Dark Knight

Georgina Townsend had never lived in one place for long enough to consider it home. The daughter of a wealthy widowed socialite, Georgy had been swept along by her vagabond mother from country to country, continent to continent. She remembered with nostalgia only one place: the Kansas farm, owned by distant cousins of her mother’s, where she had spent several idyllic months nine years ago.

It was her mother’s reduced circumstances that brought Georgy the chance to return to the Blake farm. When Lynette Townsend found that she had run through her seemingly limitless funds, she promptly married Alfred Morton, a stodgy banker who had courted her unsuccessfully for years. While Lynette and Alfred honeymooned, the nineteen-year-old Georgy would spend the summer in Kansas before starting business school in the fall.

During the flight from Los Angeles to Dodge City after the wedding, Georgy happily anticipated her reunion with kindly, gray-haired Cousin Ross and his wife, Marie. It was her seatmate, blond Bill Coreles, a Dodge City native and a relative of the Blakes, who gave her the unsettling news. Ross and Marie Blake had died three years ago in an automobile accident. The Ross Blake with whom Lynette had made the arrangements was their son.

As if that weren’t disconcerting enough, the young Ross, raven-haired and blue-eyed, looked exactly like the “dark knight” Georgy had dreamed up as the leading man in her romantic fantasies. But there the similarity ended, for far from being enchanted by her, Ross Blake greeted Georgy with cool skepticism bordering on scorn.