Excerpt from Where Coyotes Howl by Sandra Dallas, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"I know what it is. I've never been to one."

Ellen threw caution to the wind. "Then you ought to come, Mr. Bacon. I can guarantee you'll get a good meal."

"Yes, ma'am," he said and mounted Huckleberry and spurred him just a little too much, so that the horse reared before he took off.

Ellen watched him go, Pike riding hard to catch up. She chided herself for being so brazen. What must he think of her, all but asking him to have supper with her?

She did not know that he grinned until he was only a speck in the distance. Or that he'd already decided she was a woman he'd want to get his rope on.

Two

Ellen had taught school in Fort Madison, Iowa, for only a year when she spotted the advertisement in a newspaper for a teacher in Wallace, Wyoming. The ad was in a big-city newspaper that someone had left behind on a bench in the depot, where Ellen was awaiting the arrival of a friend. She studied it for a moment, wondering where Wallace was, picturing it being near deep canyons set against pine-covered mountains. She hadn't considered that Wallace might be a flat High Plains town with so little vegetation to obscure the view that one could almost see the earth curve. Instead, she thought, there would be ranches with soft-spoken cowboys, feisty young women on fast ponies, maybe holdup men and saloons with scarlet women. Iowa was so sedate, and she smiled at the excitement Wyoming might hold.

She tore out the ad and slipped it into her purse. That night after a Fort Madison teachers' meeting that was so dull she had nearly fallen asleep, she took out the scrap of newspaper as she was getting ready for bed. She read it again, then crumpled it and threw it into the wastepaper basket. In the middle of the night, she got out of bed and retrieved it. It lay on her dresser for two days.

What harm would it do to apply? she asked herself. There was nothing to keep her in Iowa. Her parents were dead, and her sister was married and living in Illinois. Ellen hadn't the slightest interest in any of the young men she'd met in Fort Madison. With only one year's experience, she wasn't likely to be offered the position in Wyoming, and even if she was, she could always turn it down.

Two months later, a letter with the Wallace postmark was sitting on the hall table in the boardinghouse where she lived. A rejection, she was sure as she took it up to her room and stared at it for a long time, feeling letdown. She hadn't counted on being given the job, but nonetheless, she was disappointed.

When she opened the letter and saw that the school board had offered her the position, she was so surprised that she sat down hard on the bed. What had she been thinking? She glanced at her bedside table. Zane Grey's The Last of the Plainsmen was hidden under her Bible. Ellen wasn't sure it was proper for a schoolteacher to read novels, and the woman who ran the boardinghouse was a gossip. She picked up the book and stared at the cover of windblown clouds over a desert. The story didn't take place in Wyoming, but what did that matter? She pictured herself in a daring divided skirt, atop a bronco, watching the sky turn crimson at sunset, as she raced across mountaintops beside a cowboy. She smiled at such foolishness. She was being offered a position in a country school, not a romantic encounter with a cowpuncher.

She wondered what her sister, Lizzie, would think. The two were close. Lizzie was four years older, and after their parents died when Ellen was sixteen, Lizzie raised her younger sister. She'd even put off her marriage until Ellen was grown. When Ellen wanted to go to normal school to get a teaching certificate, Lizzie paid the cost. She encouraged Ellen to leave Illinois for Iowa so that she could see a little more of the world—not that Iowa was London or Paris or even California. Ellen ought to ask for Lizzie's approval, but Lizzie had encouraged her to be independent, to take chances. Maybe it was time that Ellen made decisions on her own.

Excerpted from Where Coyotes Howl by Sandra Dallas. Copyright © 2023 by Sandra Dallas. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.