The Texan

The Texan is a contemporary romance by the American writer Joan Johnston, published in 2001. It belongs to her sequence of novels about feuding families in modern Texas, and it takes two people from opposite sides of the quarrel and puts them on their own.

Owen Blackthorne is a man who has arranged his life so that he does not need anyone. Bayleigh Creed arrives at his door anyway, headstrong and unwilling to be turned away, and demands his help in finding her missing brother, who has disappeared in the desolate country of west Texas. The people who know Owen describe him as a lone wolf, and he has never asked anyone for anything.

They go into the wilderness together because there is no alternative: a Blackthorne and a Creed, with a family vendetta behind them and nobody else to rely on. Neither of them expects the attraction that develops while they are trying to stay alive, and neither of them is ready for what they learn about the feud and about each other.