“Hannah, huh?” Justin had an immediate image of an old-fashioned female to fit the old-fashioned name-prim, proper, virginal and probably plain.

“Yeah, Hannah Deturk.”

Add prudish to the list.

“And you’d better be nice to her,” Mitch warned.

“Of course I’ll be nice to her. Why the hell wouldn’t I be nice to her?” Justin said, genuinely hurt by his brother’s warning, by the idea that Mitch felt it necessary to issue the warning.

“Well…” Mitch’s tone was now conciliatory. “You’ve never made a secret about how you feel about women, and I just don’t want anything to upset Maggie.”

“You sound as smitten as Ben,” he said. “You really do have it bad, don’t you?”

“I love her, Justin, more than my own life,” Mitch admitted in a quiet, but rock-solid tone.

“I hear you, and I promise I’ll behave.” He knew he’d never felt like that about a woman, not even his ex-wife, Angie, and was certain he never would.

Hell, he never wanted to experience that kind of intense emotion for any woman, Justin thought minutes later, frowning as he cradled the receiver. That path only led to pain.

First Ben and Karla, now Mitch and Maggie, he mused, staring into space, and all within one year.

Hmm. While Justin wasn’t fanciful, he did wonder if there was some type of aphrodisiac in Deadwood’s water, or maybe it was the atmosphere in the casino, some sort of love and marriage spell.

The day after Christmas, Justin set off for Deadwood, convinced he was impervious to anything like a spell or potion. He’d learned his lesson.

Hannah Deturk had not been exactly thrilled to be leaving Philadelphia at the end of the third week of December, of all times of the year, for the upper Midwest. South Dakota via Nebraska. To Hannah Deadwood, South Dakota was the back of beyond and, if possible, even more remote than the area of Nebraska where she had been born and raised.

After graduating college and relocating, first to Chicago, which was too windy, then to New York City, which was too big, and finally settling into Philadelphia, Hannah had vowed that other than brief visits home to visit her folks, she would never go back to that desolate part of the country.