“Take everything off.”
For one terrible second, Elena Whitaker forgot the storm.
She forgot the sleet striking the cabin windows hard enough to sound like handfuls of gravel. She forgot the wagon that had carried her six miles up the mountain and vanished beneath a curtain of snow. She forgot Reverend Pike’s last glance from the driver’s seat and the strange guilt she had seen in his eyes just before Caleb Holt ordered him to leave.
All Elena could hear was the sentence.
Take everything off.
Her back touched the rough log wall.
The room seemed suddenly smaller.
Caleb stood across from her beside the long wooden table, huge even by the standards of the men who worked the Montana timber camps. His dark hair was wet from the storm. Melted snow darkened the shoulders of his heavy coat. His beard made his face look harsher than it was, and the scar running near his right eyebrow did nothing to soften him.
The valley had supplied Elena with enough stories about the mountain trapper to make fear effortless.
Caleb Holt slept with a rifle beside his bed.
Caleb Holt had once spent eleven days lost above the timberline and returned carrying the wolf trap that had nearly taken his foot.
Caleb Holt had broken a man’s jaw outside the mercantile.
Caleb Holt had not entered a church in seven years.
Caleb Holt wanted a wife because no decent woman would willingly stay with him.
Some of those stories might even have been true.
Elena did not know.
She knew only that earlier that morning her father had placed twenty dollars on the kitchen table, counted it twice, and sent his daughter away with a man she barely knew.
Two draft horses had been tied outside.
Her price.
Twenty dollars.
Two horses.
Her father had not even looked ashamed.
Now the man who had paid him stood between Elena and the cabin door.
Beneath her wedding gown, Aunt Beatrice’s corset dug into her ribs so hard that every breath had become a negotiation.
Elena pressed one large hand beneath her breastbone.
Her chest burned.
The room moved slightly.
Caleb saw.
He took one step.
Elena lifted her other hand immediately.
“Don’t.”
He stopped.
The fact that he stopped unsettled her almost as much as if he had continued.
Her voice shook.
“If you think twenty dollars gives you the right—”
“It doesn’t.”
Elena stared.
Caleb’s gaze dropped toward the rigid line beneath the bodice of her cream wedding dress.
“That thing is crushing you.”
“That is none of your concern.”
“You’re turning gray.”
“I am not.”
“You are.”
“I have been breathing all day.”
“Badly.”
Elena’s cheeks burned.
She had heard men speak about her body since childhood as if she were furniture occupying too much space.
Too wide.
Too heavy.
Too soft.
Too slow.
Too visible.
At twenty-two, she weighed close to three hundred kilograms. Her body was enormous even among large-framed frontier women: broad hips, extraordinarily heavy thighs, thick legs, full arms, large hands, and a broad round face that strangers seemed to believe gave them permission to decide everything about her before she spoke.
The corset had been Aunt Beatrice’s final attempt to make Elena “presentable.”
Two women had needed to pull the laces.
Elena remembered bracing both hands against the bedpost while her aunt tightened.
“Again.”
Elena had gasped.
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
Another pull.
Pain.
“You can’t arrive looking like a sack of grain.”
Elena had almost laughed.
She had already been sold for less than some sacks of grain.
Now she glared at Caleb.
“I will decide what I remove.”
Something shifted in his expression.
Not anger.
Approval.
“Good.”
Before Elena understood, Caleb turned his back.
Completely.
He walked toward the table without looking at her.
Elena watched cautiously.
He opened a cedar chest.
From it he removed a cream cotton chemise.
It was enormous.
Not stretched.
Not altered crudely.
Made wide.
Generous.
Soft.
Then came a plain slate-blue wool dress constructed with adjustable side lacing and enough cloth to drape comfortably around a body Elena’s size.
He placed both garments on the table.
Elena’s breath caught for a different reason.
Caleb said nothing.
He reached into the chest once more and placed a small pair of scissors beside them.
Then he moved toward the fireplace.
Still facing away.
“You can cut the corset if the knots won’t open.”
Elena looked down at herself.
“You had clothes made for me?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I did not know your measurements.”
“Clearly.”
His shoulders shifted, perhaps suppressing something dangerously close to a smile.
“I told the seamstress to make them too large rather than too small.”
Elena looked at the dress again.
No one had ever deliberately made clothing too large for her.
Every fitting she remembered involved apology.
Compromise.
Extra panels inserted as though her body were a mistake the dressmaker had been forced to correct.