A Bride for the Blacksmith

The advertisement asked for a woman of good character. It also said: not a talker.

Marta Novak has talked her whole life. Through the sewing-room clatter, through the funeral hymns, through every silence that ever came for her. She answers it anyway.

Amos Rourke meets her train without a word and marries her after Sunday service with two. He is kind, steady, almost wordless, and the room above his forge is the safest place she has had in years.

But she signed the register as a spinster, and she is not one. Her first husband died under the guns at Halsted Street in ’77, and his name is on a list the mining companies still keep. One of them has found it, and come to the forge with an offer for the man who married her.

She has spent a lifetime talking so the quiet could not get in. This time the quiet man will have to speak.

A clean, closed-door marriage-of-convenience romance with a hard-won happily ever after. Book Two of The Brides of Copper Creek, complete on its own.