"I've wanted to hold you since the first night you came through that door."
A tear slipped down her face.
"Then why haven't you?"
His voice broke.
"Because I don't know whether I had the right to ask you to become my wife."
She stared at him.
And before she could demand an explanation, something struck the cabin door.
Three thunderous knocks.
The mountain man froze.
Another impact shook the wooden frame.
Then a man's voice shouted through the storm.
He called the mountain man by a name the woman had never heard before.
Not the name he used in the settlement.
Not the name written on their marriage certificate.
A different name.
One that made her husband's entire body go rigid.
The stranger shouted again.
"Open this door! The woman you buried is alive!"
The mountain man's face turned white.
The woman slowly drew back.
"What woman?"
He stared toward the door.
The stranger struck it again.
"Your first wife isn't dead! And the men who kept her hidden are coming!"
The mountain man closed his eyes.
Then whispered five words that chilled his wife more than the storm outside.
"They finally found me out here."
What neither of them understood was that the man pounding on their door was carrying a message that had already cost another man his life.
And before the following sunrise, the woman in the blue dress would discover that her husband's terrible scar, his mysterious former name, and the supposed death of his first wife were all connected to a crime powerful men had spent seven years trying to conceal.
But the cruelest discovery would be something else.
The husband who had been too frightened to kiss her had not been protecting her from his strength.
He had been trying to protect her from a past he believed would destroy anyone who loved him.
And now that past was standing outside their cabin.
The story began several months earlier, when the woman first arrived in the Wyoming mountains with two trunks, forty-three dollars, and a letter that had changed the direction of her life.
She had not come west looking for romance.
At least, not at first.
She had come because there was nowhere else she could bear to live.
For most of her twenty-nine years, she had known what it meant to be treated as though her body were a public inconvenience.