Hummingbird

Hummingbird is a historical romance by LaVyrle Spencer, published in 1983 and set in frontier Colorado, where a woman's respectability is the only protection she has.

Abigail McKenzie holds firm opinions about how life ought to be conducted, and the same train robbery deposits two badly wounded men at her door. David is gentle and loving, everything a lady could reasonably wish for, and he offers her a happiness she had stopped hoping to find. Jesse is the opposite in every respect: rude, violent, roughly handsome and entirely unwilling to behave, and he stands for everything Abigail disapproves of. Nursing them both through their recovery puts her in daily contact with two very different futures, and the novel follows her struggle with an attraction to the man she dislikes, which finally forces a choice she would rather not have to make.

Spencer wrote historical romance with close attention to period detail and to character, and this novel was one of her early successes in a long career of bestsellers. Much of its length is spent on the daily work of nursing two difficult patients, which is where the choice between them is eventually made.