After reading a score or two of European set historical romances, Written On The Wind, set in 1860 Texas, looked like a welcome change of pace. But after slogging through it, I finished it with a sigh of relief – seldom have I seen a couple with less chemistry than Matt Conway and White Fawn.

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Matt Conway and some Texas Rangers come across a band of Comanche Indians and kill them. Matt has no love for the Comanche since they killed his family, but he draws the line at mutilating the bodies, especially since one of them appears to be a teen aged boy. The “boy” is White Fawn, a white woman who, after being kidnapped as a young child, grew up with the Comanche and thinks of herself as an Indian. White Fawn knows something of the white world from a missionary and speaks broken English. She plays dead until the men leave, then takes off looking for her tribe. But Matt finds her first and realizes that she is not an Indian. So he takes her to his home.

White Fawn cleans up very prettily and it doesn’t take Matt long to fall in lust with her. There are pages and pages and pages of mental lust/hate on his part and I found it all rather icky. White Fawn is tiny, slight, and childish looking – at one point Matt plans to take her to an orphanage – and all this mental lusting after such a childish looking women was verydistasteful. Although he lusts, Matt just knows that White Fawn has had sex with the entire Comanche Nation (not that he ever asks her) and thinks evil of her for her supposed slutty ways. Finally, after many pages of lusting they do the deed and Matt is surprised that she is a virgin.

Great sex makes White Fawn and Matt all broody but naturally they don’t talk to each other. When White Fawn goes off for a ride, a group of Commanche capture her and bring her to her Indian father, Eagle Feather. When Matt takes off to look for her, a group of Commanche capture him and bring him to Eagle Feather. White Fawn must then choose.

Matt and White Fawn were not exactly the most interesting pair on the planet and I never figured out what they saw in each other. Given that White Fawn can’t speak English all that well, they really don’t communicate much (except in bed). The secondary characters – the men who work on Matt’s ranch, and Eagle Feather – were all more interesting than they were.

The background of the story was mildly interesting and I was pleased that the author didn’t make all the Indian characters noble and the white characters evil (or vice versa). There was goodness and evil on both sides in the story just as it was in real life. If only the main characters had some life and some connection between them, this would have been an excellent romance. But the lack of connection between Matt and White Fawn quite spoiled the book for me.