They Said No Woman Would Wed the Scarred Blacksmith — Then His Mail-Order Bride Arrived

Chapter 1

The ring of the blacksmith’s hammer was the heartbeat of Oak Haven, Colorado.

It came at dawn before the roosters had organized themselves, and it continued until long after the saloon had gone quiet and the last lamp in the last house had been turned down. Steady. Rhythmic. Unanswering. The sound of a man who had decided that iron was more trustworthy than people, and had organized his life accordingly.

Gideon Mercer was thirty-four years old, and he had not been invited to a social occasion in five years.

He was a mountain of a man — six foot four, shoulders broad enough to block a doorway without trying, hands the size of skillets. In a different life, in the life before the Red Creek Copper Mine boiler ruptured on a bitter Tuesday in December of 1873, he might have been called striking. He had his mother’s dark eyes and his father’s jaw and a constitution that made other men tired just looking at him.

But that was before.

The superheated steam and shrapnel had remade the left side of him. The skin from jaw to collarbone and down across the left third of his chest and back was a landscape of jagged, silvered burn scar — raised in places, sunken in others, the topography of a violence that had lasted perhaps four seconds and changed everything forever. His left eye was clouded, permanently half-hooded, the eyelid pulled slightly wrong by the scar tissue beneath. A piece of iron had torn through his jawline and left a deep, puckered groove that pulled the corner of his mouth into a permanent expression that could be read as a sneer by anyone who didn’t know better.

He had saved two men. Younger miners, barely out of their boyhood, who would not have had time to understand what hit them if Gideon had not put himself between them and the blast. They had thanked him once, when he was still in the mining company’s sickroom and the left side of his face was wrapped in linen. He had not seen either of them since.

He was not bitter about that.

He tried not to be bitter about most things.

But the hollow ache that settled into the center of his chest when the forge fires died at midnight was harder to argue with than bitterness. Buster, the three-legged hound who had appointed himself Gideon’s companion three winters ago, lay across his feet when he slept and followed him to the forge at dawn and back to the cabin at night, and that was what passed for company.

He wrote the advertisement on a Thursday evening in September, when the first cold had come down off the Rockies and the cabin had never felt so empty.

Colorado blacksmith, age 34. Hardworking, financially secure, but bearing the physical marks of a harsh life. Seeks a wife of good character for honest companionship and marriage. Will pay travel.

He read it back three times. It said what it needed to say without saying too much. He was not a man who knew how to be dishonest in ink any more than he knew how to be dishonest in iron.

He sent it to the Missouri Republican in St. Louis. He paid for a month’s run of the advertisement. Then he went back to the forge and tried not to think about it.