Raven

Raven is a historical romance by Norah Hess, published in 1999. Its central character is a woman married to a gambler who has very little money and no scruples to speak of.

Her husband orders her to entertain a handsome cowboy at dinner. She does not dare refuse him, and the arrangement becomes worse when she discovers that he has promised the stranger a night in her bed for a thousand dollars. Her husband's business is gambling, and she has learned over the course of the marriage that refusing him is not one of the options available to her.

Chance McGruder is the man who paid, and afterwards he cannot get her out of his mind. He is both tantalized and tormented when she turns up at the neighbouring ranch, newly widowed and no less desirable than she was.

The novel is about what happens to the two of them in the aftermath of a transaction neither of them chose, and about the question Chance keeps asking himself about what kind of a wife she would make.