Prologue

Ashland, Ohio

1875

The church smelled of wildflowers and beeswax candles.

Anna Foster stood in the second pew, her gloved hands clasped in front of her. It was clear from her face that she was trying very hard not to cry. She had promised herself she wouldn’t. She had made the promise somewhere between the rattling of the train carriage and the frantic pinning of her hair in the cramped station, having arrived with barely ten minutes to spare.

There had been no time for tears then, and there was certainly no time for them now. Not when Jane looked so radiant, so happy, so alive.

Her sister stood at the altar in a gown of ivory cotton and lace, her chestnut hair swept up beneath a crown of small white roses, her green eyes shining with a joy that Anna had only ever read about in the novels she kept tucked beneath her pillow at home. Liam Hunter stood opposite her, broad-shouldered and dark-haired, his hazel eyes fixed on Jane’s upturned face as though the rest of the world had simply ceased to exist.

Anna was the complete opposite of her sister. She had dark brown hair and dark brown eyes. And she always seemed to lag a little behind her. While her twin had found love and a husband, Anna’s own beau, Ethan, was always dragging his feet. But she was beyond happy for her twin, nevertheless, despite a pang of yearning.

Anna’s heart felt like it would burst.

She blinked. Rapidly. Several times.

You promised yourself.

The pastor’s voice rose and fell in gentle cadence, filling the little church to its raftered ceiling, and Anna let his sonorous words wash over her. Outside, Ohio was wrapped in the gold and amber of early autumn, the maples beginning to turn along the roadside, the sky pure azure. It was, by any measure, a perfect day. A perfect wedding. A perfect beginning for two people who deserved every happiness the world could offer as they took their first steps into the rest of their lives. Together.

Anna smiled so big her cheeks ached.

It was somewhere in the midst of her determination not to cry that she became aware of him.

He stood to the far left of the church, apart from the other guests, his back nearly to the wall. Everything about him said that he didn’t want to be approached.

He was tall—taller by a good few inches than most of the men gathered—with dark hair that fell carelessly across his forehead. It was clear from the way he held himself that he was strong; probably, he worked outside. He had a horseman’s build and bearing. He wore black, which struck her as a curious choice for a wedding. And he wore it with an unselfconsciousness that suggested it was simply what he always wore, no matter the occasion.

Anna’s gaze lingered on him for only a moment before moving back to the altar.

Then it drifted back again.

He didn’t seem to be paying particular attention to the ceremony. He was watching it, but in the distant, detached manner of a man enduring something rather than enjoying it. His jaw was set. His arms were crossed loosely over his chest. His expression gave away precisely nothing, but if Anna were to guess, she’d say his thoughts were elsewhere, galloping across some open plain perhaps.

Undeniably handsome, some unhelpful part of her brain piped up. And completely unaware of that fact, the more sensible, skeptical part of her mind supplied.

She pulled her attention firmly back to her sister.

Jane was crying now—happy tears, the best kind—and Liam was laughing softly as he reached up to brush one away from her cheek. The congregation let out an adoring murmur. Anna pressed her fingers to her lips.

She absolutely was not going to cry.

***

The reception was held in the meadow behind the church, where long tables had been dressed in white linen and strung with paper lanterns that swayed in the breeze.

A gentle tune began from the makeshift stage against the barn—a fiddle and a guitar, a man with a harmonica who played with more enthusiasm than skill. And there was food galore, enough for twice as many guests—apple cider, corn bread, roasted squash.

Anna found Jane the moment the ceremony ended, wrapping her arms around her sister so tightly that Jane laughed and protested that Anna would rumple her dress. But Jane held on just as fiercely. They hadn’t seen one another since the spring. Anna buried her face in Jane’s shoulder and breathed her in—rosewater and something warm and familiar that she had no word for except, perhaps, home.

“You look absolutely beautiful,” Anna said, pulling back to hold Jane at arm’s length. “It was all I could do not to sob my heart out.”

