A Bride for the Rancher

She answered an advertisement for a wife. She did not expect to start believing the man who wrote it.

Eliza Thornton spent six years teaching penmanship at a Boston girls’ academy until one Friday afternoon cost her the position, the reputation, and the future she’d built there. With nothing left in Massachusetts worth staying for, she answers a numbered advertisement in the Matrimonial News: a Montana rancher, widowed, honest, two children who need a mother. Four lines of bad handwriting convince her to buy a one way ticket west.

Gideon Boone is not a man of speeches. What he put in writing, he meant, and what he didn’t write about his first wife’s death, Eliza understood better than he expected her to. They agree to marry the day the train arrives, strangers standing in for a lifetime neither of them has any real evidence the other can deliver.

Six hundred forty acres, two watchful children, and a house that was never built for a stranger’s habits are not the hardest part of the arrangement. The hardest part is discovering that the marriage they entered as a practical solution is turning into the first honest thing either of them has had in years, if they can both stop bracing for it to end.

A Bride for the Rancher is Book One in The Brides of Copper Creek, a clean mail order bride western romance series about the marriages that begin as arrangements and become the truest thing in a person’s life.