A Bride for the Doctor

Ruth Ansel weighed nineteen letters on her father's counter balance at half past ten at night, because her hands wanted an occupation. Two ounces, six drams and forty grains, over four months.

She is an apothecary's daughter from Cincinnati. She mixes, she weighs, and she keeps to the measure - in powders, in speech, and in what she lets herself want. It has never once failed her.

Doctor Nathaniel Thorne of Cedar Bend writes long letters and honest ones. He tells her what the practice is, what the winters do to it, what he can and cannot promise, and how far the nearest help lies. Nineteen letters in four months, and not one evasion in any of them.

There is one thing he has left out. Not a lie - an absence, in a life he otherwise set out in full, and everybody in Cedar Bend knows the shape of it and nobody says so in front of him.

Ruth marries him on the strength of the letters and finds a practice that needs her hands, a town that is careful around her husband, and a measure of her own that will not stretch to cover this. Keeping to the measure has always been how she loves people. It turns out to be the one thing that cannot help him.

A clean, closed-door mail-order bride western about a marriage of convenience built on honest letters with one gap in them, an apothecary's daughter who measures everything, and a doctor carrying a past he never wrote down. Faith, courage and a hard-won happy ending.

Book 3 of Brides of Cedar Bend. Each book follows a new couple and can be read on its own.