“Well, I’m sure there were tears,” Jane said, her green eyes dancing. “I saw you dabbing at them from the altar.”

“There were not. That was… perspiration. It was awfully warm in there.”

Jane laughed and squeezed her hands, and for a moment they simply looked at one another, the way twins do. They listened attentively to everything the other hadn’t said. Jane’s happiness was so complete, so luminous, that it seemed to radiate from her like heat from the sun. And if there was something a little wistful in Anna’s answering smile, well, that was no one’s business but her own.

“Who is that man dressed all in black?” she asked her sister in hushed tones.

“Oh, you mean Luke. That’s Liam’s brother.” Ah, Anna thought, so this was Liam’s brother.

“He seemed a bit lonesome, stood apart like that.”

“Ah, that’s just his way.”

Anna nodded thoughtfully.

She found herself glancing at him more and more often, drawn to him in a funny sort of way. She made up her mind to seek out the man in black before the afternoon was done. Something about him had snagged her curiosity.

She found him near the edge of the meadow, where the grass gave way to a rough post-and-rail fence. He had a glass of something amber in one hand, his gaze fixed on the middle distance with an intensity that made it look like he was thinking about somewhere else he’d rather be.

Anna smoothed her skirt, lifted her chin, and walked over.

“You must be Luke Hunter,” she said brightly, extending her hand. “I’m Anna. Jane’s sister. I’m sorry I didn’t get the chance to introduce myself before the ceremony—my train was running late, and I practically fell through the church door.”

He looked at her. His eyes were dark—very dark, shadowed beneath the straight line of his brow—and the look he gave her was brief and assessing but perhaps not entirely unimpressed.

“I know who you are,” he said.

Anna waited for the rest of it. The It’s a pleasure or the Jane speaks of you often, or even the simple courtesy of a returned introduction.

It did not come.

She lowered her hand slowly. “Well,” she said. “Lovely to meet you, too.”

His expression didn’t change one bit, but there was a slight shift in his stance, and his grip tightened around a glass he was holding. He looked once again back into the distance, as though the fence post twenty yards away required his full and immediate attention.

Anna felt a flicker of irritation tangled up with amusement. She was saved from having to decide which it was by the sudden appearance of Jane at her elbow, slightly breathless and wearing the expression of a woman in the early stages of a minor crisis.

“Thank heavens,” Jane said, gripping Anna’s arm. “I need both of you. Right now. One of our gifts has gone missing, and I’m just beside myself.”

***

The gift, as it turned out, was a carved wooden box—a keepsake chest, made by one of Liam’s ranch hands. It had been set down somewhere during the scramble of the morning’s preparations and had not been seen since. Jane was certain she remembered seeing it near the side entrance of the church. Liam thought it had been put in the stables for safekeeping. Luke said nothing, but fell into step behind them with a long, unhurried stride as Jane told her flustered tale.

“I don’t have time to search,” she said imploringly, “so if the two of you wouldn’t mind, I’d be so grateful. We both would. It would be terrible if it were lost.”

“Of course we will,” Anna said, squeezing her sister’s hand.

Jane hurried away, back into the joyous throng of her wedding day. Anna turned to Luke.

“Will we now?” he drawled, amused.

“You don’t want to find your brother’s missing gift?”

“Well, you got me there. Let’s go.”

The stables were behind the church, cool and dim and smelling of hay and horse. Dust motes drifted in the strips of light that fell through the high, narrow windows. Anna stepped inside and paused a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the dimness.

“If someone put it here, I bet it’ll be on one of the shelves along the back wall,” she said, moving deeper into the stable. “That’s where I’d put something for safekeeping anyhow.”

“You’d put a wedding gift on a stable shelf,” Luke said from behind her. It wasn’t a question. His tone conveyed, in just nine words, that he found this both predictable and incorrect.

