Chapter One
Charlotte Bellamy saw Wild Rose Ridge come into view and decided, with no evidence whatsoever, she loved it.
Her sister, Odelia—or Delly as Lottie called her—would have called that premature. Odelia preferred evidence, records, and conclusions reached only after a person had exhausted every unpleasant possibility. Lottie preferred to believe a thing might be wonderful until it proved otherwise.
So far, Wild Rose Ridge had not proved otherwise.
The town sat between lake and mountain, rough at the edges and breathtakingly beautiful.
A white church steeple rose above the roofs along Main Street.
Smoke drifted from the lumber camps beyond the trees, and snow still marked the highest ridgeline even though June had already put wildflowers along the shore.
Down near the beach, men were hauling fresh-cut lumber into stacks beside a half-built structure, while the mill sent its steady grinding sound into the clear air.
Lottie pressed both hands to the rail of The Merry Jo and leaned forward.
“It’s exactly like a storybook,” she whispered.
“It is exactly like a logging town,” Delly said beside her. “Which is what the advertisement promised, so at least no one has lied to us yet. Mind your hem. The rail has been tarred, and tar does not come out of poplin with prayer alone.”
Lottie laughed and looked down at her skirt. The hem had missed the tar by an inch, which she considered providential, and Delly would almost certainly call coincidence.
“It’s wonderful,” Lottie said.
“It is remote.”
“It has a church.”
“It has a mill, which means noise.”
“It has mountains.”
“It has mountains covered in snow in June. That is not a recommendation.”
“It has my future husband somewhere upon that dock.”
That silenced Delly for nearly three seconds, which Lottie counted as an achievement.
Her stomach gave a small, eager twist as the steamship eased closer to the dock.
Somewhere in the crowd stood Mr. Peterson.
C. Peterson, according to the papers from the Sisters Mail-Order Bride Company.
He was a logger, quiet and well thought of in Wild Rose Ridge, according to what the Busy Bees had written.
His letters were tucked safely in Lottie’s reticule, tied with blue thread and worn soft along the folds from being read too often.
They were not elegant letters. His spelling wandered without supervision, and he had once used three different spellings of the word weather in the same paragraph.
Underneath the awkward sentences about rain, timber, and the price of nails, Lottie had found something.
Kindness, perhaps.
Or loneliness.
Possibly both.
A man who noticed the rain made everything green could not be entirely hard.
A man who warned his intended bride the winters were severe and the mountain roads were not fit for foolish shoes had, at the very least, given thought to her toes.
Lottie considered that an excellent foundation for marriage.
The other brides crowded near the rail, each carrying her own version of hope.
Margot Bankston looked amused by everything and impressed by very little.
Goldie Fontaine stood quiet and watchful, her chin lifted as if she had already decided the town would not find her easy to startle.
Delly said nothing at all, but her eyes moved over the dock with the same sharp care she gave to ledgers and locking doors.
The dock was full of men.
Not merely a few men. A great many men. Most wore clean shirts in a way which suggested cleanliness had been encouraged by outside pressure and might not survive past supper. Several had taken off their hats. Several had not. One man whistled, and another elbowed him hard enough to make him cough.
Lottie felt herself blush. She could not help it.
Delly, naturally, looked like a woman assessing supply, demand, and possible escape routes.
“That,” Delly said, “suggests a severe shortage of women.”
Margot leaned around Lottie. “Is that good or bad?”
“It means our position is stronger than the company implied. We are not supplicants. We are scarce, and scarcity is leverage.”
Lottie looked at her sister. “Delly, you are about to become a bride, not negotiate the price of flour.”
“Marriage involves flour.”
“That is not the point.”
“It frequently becomes the point.”
Before Lottie could answer, the gangway dropped into place, and the dock burst into motion.
Men surged forward to secure ropes, haul trunks, and call directions over one another.
The air smelled of lake water, pine, steam, and something warm from the direction of town that might have been bread.
Lottie craned her neck and searched the sea of faces.
Tall. Quiet. A logger. Perhaps bearded. Perhaps not.
The letters had said nothing about a beard, which now seemed like a serious omission.
Then she saw him.
At least, she thought she did.
