The U. P. Trail

The Union Pacific Railroad is pushing steel through the heart of a continent, and into its path walks Warren Neale, a man who has made a religion of silence. He has no intention of loving anyone, certainly not Allie, the young woman traveling the Oregon Trail with secrets wound tighter than a pistol's spring. But the wilderness has a way of stripping pretense. As survey crews battle Sioux raids, brutal winters, and the crushing labor of carving civilization from stone, Allie and Warren find themselves drawn together by the only things the frontier respects: raw courage and honesty that gets you killed. Bill Horn, the weathered caravan leader carrying a fortune east, knows what's coming. When the Sioux track them and the old trapper Slingerland delivers his warning, the only language that matters is survival. This is a novel about building something permanent in a land that wants you dead, about what it costs to lay railroad tracks across a nation, and about two people who discover they're willing to pay the price together.