“I’d put it somewhere logical,” Anna said, not turning around, “which is apparently more than can be said for whoever moved it.”

“Liam said it was here.”

“Liam also said the train from Columbus ran on time. We’ve established that isn’t always the case.”

She heard something that might, in a more amenable man, have been the beginning of a laugh. In Luke Hunter, it never got further than a breath, quickly suppressed. Nevertheless, she found herself quietly pleased to have provoked it.

She checked the back shelves—bridles, a tin of salve, a folded horse blanket—but nothing resembling a carved wooden box. She turned and found him checking the opposite wall, running his gaze along each shelf from top to bottom before moving to the next.

“It’s not there,” she said.

“Not yet checked.”

“It won’t be there. Who’d put a gift on the same wall as the feed buckets?”

“The same person who’d put a wedding gift in the stables to begin with,” he said. “I wouldn’t have thought it either. But here we are.”

Anna pursed her lips and turned to search the tack room, which occupied the far corner of the building. It was smaller in there, cluttered with hanging leather and the sharp smell of neatsfoot oil. She squeezed past a saddle stand and reached for the back shelf—

And stopped.

There it was. The carved box, sitting neatly on the highest shelf, well out of reach.

“Found it,” she called.

She stretched up onto her toes. Her fingertips brushed the edge of it. She stretched a little further—

“You’ll knock it off.”

She startled at the voice, which was much closer than she’d expected, and turned to find Luke standing in the doorway of the tack room. His arms were folded, and he watched her with the long-suffering expression of a man surrounded on all sides by people determined to do things wrong.

“I wasn’t going to knock it off,” she said.

“Your fingers barely reached it.”

“My fingers reached it.”

“Touching something and having a secure grip on it are not the same thing.” He moved past her. The tack room was small enough that he had to turn sideways, and close enough that she caught the scent of him—something like cedar and leather and the outdoors. He reached up and effortlessly lifted the box from the shelf in one easy motion.

Anna stared at him, feeling her cheeks flushing and hoping he wouldn’t notice.

He held it out to her.

She took it. “Thank you,” she said, with more frost in her voice than gratitude.

“You’re very welcome,” he said, with no warmth whatsoever.

They looked at one another for a moment in the narrow space of the tack room, the afternoon light gold through a gap in the planks beside them. Up close, his eyes were the dark brown of polished walnut. He was, she thought again with a sense of deep personal injustice, extremely handsome. It seemed entirely unfair that a man with the conversational warmth of a fence post should have been issued a face like that.

“Was that so difficult?” she asked.

“Was what so difficult?”

“Being civil.”

Something moved across his expression, a softening—too quick to catch, there and gone. “I’ve been civil.”

“You’ve been a grouch,” Anna said pleasantly, and walked out of the tack room.

***

Jane cried again when Anna pressed the box into her hands, and Liam shook Luke’s hand and clapped him on the shoulder, and the afternoon rolled on in its golden late-afternoon light. But Anna noticed that Luke did not linger over the gift’s return. He took his hand back from his brother’s grip, nodded once, and withdrew again to the edges of things, which was clearly where he preferred to be.

She found herself watching him, on and off, for the rest of the afternoon. And she could not entirely explain why, not exactly. One thing was clear to her though—even if he was infuriating, part of her was drawn to him.

***

The station platform was quiet in the early evening, the last of the daylight softening everything to copper and rose. Jane stood beside her, one hand tucked through Anna’s arm.

“I don’t want you to go,” Jane said simply.

“I know.” Anna leaned her head briefly against her sister’s. “I’ll come back soon. I promise.”

“You always say that.”

“I always mean it. And I always do.” She straightened, adjusting her traveling bag on her shoulder.

Jane smiled, but there was something careful in it. A question waited just behind her eyes. “And are you all right? Truly?”

“I’m perfectly all right.”

“You seemed—” Jane hesitated. “You seemed a little quiet this afternoon. After the gift business. Did something upset you?”

