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

Chapter 4

He showed her the house on the ridge the way a man shows a guest he expects to leave.

“Here’s the kitchen.” The great hearth he’d built, big enough to roast a whole hog. The pots hanging on their pegs, all of it clean, because a lonely man keeps things clean for lack of anything better to do with his hands.

“Here’s the parlor, though I don’t use it.”

“Here’s the well and the springhouse and the barn where the stock winters.”

And then he stopped at the last door down the hall.

“Here’s the room that’ll be yours.”

He’d fixed it up that morning. A fresh quilt, aired and beaten. The little glass vase he’d filled with the last of the season’s asters, purple and gold against the gray day. The lamp trimmed and ready. A pitcher of water and a good clean cloth.

He’d stood in that room at dawn, a giant fussing over a vase like a nervous boy before a dance, and he’d hated himself a little for the hope in it. And he’d done it anyway.

“It’s lovely,” Clara said.

And she meant it. He could hear that she meant it. And it undid something in him—some old knot he’d tied so long ago he’d forgotten it was there.

“The lock’s on the inside,” he said low, looking at the floor. “The door. I put it on this morning so you’d know that when I said you were safe, you’d have proof of it in your own hand. You can lock that door against the whole world—against me, if you have a mind to—and no power on this earth will open it but you.”

Clara was silent for a moment.

When Elias made himself look up, there was something bright and startled in her eyes, as though he’d handed her a thing she had spent her whole life being told she’d never have.

“Thank you, Elias,” was all she said.

But she said his name—his Christian name, that she’d only just learned. And she said it soft, and he carried the sound of it around in his chest for the rest of the day like a warm coal.

—

That first night, he slept in the barn.

He told her it was because the mare was near her time, and he liked to be close. It was half true. The other half was that he did not trust himself to be gentle enough, careful enough, *small* enough. And so he took a blanket out to the warm dark of the barn and lay in the straw and listened to the rain and did not sleep at all.

In the morning, Clara had coffee on and biscuits in the oven and his tools—his old neglected carpentry tools—laid out clean and oiled on the table. Because she’d found them rusting in a corner and could not abide a good tool left to spoil.

And Elias stood in the doorway of his own kitchen, watching this woman move through his lonely house like she belonged in it.

He thought: *I will not let myself hope. I have hoped seven times, and it has cost me seven pieces of my heart, and I do not have so many left.*

But he hoped anyway.

God help him, he hoped anyway.