The mountain man had never asked to see Clara Whitmore’s face.
For eight months, Elias Mercer had known her only through ink, paper, and the careful sentences she mailed west from Ohio. Yet the moment Clara stepped down from the stagecoach in Laramie, nearly two thousand miles from everything she had ever called home, there was nowhere left for either of them to hide.
Elias was waiting beside the road.
He was taller than she had imagined.
The letters had told her he was thirty-two, that he worked timber and kept livestock on three hundred acres in the foothills of the Laramie Range, and that he had once built an entire barn because the carpenter he hired disappeared halfway through the job.
None of that had prepared her for the man himself.
Broad shoulders filled his dark wool coat. Wind had roughened his face and darkened his beard. His hair was longer than respectable men wore it back east, pushed away from gray eyes that seemed to notice everything without offering much in return.
Clara paused on the stagecoach step.
Her gloved hand tightened around the rail.
For six weeks, one sentence had haunted her.
She had written it herself.
I am not pretty.
Not I am plain.
Not I am no beauty.
She had chosen the bluntest possible words because she did not want pity built on misunderstanding.
At twenty-nine, Clara knew what disappointment looked like when it arrived in a man’s eyes.
She had watched it during church socials.
At school functions.
At the library counter when visitors heard her voice before coming around the tall stacks and seeing the rest of her.
She was soft and full-bodied, with rounded cheeks and a figure no fashionable dressmaker would have described as delicate. Her dark hair was her one feature people praised, thick enough that pins struggled to hold it.
For years, relatives had told her she possessed a “kind face.”
Clara had learned that kind was what people said when they did not mean beautiful.
Now Elias Mercer stared at her.
One second passed.
Then another.
Clara’s stomach tightened.
There it was, she thought.
The pause.
The reckoning.
The moment a man who had imagined a woman from her letters realized that imagination had been generous.
She stepped onto the dirt.
“You can say it.”
Elias frowned.
“Say what?”
“That I warned you.”
Before she could explain, the stagecoach driver shouted from above.
“Mercer! You taking the trunk or marrying it?”
Elias looked away from Clara.
The driver shoved a battered brown trunk toward the edge.
Elias caught it before it fell.
Clara blinked.
The trunk contained almost everything she owned—books, winter dresses, her mother’s sewing box, a cast-iron skillet, a set of German dictionaries, and enough paper to make the thing nearly impossible for one man to carry.
Elias lifted it as if it contained blankets.
“That all?”
Clara stared.
“My carpetbag.”
The driver tossed it down.
Elias caught that too.
Then he looked back at Clara.
“You hungry?”
She had expected disappointment.
Perhaps politeness.
Possibly regret.
She had not expected that.
“A little.”
“Good.”
He turned toward the wagon.
“I've got stew.”
Clara remained in the road.
Elias walked several paces before noticing she had not followed.
He turned.
“You coming?”
She looked toward the mountains.
Then toward the road behind the stagecoach.
Eight months of letters.
Two thousand miles of travel.
Every dollar she had saved.
No return ticket.
Clara lifted her skirts enough to keep them out of the mud.
“Yes.”
She followed him.
The cabin stood farther into the mountains than Clara had imagined.
They rode for hours.
The town disappeared behind them first. Then fences became less frequent. The road narrowed until it was little more than wagon tracks cutting through pine and open meadow.
The mountains rose ahead.
Clara had read about them.
Paintings had not told the truth.
Neither had books.
They were too large.
Too near.
Their snow-covered peaks seemed to occupy the entire sky.
Elias drove without speaking much.
At first, Clara assumed he had already decided marrying her was a mistake.
Then she remembered his letters.
Elias had never wasted words.
His first response through the matrimonial agency had been only one page.
No poetry.
No promises about sunsets.
No claims about love.
He wrote:
I have land, a sound cabin, livestock enough to support us if weather is reasonable, and debt small enough to pay before spring.