As a young girl, I loved reading my grandfather's western novels. I'd sit on his bed, surrounded by the scent of Old Spice aftershave, and read Louis L'Amour for hours. The way the author described the characters and the rawness of the landscape pulled me headlong into every story.
As I grew older, romance stole my interest. I especially enjoyed those books with peril interwoven throughout the pages. At one time, my grandmother had several paperback romances she'd bought at a garage sale, and I could not read them fast enough. I was hooked.
It only made sense that my first novella would take me down the western romance path where a justice-seeking bounty hunter and a sassy but wrongly accused schoolteacher would clash and eventually fall in love.
Living in West Texas, where the sunsets are breathtaking, bluebonnets decorate the roadside, and skittish white-tailed deer abound, it's not difficult to imagine a different time in history. I can see men like the Louis L'Amour's Sackett brothers riding into town to right a wrong, and women like Annie Oakley making quick work of anyone trying to do harm.
My grandmother and grandfather have gone on to heaven. The same grandfather who kept a stash of Louis L'Amour books also drove cattle through downtown Fort Worth and into the stockyards as a young man. I could've used his expertise a time or two if only he were still alive.
And, I wish he was. Though he'd turn up his nose at the romance in the book I've written, he'd applaud the main characters—a strong man of the law unafraid of even the most treacherous villain and a spirited woman who could hold her own. Those were his type of people, and I guess they're my type, too.
Janis Jakes