Anna let out a breath that was very nearly a laugh. “Your brother-in-law,” she said, “is possibly the most disagreeable person I have ever met.”

Jane did not look entirely surprised. “Luke is…”

“Cold,” Anna supplied. “Abrupt. Thoroughly uninterested in the basic requirements of polite conversation.”

“He’s had a difficult few years,” Jane said gently. “He isn’t always like that. He’s actually… quite sensitive when you get to know him.”

“I’m sure he’s perfectly lovely to people who’ve known him for more than an afternoon,” Anna said, with more generosity than she felt. “I didn’t mean to criticize—and he didn’t upset me.”

Jane gave her arm a small, affectionate squeeze. “Give him time. He grows on you.”

“He can have all the time in the world,” Anna said cheerfully. “From a considerable distance.”

The whistle of the approaching train cut their conversation short. They turned to face each other properly, the way they always did at partings—as though they were memorizing every detail.

“Write me the moment you’re home,” Jane said.

“The very moment.” Anna pressed a kiss to her sister’s cheek, then pulled back to look at her. “You are so happy,” she said softly. “It’s the most wonderful thing I’ve ever seen.”

Jane’s eyes filled. “You’ll have it too. I know it.” She smiled. “How are things with Ethan? Do you think he might…?”

Anna felt a warmth move through her, hopeful but tentative. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “But perhaps. I think—perhaps.”

An image of Ethan flickered into her mind, handsome and well turned out. He was the very opposite of Luke. Why, she asked herself, was she thinking about Luke at this moment of all moments?

Jane beamed. “Oh, Anna. I’m so glad.”

The train exhaled great clouds of steam along the platform. Anna picked up her bag, and they held hands until the last possible moment, fingers slipping apart as Anna stepped up onto the carriage and turned to look back at her sister one last time.

Jane was waving, both hands raised, her face alight.

Anna waved back until the platform disappeared from view.

She settled into her seat as the Ohio countryside began to unspool outside the window, the last of the light turning the fields to burnished gold. Then she let herself think—very briefly, very reluctantly—of dark eyes in a dim tack room, the scent of cedar and leather, and a face that had no business being that dashingly handsome on a man so thoroughly impossible.

She thought of Ethan instead. Safe, respectable Ethan. She smiled as she watched Ohio slide away into the growing dusk.

Chapter One

The next autumn

The lace was the finest work she had ever done.

Anna held it up to the light streaming from the window, turning it slowly, examining each small loop and crossing with the critical eye of a woman who had spent the better part of her life with a needle in her hand. The pattern was her own design, a trailing vine of small flowers, delicate as a breath, worked in ivory thread with a gleam of silk. It ran along the neckline of the dress and fell in a deep border along the hem, and it had taken her the better part of three weeks to complete.

She set it down against the white cotton of the bodice and sat back in her chair.

It was finished. Her dress. Her wedding dress.

She pressed her fingertips to her lips, a smile breaking across her face before she could stop it. The dress lay spread across her worktable in the morning light, spilling over the edges in soft folds. It was—she could acknowledge to herself, here, in her workroom with no one to accuse her of vanity—beautiful. Better than she had imagined it when she first set pencil to paper and began to sketch. Better than anything she had made before.

And it was her wedding dress.

The words still sent a little rush through her. Even now, weeks after Ethan had knelt in the parlor of her mother’s house with a ring in his hand and that slow, certain smile of his that had always made her feel as though she were standing in a patch of sunlight. His dark hair was pomaded and neatly combed. He wore his best silk waistcoat and a liberal splash of cologne.

Anna, he had said, I cannot imagine my life without you in it.

She had said yes before he had finished asking.

She ran one finger along the lace border, careful not to snag the thread. Her engagement ring caught the light as she did so. It was a modest thing by Ethan’s standards, he had said apologetically, but she had loved it precisely because it wasn’t extravagant. A small oval pearl set in gold, quietly lovely. She had not taken it off once since the evening he slid it onto her finger. Whenever she looked at it, she imagined the life that awaited her—the home, the family, the husband who was a respected man about town. That little ring seemed to conjure all her dreams.

