The Blacksmith's Mail-Order Bride

She answered a blacksmith's letters. She did not expect to fall for the man who wrote them.

Wyoming Territory, 1884. Clara Whitlock, a Philadelphia bookkeeper with her life savings sewn into her hem and a return ticket in her glove, steps off the train at Cottonwood Station to marry a man she has known only through seven careful letters. Gideon Ward writes like a poet. In person, he cannot finish a sentence.

Gideon is a widowed blacksmith with a seven-year-old daughter, a forge that has been in his family for two generations, and a shoebox of receipts he has been too proud to open. Clara has three terms for their arrangement: an honest marriage, a room of her own, and ninety days in which either of them can walk away. She never meant to want more than that.

Then the smooth-talking owner of the general store, who holds the note on the forge, calls in the whole debt. Clara has four weeks, a pencil, and a stubborn streak. Gideon has a hammer, a habit of humming when he is happy, and a whole town whispering that a mail-order wife is only after a roof. Between long evenings at the kitchen table and a letter she carries in her bodice, two careful people begin to learn that the honest part of any arrangement is the part you never planned to write down.

A warm, slow-burn marriage-of-convenience novella with gentle humor, a small-town villain who loses to arithmetic, and a happy ending that is earned one true word at a time.

- Sweet, closed-door romance with tender kisses only - Mail-order bride and marriage of convenience - Widowed blacksmith hero who writes better than he talks - Capable heroine who fights with ledgers, not pistols - Small-town western setting, a little girl who steals every scene, and a dog - Happily ever after