Proud and courageous, Cheyenne Edson has to fight for everything she gets. It's been that way from childhood, and she has known no other way. A half-breed by birth, with a mother who was there yet never really there, Cheyenne knew she had to make her own way in life or get destroyed by it, like it had destroyed her beautiful mother.
When her ma marries her off to a man more than twice her age, Cheyenne is willing to accept the hand that fate has dealt her...until her new husband ups and leaves her before she's even gotten used to the idea of being a wife.
She expects her husband to be gone for a few months, but when months turn into years, Cheyenne is left with a question: Am I a wife or a widow? With no family or friends, and starved for attention, she befriends the first thing that shows her any love, a half-breed like her--a wolf-dog that she rescues from certain death.
Together the two of them try to live in a land where only the strong survive, where women are viewed as nothing more than the property of men, and where wolves and dogs are only tolerated.
Cheyenne is used to making use of her double-barreled shotgun to keep unwanted visitors away from her cabin, until she catches the eyes of Theodore McCloud (Tipp). Cheyenne knows when she looks into his eyes that this stranger will be trouble for her and her dog, and no matter how many times she refuses his gifts, he will not take no for an answer.
In the quiet of the night, she has to be honest with herself. Does she really mean no? Does she want him gone, as she keeps telling him? In the hours just before dawn, the truth has a way of making itself heard, of forcing one to acknowledge what is and what isn't. And in Cheyenne's case, what she says isn't what she means. She doesn't want him gone, as she keeps telling him. She needs him, in every sense of the word. She won't survive without him. But first she has to acknowledge that fact and then get Tipp to see her as something more than a widow with a slow walk.
