Due To His SIZE DOWN THERE, Mountain Man Was Rejected By Every Woman Until Mail-Order Bride Came…

Chapter 1

They called him the devil of Copper Hollow.

Not for anything he’d done. Not for a single life he’d ever taken. But for something no man could help, and no woman had ever been willing to forgive.

Elias Thorne stood six foot seven in his stocking feet, and folks in that dusty Montana town swore the ground itself groaned when he walked. His shoulders filled a doorway the way a storm fills a valley. His hands could crush river stones to gravel—and had, on more than one long and lonely afternoon.

He was the biggest man anyone in the territory had ever laid eyes on. And he was, by every measure the town could gossip about, the most alone.

Seven women in four years. Seven brides sent for, seven wagons rolling up the mountain road with hope tucked into their trunks. And seven times that same road carried them back down before the first frost.

Some left in the night. One left screaming. One never even climbed down from the wagon at all—took one look at the size of the man waiting on the porch and told the driver to turn the horses right around.

They whispered about why. Oh, how they whispered. In the mercantile behind cupped hands. At church socials under the hymns. At the barber’s over the scrape of the razor. The reason was always the same, always spoken in that low, scandalized murmur that traveled faster than any telegraph.

It wasn’t his height, though heaven knew that was a wonder in itself.

It wasn’t his temper, for he had none to speak of. Never once raised his hand or his voice to a living soul.

It was what the good Lord had seen fit to give him. A body built on a scale meant for legend, not for any ordinary marriage bed. A thing so far beyond the natural order of men that every woman who learned the truth of it fled as though from a wildfire.

There was a story they told about the third bride. She’d made it a whole month, longer than most. Folks had begun to think it might take. And then one morning she came flying down the mountain road on a borrowed mule, her hair half undone and her eyes wild, and she would not say a word to a living soul about what had sent her running. She only sat in the back of the church for three days straight, and then she took the eastbound train and was never seen in the territory again.

After that, the name stuck for good.

The Devil of Copper Hollow.

Not for his soul. Never for his soul. But for the terrible, God-given fact of him.

And Elias Thorne, who had heard every word of it—for a small town keeps no secrets, least of all from the man they’re about—had come to believe it too. That he was a curse in the shape of a man. That he had been built by some cruel joke of creation, too much for this world to bear.

The rain had been falling on the high country for three days straight the morning everything began to change. It turned the wagon ruts to soup and the mountain passes to glass, and it drummed on the tin roof of the Copper Hollow depot like the whole sky was trying to knock its way in.

Elias stood beneath the depot’s narrow eave, hat in his enormous hands, water sheeting off the brim and down his oilskin coat, and he waited.

He did not want to be there.

Every part of him—every scarred and mountainous inch—wanted to turn his gray gelding around and ride back up to the empty house on the ridge and let this foolishness end the way it always ended.

But he’d made an arrangement. Paid a matchmaker in St. Louis good silver. And a woman was on that train. And a man of his raising did not simply leave a stranger standing on a wet platform in a town she’d never seen.

The train came around the bend with a shriek of iron and a great white breath of steam.

Elias felt his heart do the thing it always did. That stupid, hopeful lurch, like a green colt that never learns the branding iron is hot.

He pressed his hat back onto his head and stepped out into the rain.

The passengers came down in a trickle. A whiskey drummer with a checkered vest. Two ranch hands. An old woman met by her grown son. Elias watched each one and felt the platform empty around him.

And then she stepped down.

She was not what he expected. She was small. The top of her rain-darkened bonnet would not have reached his collarbone. And she was not young in the way the matchmaker’s letters had promised. There was silver threaded through the brown hair at her temples. There were fine lines at the corners of her eyes—the kind that only come from a life that has asked a great deal and been answered.

She carried a single worn carpet bag and a wooden case with a brass clasp, and she held them both against her like a woman well used to being the only one she could rely on.

She looked up at the town. Then she looked down the platform. Then she looked at him.

Elias braced himself. He had felt this moment seven times. He knew its shape the way a man knows the weight of his own axe. The eyes go wide. The chin pulls back. The whole body does that small, involuntary flinch.

He waited for it.

But she didn’t flinch.

She looked at him—up the long climb of him, all six-foot-seven of rain-soaked mountain—and something crossed her face that he could not name. Because he had never once seen it aimed at him.

It was not fear.

It was something closer to relief.