The Outlaw's Bride

Clara Adams has spent six years teaching arithmetic in Philadelphia and living behind a window that faces a brick wall. Then she answered an advertisement from a Wyoming rancher, and seven plain, true letters later, she is on a train to Bitter Creek with a request of her own: two weeks of daylight and honest conversation before she says any vow.

She never reaches the depot. Outlaws stop the train on the Little Bitter trestle and carry her away. Gideon Mercer, a widower and former Army scout, follows a trail of pearl buttons and torn ribbon into the rain. He has been waiting for her for months, and he has a secret of his own, a six-year-old daughter who has not spoken a word in three years.

By the time the sheriff brings them back to town, the gossips have already decided what happened and a preacher is offering a remedy that will not wait. Clara and Gideon marry first and court afterward, in a house with a bunk in the barn. But a man in Bitter Creek sold the train to the outlaws, and he is not finished.

The Outlaws Bride is a sweet slow-burn western romance with a resourceful heroine, a gentle hero, a silent child who finds her voice, and a love that arrives one honest letter at a time. It is book one of the standalone Hearts of Bitter Creek series.