The first thing Adelaide Miller noticed about Montana was that the wind seemed to have teeth.
It came across the Dry Creek station platform without obstruction, carrying fine needles of snow that slipped beneath her collar and found every place where her traveling clothes failed to protect her.
The second thing she noticed was the man waiting beneath the station awning.
He was taller than she had imagined from the photograph.
Much taller.
Broad through the shoulders, wearing a weather-darkened sheepskin coat, heavy boots, and a black felt hat pulled low over brown hair that was already dusted with snow. A short beard covered a hard jaw. His eyes were gray and steady enough to make Adelaide feel as though she had been measured before he had taken a single step toward her.
She tightened her hand around the green ribbon the matchmaking agency had instructed her to carry.
The ribbon had seemed ridiculous when she boarded the train in Missouri.
Now it felt like the only thing connecting the life she had abandoned to the uncertain one waiting in front of her.
The man crossed the platform.
“Adelaide Miller?”
His voice was deeper than she expected.
She gave him the nervous smile she had practiced during the final hundred miles of the journey.
“Yes.”
The relief that should have appeared on his face never came.
Instead, his gaze traveled past her shoulder.
To the train.
Then back toward the passengers moving around them.
“Were you traveling with another woman?”
Adelaide’s smile disappeared.
“No.”
The man looked at the ribbon again.
Then at her.
She knew that look.
She had known versions of it since childhood.
Adelaide was a very large woman.
She had broad shoulders softened by fullness, heavy arms, generous hips, a round stomach, thick thighs, and a beautiful face people often failed to notice until after they had finished noticing everything else.
Dressmakers sighed before taking her measurements.
Children stared.
Men sometimes made jokes loudly enough for her to hear and then pretended they had not meant anything by them.
Women offered diets she had never requested.
There were days when Adelaide could walk into a room and feel every chair announcing whether it had been built with someone like her in mind.
She had learned to enter such rooms carefully.
The man before her was doing exactly what so many others had done.
Calculating.
His disappointment was almost physical.
“You’re Gideon Cole?” she asked.
“Yes.”
He removed his hat briefly.
His manners were not entirely absent.
That almost made what came next worse.
“The agency lied.”
Adelaide’s fingers tightened around the ribbon.
“About what?”
Gideon looked toward the tracks.
Then back at her.
“I was specific.”
“I asked for a woman accustomed to hard work.”
“I am.”
“A woman who could manage an isolated ranch through winter.”
“I can work.”
His jaw tightened.
“You don't know where I live.”
“Twenty miles north of Dry Creek.”
“In summer.”
“In winter, those twenty miles can become three days.”
Adelaide felt people passing behind her.
She wished every one of them would vanish.
Gideon continued.
“I haul water when the creek freezes.”
“I cut wood.”
“I clear snow.”
“I tend cattle through storms.”
“I asked the agency for a woman built for that kind of work.”
There it was.
Not a direct insult.
Something more respectable.
Something he could later claim had only been practical.
Adelaide lifted her chin.
“And you have decided I am not?”
Gideon’s eyes moved over her figure once more.
The answer was already there.
“I have no intention of registering this marriage.”
The platform seemed to become very quiet.
It was not.
A porter shouted.
Steam hissed beneath the train.
A child was crying farther down the platform.
But Adelaide heard none of it.
She had spent eight days traveling west.
She had sold nearly everything she owned to afford what the agency did not cover.
Her uncle had died in April.
The farm where she had lived since her parents’ deaths belonged to his creditors.
There was no home waiting for her in Missouri.
No parent.
No sibling.
No wealthy cousin who would welcome her indefinitely.
She had come to Montana because a man named Gideon Cole had written that he needed a wife.
Not a beauty.
Not a social ornament.
A partner.
Adelaide had believed, foolishly, that perhaps usefulness would matter more than appearance.
Now Gideon looked at her as though even usefulness had been disproved by the shape of her body.
“When is the next eastbound train?” she asked.
He looked surprised.
“Thursday.”
Today was Monday.
“How much is the fare?”
“I don't know.”
“I spent what I had getting here.”
Something changed in his face.