Delafield Affair

New Mexico's brutal heat doesn't forgive weakness. Lucy Bancroft arrives in the territory fleeing the remnants of typhoid fever, her health shattered but her will unbroken. When she and her father stop at Curt Conrad's ranch, they find a man shaped by a single obsession: Delafield, the eastern businessman who cheated Curt's father out of everything and vanished into respectable society. Curt has spent years tracking this ghost, and now Lucy becomes entangled in his hunt, drawn into a dangerous game of pursuit across a landscape that offers no mercy. What begins as a quest for justice becomes something neither of them expected. The desert strips away pretense, leaving only truth, the truth of what we sacrifice for revenge, and what we're willing to accept when love complicates everything. This is early 20th-century Western romance at its most visceral: a story about recovery, obsession, and whether two people can find each other when one is consumed by the past.