“We Want Her, Daddy!” The Mountain Man’s Twins Chose the Widow the Town Called ‘Too Wide to Wed’

Chapter 2

Moses puffed out his chest. “Look here, mountain man. This is a private conversation.”

“Sounded like a threat,” Ezra rumbled, stopping inches from him. He smelled of woodsmoke, pine needles, and raw danger. “And I have a severe distaste for men who threaten women.”

“She’s hardly a delicate flower.” Moses scoffed, stepping back. “Look at her. She’s half a draft horse.”

Ezra’s hand shot out — enormous, unerring — and seized the front of Moses’s silk vest, lifting the rancher clean off his boots. Moses gasped, his face going an alarming shade of plum, his spurs jingling uselessly in the air.

“You will apologize to the lady,” Ezra growled, his voice so low it vibrated the glass jars on the shelves. “And if I ever hear of you speaking to her that way again — or if any accident befalls her property — I won’t just break your wagon axle. Do we understand each other?”

Ruth’s heart stopped. *Wagon axle.*

Moses nodded frantically. Ezra dropped him in a heap on the floor. Moses scrambled up, stammered a breathless apology, and ran for his horse, leaving the door swinging.

Silence fell, broken only by Micah happily gnawing a crust of sourdough.

Ezra turned back to Ruth. “My apologies again. Seems I only bring violence to your counter.”

But Ruth was staring at him, her mind galloping. “Mr. Vance. Why did you say that about the wagon axle?”

Ezra’s expression went unreadable, then he sighed — a sound like a glacier shifting. “I’m a tracker, Mrs. Calloway. I read the woods. Two years ago I was hunting near Gallows Gorge. I found a wreck at the bottom. A man had perished. The town had already taken the body, but I looked at the debris. The rear axle didn’t snap from weight, and it didn’t snap from rough roads.” His eyes narrowed. “It was sawed halfway through. Whoever drove that wagon was meant to die the moment they hit the rocky grade.”

The blood drained from Ruth’s face. “Nathan… you’re saying Nathan was murdered?”

Ezra caught her by the shoulders before she could fall — his grip firm, shockingly gentle. “I’m saying,” he said softly, “that the snake who just left this store knows a lot more about your husband’s death than he’s letting on.”

“Then what am I supposed to do? Live my whole life looking over my shoulder?”

The answer came from her skirts, small and fierce. “We protect you, Mama.” Jasper hugged her knee hard enough to leave fingerprints. “Yeah,” Micah agreed, baring his little teeth. “We bite the snake.”

Ruth looked from the feral boys to the mountain man holding her upright. The town called her an outcast in her own home. But here, wrapped in the wildness of the Vance family, she felt something she hadn’t felt in years.

She felt safe.

And she knew, with terrifying certainty, that the real trouble in Juniper Flats had only just begun.