“Look at me, Elena. Look at this face. Look at these hands. Men like me don't get happy endings.”
Gideon Hale's deep voice trembled beneath the thunder rolling across the mountains outside Cedar Hollow, Montana, in the winter of 1887.
He sat in an enormous oak armchair beside the roaring stone fireplace, his broad shoulders hunched forward, his rugged face half-hidden beneath long dark-brown hair. A jagged scar stretched from his left temple to his jaw, disappearing into the thick beard that made him look even more intimidating than his towering height already did.
He was thirty-nine years old, nearly six and a half feet tall, with a powerful build earned through decades of ranch work, enormous scarred hands, and pale gray-green eyes that rarely revealed what he was thinking.
People in Cedar Hollow called him the mountain beast.
Some whispered that he'd killed a man.
Others claimed he'd driven his own brother into a winter storm and left him there to die.
Gideon had stopped correcting them years ago.
But the woman standing before him wasn't afraid.
Elena Whitmore was twenty-nine years old, extraordinarily beautiful, with soft green eyes, a lovely round face, full rosy cheeks, thick chestnut-brown curls, and an enormous, naturally proportioned figure weighing approximately four hundred kilograms.
Her full arms were wrapped around Gideon's face, her broad hands resting gently against his scarred cheeks.
She wore an ivory lace-trimmed Victorian blouse, a dark-brown tailored corset, and an enormous flowing prairie skirt that spread across the specially reinforced cedar bench beside his chair.
She had spent her life listening to people tell her that she was too large.
Too much trouble.
Too different.
Too difficult to love.
And now the strongest man she'd ever known was looking into her eyes and insisting that he wasn't worthy of her affection.
“Children hide when they see me,” Gideon whispered. “Women cross the street. Men reach for their guns when I walk into a saloon.”
Elena leaned closer.
“Then perhaps they've never looked long enough to see you.”
His jaw tightened.
“You don't understand what I've done.”
“Then tell me.”
His eyes filled with pain.
“My brother died because I let him ride into a storm.”
Elena touched the scar along his cheek.
“You've carried that punishment for ten years.”
Gideon looked away.
“And I'll carry it until I'm buried.”
“No.”
The single word surprised him.
He looked back.