Outside, the town was going about its morning business. She could hear the distant rhythm of wheels on the road, a dog barking somewhere down the street, and the faint clang of the blacksmith’s hammer carrying through the air. Her mother was moving in the kitchen below, the familiar sounds of her domestic chores drifting up through the floorboards. The smell of coffee and woodsmoke and baking bread.

Anna looked at the dress one more time.

She wanted to show him. She wanted to show Ethan.

It was an impulsive thought, and she recognized it as such, but impulsive had never particularly frightened her. Ethan had said he would be at his office all morning. He had a meeting with one of his business associates, something to do with a property transaction she hadn’t fully followed. But surely, he would take five minutes. Surely, he would want to know that the dress was done, that everything was moving forward, that their wedding was becoming real and tangible. Something beautiful that could be held up to the light and admired. As she looked at it, she allowed herself to dream about the day when she would walk down the aisle towards her adoring fiancé, just as she had watched Jane do a few months before. Her heart skipped a beat.

She folded the dress carefully, wrapped it in the length of cloth she kept for protecting finished work, and tucked it under her arm.

Then she went to find her coat and her bonnet, called up to her mother that she’d be back before noon, and stepped out into the crisp autumn morning.

***

Ethan’s office occupied the first floor of a handsome brick building on the main street. It was the sort of place that announced its occupant’s prosperity without needing to say so directly. The brass plate beside the door read E. Campbell & Associates, and the windows were tall and clean. Anna had always thought it suited him. Ethan Campbell was a man who understood the importance of appearances.

She was aware, as she walked, of the particular lightness that buoyed her up these days. It was a feeling she had no better word for than lucky. She was not the kind of woman who inspired the attentions of men like Ethan, or so she had always believed. Jane had always been the beautiful one—the glowing one. Anna’s hair and eyes were dark, and though everyone had always said she had her own particular charm, a handsomeness, she wasn’t as lovely as her sister. She was a seamstress, the daughter of a carpenter, a woman of modest means and unremarkable prospects whose chief accomplishments were a talent with a needle and an ability to see beauty in things that most people walked past without noticing. She painted on Sunday afternoons and embroidered by lamplight and had long ago made a quiet peace with the likelihood that her life would be small, but it would be her own.

And then Ethan had walked into the dress shop where she worked, to commission a waistcoat for a business dinner, and had spent the entire fitting talking to her as though she were the most interesting person he had ever met. He had seemed so enchanted by her. It had been intoxicating.

He had come back the following week. And the week after that.

Lucky, she thought again, turning onto the main street, the wrapped dress tucked under her arm. Extraordinarily, improbably lucky.

The street door of his building was unlocked, as it always was during business hours. She pushed it open and stepped into the small entrance hall, with its polished floor and the narrow staircase leading up to the offices on the second floor. Ethan’s office was at the end of the ground-floor corridor; its door was set apart from the others by the small gold nameplate affixed to the wood.

The corridor was quiet. Apparently, no one else was there. Her footsteps were quiet on the floorboards. She would, she thought, give him such a surprise. He’d never expect her to pay a visit.

The door to Ethan’s office stood slightly ajar. Through a gap of several inches, she could see the warm light of the interior and hear the low murmur of voices.

He wasn’t alone after all.

She lifted her hand to knock. And then she stopped.

The murmur was not the voice of a business associate.

It was a woman’s voice, low and warm, intimate in a way that turned Anna’s stomach to water even before she fully understood why. She stood with her hand raised and her feet rooted to the floorboards, and through the gap in the door she could see…

She could see Ethan.

And a woman.

And his hands were on the woman’s face, tilting it upward.

And the unmistakable, unambiguous press of his mouth against hers.

