Mail-Order Bride Rejected For Being ‘Too Poor’, Until a Rancher Gave Her the World

Chapter 2

The rain hit her a mile and a half out, straight and hard, as if the sky had been saving it for her arrival.

Clara walked with the satchel clamped to her chest, her hair plastered flat, her dress a second skin gone cold. The wheels had ruts filled with water; her boots filled and emptied with every step. Lightning strung the clouds together like dropped stitches, and the thunder followed so close behind that the ground vibrated up through her teeth. She did not cry. She counted — twenty-three cents, one satchel, two hands — a litany against the dark, the way her mother had taught her to count the stitches in a hem to keep from crying the night before her father’s funeral.

Then she saw the barn.

It crouched on a hillside above a long house with smoke rising anyway, heedless of the season, and she climbed toward it as the mud tried to swallow her boots whole. The latch gave with a groan, and the silence inside was so abrupt it rang. Hay and leather and horses — the smell of something that would not judge her.

She was asleep against a bale before the rain finished its aria, curled around her satchel, the thimble still on her finger.

Light woke her. Lantern light, and a man’s shape above her, big-shouldered and still.