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

Chapter 7

There was one night in the deep of January he would carry with him always.

A blizzard had come howling down off the peaks—the worst of the winter—and the wind found some gap in the eaves and set up a shriek that made the whole house moan. Snow piled against the windows, turning the glass opaque, sealing them inside a world of white and silence and the snap of the fire. Clara, who slept so lightly, so poorly, out of that old hard habit of never feeling safe, could not sleep at all.

Elias heard her moving in the small hours. Heard the creak of her door. The soft pad of her feet on the floorboards. The pause. The hesitation.

And he came out into the cold parlor to find her wrapped in her quilt by the banked fire, small and sleepless, her eyes shining in the dark. She looked like a child there, curled into herself, her arms wrapped around her knees. The firelight caught the silver in her hair and the worry in her brow.

He didn’t ask. He just built the fire back up, quiet and careful, coaxing the flames until they caught and threw warmth across the room. And he settled his great bulk onto the floor beside her chair, his back against the settle. Close, but not too close. Near enough to be a warmth and a wall against the storm.

And after a while, without a word, Clara slid down out of the chair and tucked herself against his side, under the arm he lifted for her. And she laid her head on his chest, where his heart beat slow and steady as a war drum.

And the storm screamed itself out against the walls. And the two of them sat there in the firelight.

And Elias did not move a muscle all the long night through, for fear of waking her.

Because somewhere in the black hours, at last, against the enormous warmth of him, Clara Whitfield had fallen fast and deeply asleep. *Safe.* For maybe the first time in twenty years. *Safe.*

He watched the fire burn down to coals, then to ash. He watched the gray light come up slow behind the frosted glass. And he held perfectly, achingly still—this mountain of a man cradling the sleeping woman like she was made of spun glass—and he thought his heart might crack clean open with the tenderness of it.

*I would sit here a hundred years*, he thought. *I would turn to stone right here and count it the best bargain any man ever made. Just to be the safe place. Just to be the thing that lets her rest.*