Her stomach plunged as though she were falling from a height. Her skin went cold and then flushed hot. She thought she might faint.

The wrapped dress slipped from Anna’s arm.

She caught it before it hit the floor and stood very still in the corridor for a moment that seemed to stretch to an impossible length. It was the kind of moment that rearranges the furniture of a life while you stand helplessly by. All she could do was watch as all her hopes dissolved to nothing before her eyes.

Then she turned and walked back down the corridor through the street door, and out into the street, which continued to bustle in the autumn sunshine as though nothing had happened. A dog barked. A carriage rolled past, and its driver tipped his hat. Everything was the same, and yet everything was different.

***

She could not have said, afterward, how she got home.

She remembered the cold air on her face. The way her own heartbeat sounded loud and strange in her ears. A woman she vaguely recognized saying, “Good morning, Miss Foster,” from across the street, and her own mouth forming the appropriate response.

She remembered the front door of her mother’s house. The familiar give of the latch. The smell of the kitchen.

And then her mother’s kindly face, rosy and plump, turned from the stove, just beginning to say something ordinary, something about dinner or errands or the letter she’d been meaning to write—and stopping, because her mother had always been able to read her. No explanation was needed.

“Anna,” her mother said, and opened her arms.

Anna crossed the kitchen and fell into them. The composure she had maintained all the way home failed her completely.

She wept great shuddering sobs into her mother’s shoulder while her mother held her close and said nothing at all. Which was exactly right because there was nothing to say. Her mother stroked her hair and rocked her slightly, the way she had when Anna was small, and the world had seemed very large and very frightening, as it did again now. Anna cried until she could cry no more, and the kitchen was quiet again except for the soft sound of her own unsteady breathing.

“Tell me,” her mother said at last, gently.

So Anna told her. In fragments, not all in the right order. The office. The door. The woman. The wedding dress. The lace. The way his hands had looked, so familiar, pressed against another woman’s face.

Her mother listened without interrupting. Even through her wretchedness, Anna noticed her mother’s expression was very still, very sad, and not entirely surprised. Was Anna the only one who had never seen Ethan for what he was, she wondered.

“I have to leave,” Anna said when she had finished. Her voice came out steadier than she expected. Calmer. The weeping seemed to have clarified her feelings, the way a heavy rain clarifies the air. “I can’t stay here, Mama. I can’t… I can’t be in this town, and pass his building on the street, and…” She stopped, swallowed. “I need to go.”

Her mind reeled. Where could she go?

“Oh, honey… maybe you could go to Jane?” her mother said.

“To Jane.” The thought of her sister warmed her shuddering heart. “She’d have me, I know she would, but I don’t want to arrive on their doorstep and be a burden to them. They have the baby coming, and Liam’s ranch to manage, and—”

“Anna.” Her mother took both her hands. “You would not be a burden.”

“I’d feel like one.” She looked down at their joined hands. The pearl ring caught the kitchen light, and she slid it from her finger with a swift, decisive movement and set it on the table between them. “I need to find my own way. Something that’s mine. Not… not depending on anyone else’s charity, even if the charity is kindly meant.” She lifted her chin. “I’ll find work. I can sew anywhere.”

She stopped.

Because there, beneath her mother’s abandoned letter and the folded cloth Anna had set on the table when she came in, was the corner of the newspaper. She reached for it without entirely knowing why, smoothed it open on the table, and began to turn through the pages, looking for something, though she couldn’t quite have said what.

Employment advertisements. Rooms to let. Goods for sale. A notice about a missing horse. A church fund.

She turned another page.

Her eyes moved down the columns, scanning, searching—for what?

And then stopped.

BRIDE AUCTION—Shreve, Ohio. Married to the highest bidder. Escape to a new life, a fresh start. Respectable women aged eighteen and over sought for forthcoming auction. Travel arrangements provided. Inquiries to Box 14, Shreve.