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

Chapter 8

But there was a thing that stood between them still. Unspoken and enormous. The great fear at the root of all his solitude.

And Clara, being Clara, was the one to finally name it.

It was late February. The worst of the winter had broken, but the snow still lay deep. They were close by the fire, her book long since set aside, her head against his shoulder.

“Elias,” she said quiet into the warm dark. “Can I ask you something? And will you promise not to go stiff as a poker and pretend you’ve somewhere to be?”

He gave a low, uneasy laugh. “I can try.”

“The reason they call you what they call you. The reason the others left.” She kept her cheek against his shoulder, would not look up at him, and he understood she did it on purpose—to make it easier. “You’ve never said it, and I’ve never asked, but I think it stands between us like a third person in this house. And I’m tired of it having a chair at our fire.”

Elias felt the old shame come up so hard and so fast it nearly choked him. He went to rise.

Her hand on his chest stopped him.

“Don’t run from me,” she said. “Not you. Everyone else in my life ran from the hard things and left me to face them alone. Don’t you be one more.”

She sat up then and looked at him, and her eyes were so steady and so kind that he felt the truth come up out of him whether he willed it or not.

“It’s true,” he said. “What they say. I’m—I’m made wrong, Clara. Built on some scale God meant for a different kind of creature.”

He could not look at her. He looked at the fire.

“Every woman that came up this mountain—when she understood what marrying me would truly mean—it frightened her past bearing. And I don’t blame a one of them. It’s a fearsome thing. I’m a fearsome thing. And I made my peace long ago with dying the way I’ve lived—alone and untouched.”

His voice broke.

“Never once in all my life, held by another soul.”

For a moment, Clara said nothing at all. Then she took his enormous face in both her small hands and turned it toward her. There were tears standing in her eyes, but her voice, when it came, was steady as bedrock.

“Elias Thorne. Listen to me now, because I am a doctor, and I have looked at more of the human body than any of those frightened girls ever will. And I am going to tell you the truth of it.”

She held his gaze.

“You are *not* made wrong. You are made *large*, which is a different thing entirely. And the only thing wrong in this whole sad story is a world that taught a good and gentle man to be ashamed of the body he was born into.”

Her thumbs wiped at his cheeks, and he realized he was weeping. This great mountain of a man, weeping in the arms of a woman half his size.

“There is nothing about you that frightens me. Do you hear me? *Nothing.* And when the time comes—if it comes, in its own good hour, with no hurry and no fear—we will find our way to each other, slow and gentle and kind, the way everything between us has been.”

She pressed her palm to his chest.

“Because I am not a frightened girl, my love. I am a grown woman who knows exactly what she wants. And I want you—*all* of you—just exactly as you are.”

Elias Thorne wept then, in a way he had not wept since he was a boy. Great, silent shudders. And Clara held his head against her breast and rocked him and said nothing more, because nothing more needed saying.

And outside, the snow fell soft on the sleeping valley.

And inside, for the first time in his whole long, lonely life, the devil of Copper Hollow was *held*.