Looking After Lily

Cindy Bonner knows that the most powerful love stories are those told straight from the heart of the lover. In Looking After Lily, the lover is a young Texas outlaw, trying to reform. Haywood Beatty and his brother Marion have survived the famous Christmas 1883 shootout between the Beatty Gang and the McDade vigilantes. Both Beattys are jailed in Bastrop where Lily, Marion’s very pregnant young wife, waits for the outcome of their trials. Haywood gets sprung, but Marion is sentenced to two years hard labor. And before Haywood leaves the jail, Marion exacts his promise to take care of Lily.Looking after Lily is a burden Haywood didn’t bargain for. Only twenty years old himself, destitute and without a respectable upbringing or trade, he keeps trying to “settle” Lily someplace so he can get on with a new life as a cowboy. But it’s not so easy to leave Lily behind. For one thing, she keeps coming up with what Haywood needs. A horse. A gun. Some money. Common sense. And once Haywood has saved her from a rapist by murdering him, once he witnesses her bravery in the face of childbirth, and watches as she raises her baby girl, Haywood recognizes that he has fallen in love with his brother’s wife.Just as she did in her very popular first novel, Lily, Bonner takes and old story and breathes new life into it by creating characters so convincing and so likable that they take on dimensions that are at once human and heroic. As Haywood struggles to deal honorably with his brother’s wife and child, we watch a boy turn into a man.And what a man he turns out to be.