Colorado Pluck

Colorado Jim, nouveau-riche from the dust-blistered frontier, barrels into Manhattan’s chandeliered salons flush with mining millions; there he collides with Reggie Featherstone, a penniless English dandy whose blood is bluer than his bank account. A whim of transatlantic curiosity shuttles them eastward to a fog-soft London where ancestral portraits weep dust and creditors circle like ravens. Amid cracked heraldic china and the sour perfume of genteel decay, Jim’s gaze locks on Angela Featherstone—alabaster composure over smouldering panic—who, cornered by her family’s insolvency, barters her hand for Jim’s gold while vowing the marriage will remain a frigid contract, never a consummated union. Flush with his dollars, she embarks on a glittering rampage of dressmakers, casinos, Riviera detours, reducing his fortune to a thin wail of coins. Broke but oddly liberated, Jim ferries her back to the raw cobalt skies of his Colorado ranch, a realm of spurs and pine resin where three trespassing oil speculators must be ousted at gunpoint; a ricocheting bullet finds his chest, and as Angela, sleeves rolled, cleans the wound by lamplight, the last ice inside her fractures. Enter Philip Meredith, London’s velvet-gloved predator, trailing declarations of love and a derringer, yet even he becomes mere echo when Angela, sun-burnished and callus-handed, finally whispers her husband’s name like prayer.