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

Chapter 3

Dot Fenny was right about most of it.

She was wrong about one thing: Clara Whitfield’s husband was not dead.

—

The morning Elias met Clara at the depot, he had already planned the whole thing. He would be kind. He would be honest. He would let her get one good look at him. And when the fear came into her eyes—and it always came—he would pay her fare home himself and not say a word about it. He would tip his hat, and he would ride back up the mountain to the life that fit him like a coat cut for another man.

He was practiced at this now.

God help him, he had learned over seven fine and hopeful women exactly how to lose with grace.

He had learned it so well he could feel the losing already, standing there in the rain before the train had even rounded the bend.

And then she stepped down, and she didn’t flinch, and everything he had prepared fell apart.

—

Her name was Clara Whitfield, and she was forty-one years old. She had been married twice. The first was a doctor in Ohio who taught her everything he knew because he had no sons and she had a steady hand and wasn’t squeamish. For eleven years, she set bones and stitched wounds and delivered babies right alongside him.

When he died of the fever, she kept on doing it. Because folks still got sick, and there was no one else.

Then she made the mistake of marrying again.

A man who did not care for a wife who knew things he didn’t. A man who did not care for a wife who had her own money and her own mind. He spent the money, and when it was gone, he found ways to spend her, too.

She told Elias none of this at the depot. She told him over coffee at the Silver Spur, with Dot Fenny’s sharp eyes tracking every word from behind the bar, and Elias’s enormous hands wrapped around a tin cup that looked like a toy in his grip.

“My first husband was a good man,” she said, her voice steady. “He taught me everything. And when he died, I kept on doing it because folks still got sick and there was no one else.”

She turned her cup a quarter turn.

“Then I made the mistake of marrying again. A man who did not care for a wife who knew things he didn’t. He spent my money, and when it was gone, he found ways to spend me, too.”

Elias went very still. Something moved in the great plains of his face—some old grief of his own answering hers—and his enormous hand, resting on the table, curled slowly into a fist. Then, with visible effort, uncurled again.

“You needn’t look like that,” Clara said gently. “I didn’t tell you to make you angry on my behalf. I told you because I want no lies to stand between us. Not even the polite kind.”

She took a sip of her coffee.

“So I have come to prize the plain truth above almost everything. And the plain truth, Mr. Thorne, is that I stopped believing in gentlemen a long time ago. I stopped believing there was such a thing as a strong man who wouldn’t sooner or later use that strength on someone smaller.”

She paused.

“I’m here because I heard a story about a man the whole world was afraid of, who had never once in all his years hurt a living soul. And I thought—there is a thing I have never seen. A man with every power in the world to be cruel, who simply chooses not to be. I had to know if he was real.”

Elias asked, hardly daring: “And?”

Clara looked at him—at the great, gentle giant who had carried her bag and worn the town’s stares off and put a lock on the inside of her door—and the smallest smile touched her weathered face.

“I’m beginning to think,” she said, “that he might be.”