I Hid My Beauty So the Mountain Man Would Reject Me—Then He Asked the One Question I Never Expected
PART 2
He put her on the back of a black draft horse as if she weighed nothing, wrapped his own bearskin coat around her shivering shoulders without being asked, and told her in a voice with no cruelty in it at all, “Dead wives are bad luck.”
Aara didn’t know if it was a joke. She didn’t know anything about this man except what the whole territory whispered about him in fear, and none of it matched the stranger riding ahead of her into the trees, silent, watchful, giving up his own warmth for a woman he had bought like a sack of grain at auction.
By the time they reached the cabin, dusk had swallowed the last of the light from the peaks. Aara expected a hovel, something that matched the legend. What she found instead was a solid, well-kept structure with swept floorboards, shelves lined with preserved peaches and venison, a fire already laid, and an entire wall, an entire wall, of books. Shakespeare. Dickens. Philosophy she recognized from her father’s own shelves back in Ohio.
A savage didn’t read Plato.
He set a plate of bacon and cornbread in front of her and told her to eat. Aara, still committed to her act, reached for the food with a clumsy, childlike grab.
“Use the fork, Aara,” he said. Quiet. Certain.
The cornbread crumbled in her fingers. She hadn’t told a single soul in this territory her real name.
“How…” she started, before catching herself.
“Mayor’s ledger,” he said simply, tapping a folded paper against the table before sliding it across. “He records every woman’s name when the fee is paid, in case a husband dies and he needs to know who is left. I read it while they were loading you onto the horse.”
Half a second later, Aara understood that it was a small mercy, an honest answer instead of letting her believe he could read her like scripture. But the paper he slid across wasn’t the ledger page. It was a wanted poster. Her own face, crudely sketched but recognizable, stared back at her. Grand larceny and arson. Reward: $500. Fled the estate of Judge Ambrose Thorne, St. Louis.
“That one I found nailed to the trading post door,” he said. “Before the auction. I wasn’t looking for you specifically. I was looking for anyone worth five hundred dollars who might be foolish enough to stand in that line.”
The act was over. There was no point in keeping it up anymore, not with the truth sitting on the table between them like a loaded gun.
She stood, spine straight now, her ash-smeared face burning with something closer to fury than fear. “You’re going to turn me in?”
He didn’t answer the way she expected. He picked up the poster, held it to the fire, and let it curl into ash in his hand, the only leverage he had over her burned away without a second thought.
“Judge Thorne is my father,” he said. “And if you burned down his carriage house, you and I have something in common.”
Aara stood frozen at the edge of the firelight, the warmth of the cabin fighting the cold still locked in her bones, staring at the broad back of a man who had just destroyed the one thing that could have bought her freedom back to St. Louis and traded it for nothing.
The monster wasn’t a monster. He was the exiled son of the man she had fled, and that meant somewhere behind them on the mountain trail, the real danger hadn’t even started climbing yet.
