Meredith

Meredith Calloway and Roland Goodman were children when his father's broken pocket watch slipped into a Wyoming pond — right before his father's fists found him. Meredith never forgot the fear in his eyes that day, or the train she convinced him to jump.

Years later, Meredith is grown, gun-trained, and desperate to prove she belongs at her brother's detective agency — the one founded by her whip-cracking idol, Lula Mae. She's torn between two men: steady, capable Ledge Prettydog, and Roland, the boy who once needed saving and has come back into her life courting her instead.

Then Roland admits the truth — he's trapped in his father's old gang, and leaving means dying. Meredith risks everything to get him out. But the gang has a ransom in mind that isn't money: that same broken watch, still lost in the pond where it fell years before. Only Meredith might know where to find it — and what she pulls from the water will decide whether Roland lives to become her husband at all.

Fans of Lula Mae will recognize the same fire in her protege — a woman who'd rather race toward danger, veil and all, than wait safely on the sidelines.