Mountain Man Expected a Cold Marriage — But His Bride Set His Heart on Fire

Chapter 2

You want to know what she was really holding in that bag?

Those scissors weren’t sewing tools.

They were evidence.

In Boston, when Sterling locked her in that sewing room — when he finally came for her, drunk and certain of his right to her body — she did not scream. She did not cry. She picked up the scissors from the table where she had been mending his shirt, and when he pushed her against the wall, she drove them into his side.

Not deep. Not enough to kill. But enough to make him bleed. Enough to make him howl.

She ran through the servant’s entrance with his blood still wet on her hands. She washed them in a horse trough three blocks away, but she could not get the red out from under her nails for days.

Sterling did not go to the police about the scissors. He could not admit that a woman had cut him while he was trying to force himself on her — that would mean admitting what he had been doing. So he lied instead. He told them she robbed him. He told them she was a prostitute who attacked a client. He used his money and his name to paint her as the criminal.

And she let the lie stand. Because the truth — that she had fought back, that she had drawn a man’s blood — would have destroyed her just as surely. A woman who attacks a gentleman, even in self-defense, is still a woman who attacks.

So she fled with the scissors wrapped in cloth at the bottom of her bag. Not as a weapon. As proof. Proof that she was not the monster he said she was.

But proof of what, exactly?

That she had it in her to hurt someone?

That given the right circumstances, she could become dangerous?

She lay in that cabin bed on her first night, with the metal cold against her palm, and she wondered: if this mountain man tried to take what Sterling had tried to take, would she do it again?

She did not know the answer.

And that terrified her more than any warrant ever could.