When I was a teenager, growing up in Colorado and just starting to write romantic fiction, there was no better place to be and no better place to write about. The mountains in my back yard, breathtaking canyons to drive up, creeks to watch tumbling over giant boulders, sometimes an arrowhead in the reddish dirt to remind me of those who came before…the past was as real as my present.

There was an old stagecoach road I walked, listening to the wind in the pines, experiencing great solitude all around. There was an Indian cave with a smoke-blackened ceiling, a gold mine that spooked me when I dared to venture too deep inside. The smell of a dug-out horse shed, oats and leather horse tack, lives on in my memory as real as this moment as I write. A tourist attraction called Ghost Town fascinated me, with its rooms filled with ornate brass bedsteads, black high button shoes on display, glass-chimney lamps and pot-bellied stoves.

I fell in love with the Old West. As I began to imagine how people lived back then and how they loved I had to tell their stories.

What did it feel like to fall in love back then, being bound by the strict code that governed all women? What happened when a woman chose to break the rules? Back then, when a woman made love, inside or outside marriage, she took her life in her hands. Pregnancy and childbirth in the Old West made romance a serious business. If a young woman made a bad choice in a man, she faced a lifetime of hardship. If she fell for a bad boy, it wasn’t just a romantic fling she could shrug off when it soured. She was likely ruined. Reputation was everything. Throw that away and there were few jobs she could get, few men who would have her.

But women still loved, married and had children. They had incredible love stories. .

My first novel about the Old West was ANGEL. That story taught me just what lay in store for a girl with bad luck and careless choices. The research started out fun and fascinating but quickly informed me of the sobering reality that women paid a severe price for rebellion. Eight more of my novels have explored living and loving in the Old West. HER OUTLAW HEART, my newest historical romance, explores what it means to live and love by Old West standards from a different perspective. My young heroine risks everything for love, fights for her reputation and wins the heart of a true hero.

I’ll always love the Old West because it’s in my blood. I’ll keep writing western romance because 19th century America is still as real to me as the mountains I love.