The first time Caleb Morgan asked Eleanor Whitmore to marry him, she was elbow-deep in dishwater.
Not metaphorically.
Her sleeves were rolled past her elbows, her hands were red from lye soap, and a tower of greasy breakfast plates leaned dangerously beside the kitchen sink of the Ridgeline Tavern.
Snow pressed against the windows.
A cook shouted for onions.
Someone in the dining room dropped a cup.
And from the doorway behind her came a deep male voice.
“I need a wife.”
Eleanor kept washing.
Margaret Holt, the tavern owner, nearly dropped the stack of mugs she was carrying.
“You need what?”
“A wife.”
Eleanor glanced over one shoulder.
That was the first time she saw Caleb Morgan clearly.
Everyone in Silver Hollow knew his name.
Most people knew very little else.
He lived eighteen miles north of town on a mountain property large enough that nobody seemed certain where it ended.
He came down for salt, ammunition, coffee, veterinary medicine, lamp oil, and whatever iron parts he could not make himself.
He spoke little.
He drank less.
He never gambled.
He avoided church socials, harvest dances, and every unmarried woman whose mother happened to discover he owned land.
That alone made him interesting.
The fact that he stood more than six feet four inches and looked as though chopping wood had personally insulted him made him more interesting.
That morning his dark hair was damp with melting snow.
A heavy fur-lined coat hung open over a dark work shirt.
His beard was trimmed enough to reveal a severe mouth.
He carried a folded legal document.
He looked nothing like a man announcing a romantic intention.
Margaret put down the mugs.
“You’ve finally gone mad.”
“Possible.”
“You want me to find you a wife?”
“Yes.”
“For what?”
Caleb placed the paper on a preparation table.
“My father died in September.”
Margaret’s expression softened.
“I heard.”
“He left the North Slope acreage under conditional title.”
Eleanor returned to the dishes, though she listened.
Everyone knew the North Slope.
Timber.
Granite.
Water.
Several miles of land running above Morgan Creek.
What most people cared about, however, was what lay beneath it.
Silver.
Maybe copper.
Possibly something more valuable.
Consolidated Western Mining had been attempting to acquire the acreage for years.
Margaret unfolded the document.
“What condition?”
“I keep title only if I establish and maintain a legal household before the spring review.”
She frowned.
“What does that mean?”
“Marriage.”
Margaret stared.
“Your father put marriage in a will?”
“He enjoyed controlling people after death.”
“That sounds unpleasantly efficient.”
Caleb almost smiled.
Almost.
He continued.
“If I remain unmarried at the March review, the North Slope transfers under an old purchase option to Consolidated Western.”
“And you waited until December?”
“I objected.”
“To marriage?”
“To being ordered into it.”
“Useful protest.”
“So I need a wife.”
Eleanor dried one plate and set it aside.
Margaret asked the obvious question.
“For how long?”
“Three months.”
The kitchen became quieter.
Even the cook stopped chopping onions.
Caleb reached into his coat.
“Two hundred dollars upon completion.”
Someone whistled.
“Fifty in advance.”
Now everyone listened.
Two hundred fifty dollars could change a poor woman’s life.
Not permanently.
But enough.
Enough to rent a room.
Buy clothes.
Travel.
Start something.
Eleanor knew exactly because she had spent the previous six weeks calculating what she did not have.
Her father had died in October.
A fall from scaffolding.
Quick.
Senseless.
Before the funeral was over, her uncle produced papers claiming the Whitmore house had been pledged against debts Eleanor had never known existed.
He took possession.
She challenged him.
He produced signatures.
Her father’s.
Perhaps genuine.
Perhaps not.
She had no attorney.
No money.
No one important interested in a twenty-seven-year-old unmarried woman insisting the men handling property records had cheated her.
She moved into the storage room above Ridgeline Tavern.
Margaret let her sleep there because Eleanor worked fourteen hours a day.
No wages for lodging.
Meals after customers finished.
It was not cruelty.
It was economics.
Eleanor understood economics.
She also understood humiliation.
At twenty-seven, she had become skilled at recognizing the second before it arrived.
A glance down at her body.