“Can You Make Me Come Tonight — The Mail Order Bride Asked… The Virgin Mountain Man Whispered, ‘I…’”

Chapter 1

The cold was the first thing that demanded her attention, and the last thing that would ever let go.

Margaret Howe stood at the edge of the Wyoming Territory with her carpet bag in one hand and the ghost of her dead husband in the other, watching the wagon disappear around a bend in the mountain pass. The driver hadn’t even waited for her boots to touch the ground properly. He had dumped her trunk in the snow, touched the brim of his hat, and whipped the mules back down the trail as if he was fleeing a wildfire.

She was alone.

The cabin crouched thirty yards ahead, pressed against a granite cliff face like a man bracing against a coming storm. Smoke curled from the stone chimney, thin and gray, dissolving into a sky the color of old bone. Around her, the world was a brutal study in white and gray — snow that stretched unbroken to the tree line, rock that scraped at the belly of the clouds, and a silence so complete it pressed against her eardrums like a physical weight.

She had been standing there for five minutes, maybe ten. The cold had stopped being painful and started being numb. Her wedding dress, a simple gray wool she had purchased secondhand in St. Louis, hung heavy with the moisture of the journey. Her boots were soaked through. Her fingers, wrapped in threadbare gloves, had gone white at the tips.

She should move. She knew she should move. But her feet had rooted themselves to the frozen ground, and her chest was doing something strange — tightening and releasing in waves that had nothing to do with the altitude.

She had come from the noise of St. Louis. From the clatter of carriage wheels on cobblestone and the drunken shouts of men spilling from saloons. From a narrow room above a bakery where she had spent six months watching the light change through a cracked window and wondering if this was all that was left.

Charles Vance had been dead for eight months. Her husband of four years had left her with a bruised jaw, a mountain of debt, and a profound understanding of how little a woman’s life was worth when she had no father, no brother, no son to speak for her. He had been a handsome man with a silver tongue and a taste for whiskey. He had courted her for three months, married her in a small church, and spent the next four years making her believe that the bruises were her fault.

She had buried him on a rainy Tuesday. She had stood at the graveside in a borrowed black dress. And she had felt nothing but the slow, terrifying bloom of relief.

But relief didn’t pay debts. Relief didn’t stop the landlord from pounding on her door. Relief didn’t put food in her mouth.

The letters had come through a woman at the church who had heard about a man in the mountains looking for a wife. They were written in a rough, unpracticed hand on paper that smelled of wood smoke and pine resin.

I have a cabin. I have food. I need a wife to keep the hearth and help with the pelts. I do not drink.

That last sentence had been the one that decided it. After four years of whiskey breath and closed fists, the promise of sobriety was more seductive than any declaration of love.

Margaret pushed off from the frozen ground and walked toward the cabin. Her boots crunched in the crusted snow, the sound obscenely loud in the vast silence. She was twenty feet away. Fifteen. Ten.

The door opened before she reached it.

She had pictured this moment a hundred times on the train. She had imagined a dozen different versions of the man who would greet her — leering, stern, awkward, eager. She had prepared herself for every possibility except the one that stood before her now.

Elias Thorne filled the doorway like a force of nature that had decided to take human shape. He was massive — not fat, but built for survival in a world that killed the weak. His shoulders were broad enough to block the firelight spilling from the hearth behind him. His hands, resting on the doorframe, looked like they could crush stone. His beard was thick and dark, threaded with silver, and his hair fell past his ears, tangled and untamed. A thin white scar ran from his temple into his beard, and another crossed his left eyebrow, splitting it in two.

But it was his eyes that stopped her.

They were the color of river stones under shallow water. Clear. Steady. And they were not looking at her with hunger. They were not looking at her with cruelty. They were looking at her with something she had never seen in a man’s eyes before.

Fear.

“You’re here,” he said. His voice was deep, rough, unused — a rumble that seemed to vibrate in the frozen air between them. “I’m Elias.”

Margaret nodded. Her throat was too tight to speak.

“Margaret,” she managed. “Margaret Howe.”

He nodded once, a single economy of motion. He didn’t offer a greeting. He didn’t tell her she looked pretty or that the journey must have been hard. He simply walked past her, lifted her heavy wooden trunk onto his shoulder as if it were a sack of kindling, and tilted his head toward the open door.

“Get inside. You’ll freeze.”

The cabin was a single room, aggressively functional. A cast iron stove dominated the center, radiating a fierce, blistering heat. Bundles of dried herbs and salted meats hung from the rafters, casting dancing shadows in the firelight. A heavy oak table sat near the window, scarred and stained by years of use. Two chairs. A shelf of books with cracked spines. A washbasin. A rifle mounted on pegs above the door.

And in the far corner, tucked beneath the sloping roof, was a bed.

One bed.

Margaret looked at it. Then she looked away.

“You can put your things by the wall,” Elias said, setting the trunk down with a thud that shook the floorboards. He stood in the center of the room, wiping his massive hands on his thighs — a nervous, almost boyish gesture that seemed wildly out of place on a man his size. “There’s stew. Elk and potatoes. If you’re hungry.”

“Thank you.”

She took off her coat. Underneath, she wore a simple dark blue dress, the best she owned, the one she had chosen to be married in — though the ceremony had been nothing more than a signature in front of a board magistrate in the valley town three days ago. She had been married in a stranger’s office to a man she had never met, and she had felt nothing.

Elias watched her for a split second before his gaze dropped to the stove. He grabbed a poker and began jabbing at the coals, a desperate, unnecessary motion that told her everything she needed to know about how comfortable he was with her presence.

They ate in silence. The stew was rich and gamey, and Margaret ate mechanically, her eyes scanning the room, cataloging exits, potential weapons, the layout of the space she would be sharing with this giant of a man. Back east, silence meant anger. It meant a blow was coming. But here, in this cabin at the edge of the world, the silence felt different. It felt like the natural state of things.

She watched him from across the table. His hands were fascinating. They were scarred, the knuckles thick, the skin weathered to the texture of saddle leather. These were hands that killed things. Hands that skinned hides and split logs and swung axes. But as he held his tin spoon, his movements were deliberate, almost gentle, as if he were afraid of breaking the fragile metal.

“Is the winter always this early?” she asked, her voice cracking from disuse.

Elias looked up, startled. “Usually comes by late October,” he said. “Sometimes earlier. We got snowed in till May last year.”

“We?”

“Me and the dogs.” He nodded toward the corner, where two large, wolfish dogs lay curled together, their eyes tracking Margaret’s every movement. “Lost one to a cougar in January. Just the two now.”

Margaret swallowed. The reality of her situation settled heavy in her gut. She was trapped on top of the world with a stranger, two half-wild dogs, and a single bed.

“I can cook,” she said, feeling the sudden need to justify her presence. “I can mend. I know how to process meat. I won’t be a burden.”

Elias’s brow furrowed. He set his spoon down. “Didn’t ask you to be a servant, Margaret. I asked for a wife.”

The word hung in the air between them like a blade suspended by a thread.

Wife.

To Margaret, it meant duty. It meant enduring the dark hours of the night, staring at the ceiling beams while a man’s weight pressed her into the mattress. She had done it before. She could do it again.

“I know what you asked for,” she said, her voice flat. “I’m here.”

Elias didn’t reply. He stood up, took their bowls to the washbasin, and kept his back to her. The tension in the cabin thickened, mingling with the smell of wood smoke and roasting meat.

Outside, the sun had dipped behind the jagged peaks, plunging the wilderness into a deep, bruised purple twilight.

Night was here.

The time for transactions had begun.