Rejected Mail-Order Bride is Rescued by a Lonely Sheriff – She Has No Idea He’s a Shifter

Chapter 3

She was twenty-four, unemployed, homeless, and the object of a city’s polite pity.

And then the letter came.

Not the one from the advertisement — that would come later, from a stranger with neat handwriting and promises of prosperity. The letter that mattered arrived first, from Wyoming Territory, in an envelope addressed in a hand she almost didn’t recognize.

Margaret,

I am well, though the work is hard and the nights are long. The town grows by the week. I have taken a position with a mining concern that pays well. The mountains here are beautiful, and I think of the library at home. Do you remember the winter we spent translating Father’s Latin books, and how we made a game of finding the secret words? I have found work that requires me to be careful about what I say. The sheriff is a respected man. He keeps to himself. But I have seen things that trouble me. I have written to the Chauncey house about the arrangement. I hope you will consider it. The snow is deep. Come soon, if you can. Do not be afraid of the dark. The dark is where the truth lives.

Your affectionate brother,

Henry

Margaret read it three times before she found the words. Underlined, faintly, in the way they’d practiced as children — the first letter of each marked word, strung together:

THE SHERIFF CARRIES A SECRET. I NEED YOUR HELP. COME NOW. DANGER.

She had to sit down.

So it was that when the advertisement appeared in the Boston paper — Successful businessman in established Wyoming township seeks bride of good character and education — she read it as providence. Wolf Hollow. The very town where her brother rotted in a jail cell. The groom described himself as a man of substance and vision, which was exactly what a desperate woman needed to believe. She wrote back the same night. His letters were neat, confident, and full of a future she could almost see: a house, a schoolroom, a life.

She sold what remained of her good dresses for a train ticket. Every penny of it.

The journey took eleven days. The landscape changed from brick to farmland to a vast, empty sea of grass and mountain, and with each mile the certainties of Boston fell away until she was a woman made only of hope and a brother’s warning.

The train stopped at Wolf Hollow in late afternoon, in a snow so thick the station was a ghost. She stood on the platform with her trunk and her father’s watch, and she waited. Four o’clock came and went. Five. Six. The cold walked up her fine Boston boots and into her bones.

The station master, a gray-mustached man with a face like a folded map, came out as the dark thickened.

“Miss,” he said, not unkindly. “Station’s closing soon. Your party ain’t coming.”

She lifted her chin the way her father had taught her. “He assured me in his letter. He’ll be here.”

“Miss.” The man’s pity was worse than cruelty. “It’s near seven. There’s a boarding house down the street.”

She looked at the empty road, at the snow swallowing the tracks behind her, at the ticket stub in her purse that had cost her everything. Somewhere in this town a jail cell held her brother. Somewhere in this town a man who had promised her safety was eating his dinner by a warm fire.

And she had no way back.