The Bride Who Step Dances

She wants to step dance her way to the West.
He wants nothing to do with women and marriage.
Sparks fly when he drags her off of a saloon stage.

Stranded in Laramie City, Wyoming Territory, British immigrants Maggie Clarke and her sixteen-year-old brother, Eddie, hope to earn enough to buy train tickets to take them closer to the gold fields in the West. Eddie plays the fiddle while Maggie step dances. The pair searches for a location with a raised wooden platform so they can perform for tips. They find one, but how were they to know that saloons in the Wild West are not like the public houses with lady parlours they were used to in Manchester?

Cecil Bellamy and his newly married brother visit Rupert’s Roundup, the “cowboy saloon,” in Laramie City to hire cowhands for the fall roundup. After, while his brother collects his wife from a women’s social, Cecil avoids being approached by marriage-minded women by waiting inside the same saloon where he found his new employees. Much to his surprise, instead of the usual out-of-tune piano music, a teenage boy playing the fiddle and a young woman stomping her feet take to the stage. All was well and good until a man with a reputation black as all hades when it came to how he treated women decides to climb onto the stage, intent on dancing—and more—with the pretty lady. The next thing Cecil knows, he forgets all about his personal vow to avoid women and enters the fray.

You might also enjoy reading the companion book, The Bride Who Invades Saloons.