne Bittner
Part One
Prologue
June 1897
There were nine of them that day. All hard men, all on a mission. They were dead set on getting rich off of someone else’s money—money they would steal from the City Bank in Boulder, Colorado. Their horses panted and snorted from the hard ride, and a mixture of dust and sod rolled from under the horses’ hooves.
The riders wore long canvas coats over shirts and jackets in the cool spring weather, and under it all they wore gun belts packed with cartridges. Some held one gun, some two, and everyone carried rifles on their saddles. Some were clean shaven, others were nothing but filth and beards and unwashed hair. All wore wide-brimmed hats against the bright, spring Colorado sun, and all were filled with anticipation for the ways they would spend the money they were going to take today. Women and whiskey—those two came first.
They rode up toward the foothills of the Rockies and right over farmers’ fields, avoiding the main roads. They were coming from the Santa Fe Trail in New Mexico, leaving behind robbed stagecoaches and freight wagons. Trains were their specialty, and always they were trying to avoid the Pinkertons, the relentless railroad detectives who hunted them.
Their leader, George Callahan, figured Boulder to be a peaceful, unsuspecting, little-guarded mountain town. They wouldn’t be ready for nine men to ride in and take over a bank. They wouldn’t be ready for men who didn’t care who might get killed in the process. Tomorrow they would ride out of Boulder with a fortune in railroad and mining money, and head for Mexico.
There was only one problem with Callahan’s plan. He’d picked the wrong day to rob a bank in Boulder. Neither he nor any of his men knew Jake Harkner happened to be in Boulder, and he would still be there…tomorrow.
One
Jake trailed his tongue over his wife’s skin, trying to ignore his fear that she could be dying. Her belly was too caved-in, her hip bones too prominent.
She’ll get better, he told himself. The taste of her most secret place lingered on his lips as he moved to her breasts, still surprisingly full, considering, but not the same breasts he’d always loved and teased her about, with the enticing cleavage that stirred his desire for her.
He would always desire her. This was his Randy. She was his breath. Her spirit ran in his veins, and she was his reason for being. God knew his worthless hide had no business even still being on this earth.