A tall man stood near the back of the dock crowd, apart from the others. He had a dark brown beard and shoulders broad enough to make every man near him look unfinished by comparison. While the others jostled for a better view of the brides, he stood still.
Her heart gave a ridiculous leap.
His gaze moved once over the rail, stopped near Lottie, then dropped quickly to the crates being unloaded.
There! Then he looked away.
Lottie’s leap became less ridiculous and more uncertain.
Perhaps he had not seen her. Perhaps he had seen her and was shy. A quiet man might reasonably be overwhelmed by a bride arriving with half the town staring and several men making fools of themselves. Lottie decided to be generous.
Then the book trunks came up from the cargo hold.
The dockhands handled the first of them with confidence. That confidence lasted until two men tried to lift it and discovered it held more than stockings. One of them grunted as though personally betrayed.
“What’s in this one?” someone called. “Stove iron?”
“Books,” Lottie said brightly from the gangway.
Four men looked up at her.
“Books,” one repeated.
“Yes.”
“All of it?”
“Not all of them,” Lottie said. “There are two more trunks.”
That produced a pause she would remember with fondness for years. The red-haired man nearest the crate set both hands on his hips. “Miss, you brought a library?”
“I brought the beginning of one.”
That seemed to alarm him more. The next several minutes became a spectacle.
Lottie would have found it funny under other circumstances.
Men advised one another, ignored the advice, changed their grips, argued about angles, and blamed the trunk as if it had malicious intent.
Delly murmured something about the predictable consequences of underestimating books.
Lottie kept stealing glances at the tall, brown-bearded man.
He had moved closer, but not enough. He watched the trunks with a tightness around his mouth she could not understand. Once, when a crate shifted sharply, he stepped forward as though his whole body had answered before his mind allowed it. Then he stopped.
His right hand was tucked inside the front of his coat. In June.
Before Lottie could wonder properly over that, the shouting changed.
One moment the dock was full of laughter and men making a show of themselves. The next, a sharp cry split through all of it.
A crate of books swung hard against the gangway. A dockhand lunged for it, lost his footing, and went down beneath one corner as the surrounding men shouted over one another and started barking instructions.
Lottie’s stomach dropped.
“My books,” she whispered.
Delly was already moving.
Of course, she was. Delly moved toward disasters the way other women moved away from them, chin lifted, hands ready, fear folded somewhere so deep no one could see it.
She pushed through the men, dropped to her knees beside the injured dockhand, and began issuing orders in a voice that made grown loggers obey before they thought to object.
Lottie stood frozen on the gangway with two books clutched to her chest and guilt closing hard around her throat.
It was one thing to bring a library to Wild Rose Ridge. It was another thing entirely to injure someone in the town before the library opened.
Then a large man with a dark beard and a leather satchel came through the crowd. He kneeled opposite Delly and said something Lottie could not hear. He set his hands to work with the calm certainty of a man who had met blood before and did not intend to be impressed by it.
For several minutes, the dock belonged to Delly, the injured boy, and the man with the satchel. Lottie could only watch.
The tall logger near her trunk watched too.
His jaw tightened when the injured boy groaned.
His right hand stayed hidden in his coat, but his left hand closed hard at his side.
He looked, Lottie thought, as if he wanted badly to do something and hated he could not decide what that something ought to be.
That was the first thing about him she did not understand. The second came when a book slipped free from the loosened strap of her valise and landed open on the damp boards near his boot.
Tennyson.
Her poor Tennyson, face-up on the dock as if poetry had been struck down alongside everyone else.
The logger looked at it.
Lottie saw him look. Not glance in mild curiosity. Look.
The sounds of the busy dock, the shouting, the clanging, the creaking ropes, all seemed to diminish around him for a fleeting moment.
The injured boy was being lifted. Delly wiped blood from her hands with the rag the healer had given her.
Men were talking again, softer now, embarrassed by their own panic.
The tall logger stood with his eyes on the open page, and something on his face changed.
Longing, perhaps; or recognition.
He bent and picked up the book with his left hand. Carefully. So carefully Lottie forgot to be embarrassed he had found one of her books lying in dock muck. His thumb rested along the spine, and his gaze caught on the open page before he closed it.