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

Chapter 5

The dining room at Whitlock’s Boarding House was a confessional of small-town observation. Over the first week, Margaret learned to read it the way she’d learned to read a classroom: Mrs. Whitlock, plump and silver-haired, presided like a benevolent general. Lydia Morris, the redhead from the dress shop, filed gossip the way other women filed needle and thread. And on the first night, it was all aimed at her.

“That’s her,” Lydia whispered loudly. “Pemberton’s mail-order bride. Rejected right there at the station.”

“How dreadful,” Mrs. Hartnell agreed, peering over her spectacles.

Lydia leaned in, clearly relishing it. “Called her a shelf-worn spinster in front of half the town.”

Margaret kept her eyes on her stew. She had been wrong; embarrassment knew no Boston manners. It was the same everywhere, just better dressed at home.

“Enough,” Mrs. Whitlock said crisply, setting down the bread with more force than necessary. “Miss Whitfield is a teacher. When the town council meets, I’m introducing her for the schoolhouse position. The children here have been without a proper instructor since Miss Barnes ran off.”

So it was that Margaret found herself, forty-eight hours later, standing before twenty-eight students aged five to sixteen in a one-room schoolhouse that smelled of smoke and wet wool. The pot-bellied stove was warm. The children were not.

“Good afternoon. I am Miss Whitfield, your new teacher.”

A red-haired boy in the back smirked. “Till you run off like Miss Barnes did.”

“That remains to be seen, Mister Hughes.” She consulted the roster. “Danny Hughes — ah, the young man who set fire to the woodshed.”

He had the decency to look startled. “How’d you know that?”

“Small towns, Mr. Hughes, run on gossip the way Boston runs on coal.” She smiled at him. “I haven’t yet met a cattle driver who strikes my fancy, so I imagine I’ll be here a while. Now — let’s begin with an assessment.”

The assessment was sobering. Most of the older boys could barely read; the younger children had been taught almost nothing. But one child raised her hand for every question — a small girl with serious brown eyes and two neat braids.

“Please, Miss Whitfield,” she asked during geography. “Is it true Boston is by the ocean, with real ships?”

“Yes, Clara—” Margaret glanced at the roster. “—Lucy. Lucy Sutton. Ships come from all over the world.”

“Did you ever see a sea monster?”

Danny snorted. “There ain’t no such thing.”

“There aren’t any such things,” Margaret corrected. “And we don’t call each other names, Mr. Hughes. Lucy — what about wolves? Does Boston have wolves?”

“Not in the city.”

“We got plenty here,” Danny said with a grin. “They eat little girls who ask too many questions.”

“They don’t eat people,” Lucy insisted, her chin lifting.

“Not regular wolves,” Danny said. “But the other kind might.”

The room dissolved into laughter. “Lucy believes in werewolves!” a girl announced. “My paw says she’s touched in the head.”

Silence. Margaret clapped her hands. “We show respect for each other’s ideas in this room. Now — geography.”

At the end of the day, Lucy lingered.

“Miss Whitfield? Do you think I’m touched in the head?”

Margaret knelt until their eyes were level. “Absolutely not. You have a vivid imagination and the courage to speak your mind. That’s rare, Lucy. Don’t let them talk you out of it.”

Lucy glanced around, then leaned in close. “I saw one, Miss Whitfield. A wolf man. In the woods behind my paw’s cabin.”

“Did you? What was it like?”

“Big,” Lucy whispered. “Bigger than any normal wolf. Its eyes glowed yellow — like honey.” She paused, and Margaret felt a chill crawl down her spine. “Amber.”

Amber. Against her will, Margaret saw the sheriff’s eyes in the lamplight.

“It didn’t hurt me,” Lucy went on. “Just watched. Some folks say the sheriff knows where they live — that’s why our animals are safe.”

Before Margaret could answer, Lucy darted out the door.

Margaret locked the schoolhouse and stood in the falling dark, and she was so lost in thought that she nearly walked straight into the man waiting by the gate.

“Miss Whitfield.”

She looked up — always up — into Sheriff Gideon Cross’s face. In the day’s last light he looked carved from the wilderness itself, a lock of dark hair fallen across his brow.

“Sheriff. Heard you took the teaching position.”

“News travels quickly in Wolf Hollow.”

“Small town,” he said. “No secrets.”

They walked in silence for a block, snow crunching beneath their boots.

“Most people who come from cities don’t stay,” he said. “Too quiet. Too wild.”

“I’m not most people.”

At the crossroads, her eyes flicked, involuntarily, toward the jail. He noticed.

“Something interest you about the jail, Miss Whitfield?”

She forced a smile. “Just curious. Law in Boston is different.”

“Everything’s different here.” His voice went distant. “Out here there are older laws — territory, survival, protecting what’s yours.”

“Is that why you became sheriff? To protect what’s yours?”

He was quiet a moment. “Never had much that was mine. But the town took me in. Gave me purpose.” He met her eyes. “Sometimes belonging is enough.”

At Mrs. Whitlock’s gate he stepped back and tipped his hat.

“Good evening, Miss Whitfield.”

She watched him go, her heart hammering against her ribs. In her room, Henry’s letter waited on the nightstand.

THE SHERIFF CARRIES A SECRET.

But another thought echoed louder now, impossible to silence:

What if Henry was wrong?