Part 1
Chapter 1
Three mail-order brides fled Jed’s mountain before a week was over. When Martha arrived, the town bet the obese woman would last 48 hours. Then she fell hard on the frozen trail—and what she did next erased the satisfaction from his face.
Three women before her packed their bags before the first snow even stuck to the ground.
They took one look at Jedodiah's rotting cabin, his scarred face and the endless, brutal isolation of the ridge and ran crying back to the stagecoach.
When the driver dropped off Martha, a woman whose heavy frame drew open sneers in the city, the local betting pool gave her 48 hours.
They didn't know Martha had nowhere left to run, and they sure as hell didn't know she was tired of running anyway.
The town of Bitter Creek was less a town and more a collection of wind-battered boards nailed together in defiance of the Wyoming territory.
Martha Higgins stood on the dirt platform, her heavy wool skirt already collecting dust.
In one hand she held a worn leather carpet bag.
In the other, a small wooden trunk bound in cracked brass.
The stagecoach driver spat a stream of black tobacco juice into the dirt, missing the hem of her dress by a deliberate inch.
"He ain't coming down here, Mr. Boon. He don't come into town unless he needs bullets or salt.
He'll be waiting up at the treeline, assuming you can make it that far."
Martha didn't dignify the man with a response. She adjusted her grip on her bags. She was a large woman.
It was a fact of life as undeniable as the cold wind currently biting through her shawl.
For 32 years, her size had been the punchline to a cruel, endless joke played by society.
It had cost her jobs in respectable houses, cost her the affections of decent men, and relegated her to the sweltering, grease-choked kitchen of a Chicago boarding house until the owner went bankrupt.
She hadn't answered the advertisement in the matrimonial news for romance. She had answered it for a roof.
She turned away from the settlement and looked up the mountain.
The ridge loomed like a jagged black tooth against the gray sky.
Pine trees clung to its sides in thick, forbidding clusters.
It was a three-mile hike up a grade that would make a mule reconsider its life choices. Martha started walking.
She made it to the edge of the timberline before her lungs began to burn in earnest.
The altitude was a physical weight on her chest.
She set the trunk down, her breath coming in ragged white plumes. A shadow detached itself from the pines.
Jed Boon was not a tall man, but he was wide, built like a barrel of cured oak.
He wore a coat made of bear hide, and his face looked like it had lost an argument with a logging saw.
A jagged white scar pulled the left side of his mouth into a perpetual cynical sneer.
He didn't look like a man looking for a wife.
He looked like a man who had forgotten how to speak to another human being. He stared at her.
He didn't look at her face.
His eyes dropped immediately to her wide hips, her thick waist, the heavy set of her shoulders under the wool coat.
The disappointment was palpable, hanging in the freezing air between them. "You're the Higgins woman," he said.
His voice was gravel, grinding under a boot heel. "I am." Martha didn't try to hide her heavy breathing.
There was no point. Jed looked at the trunk, then back down the trail toward town.
"The last one was a twig," he said, speaking more to the trees than to her.
"She cried when she saw the trail.
Figured I needed someone with more meat on her bones to survive the frost.
Didn't figure the agency would send me a draft horse—" It was a cruel thing to say, stripped of all polite veneer.
A younger Martha, or a softer one, might have flushed red, let the tears well up, and turned back, but Chicago had burned the softness out of her years ago.
"A draft horse pulls its weight, Mr. Boon," Martha said flatly. She picked up the carpet bag.
"Are you going to stare at me until we freeze, or are you going to show me where this cabin is?"
Jed's eyes narrowed. A flicker of something—annoyance, maybe surprise—crossed his weathered face.
He reached down, grabbed the heavy wooden trunk with one hand, and hoisted it onto his shoulder as if it were filled with feathers.
He turned on his heel and began to march up the trail. He didn't slow down.
May you like
The next two hours were an education in physical agony.
—END OF Chapter 1,
