"Whose Wife Are You Pretending to Be?" the Marshal Asked—She Had No Answer Ready

""Whose Wife Are You Pretending to Be?" the Marshal Asked—She Had No Answer Ready" | Western Romance Audiobook Dora Vandermeer is twenty nine years old and has spent eleven years copying her father's account books by lamplight, one green ledger, one brass corner stamped with her mother's initials. Three nights ago she sat at a table under six lamps while her sisters counted her dinner rolls and Lucius Vandermeer slid a petition for the Pueblo asylum toward her plate. Now she stands on the white platform at Tallis Junction with a rolled shawl and a bare ring finger, having told the ticket agent she is meeting her husband. She never thought of a name. When Marshal Orrin Teague stops his boots in front of her and asks whose wife she is pretending to be, she believes the lie ends here. Then a voice says "Mine" from the freight shed. Ansel Drummond steps out of the shadow, tall and lean, a white scar running from temple to jaw, a man the town calls the Wolf after six winters alone at Sorrel Basin. He lies to the marshal without blinking. Then he bolts a hay bale, a folded blanket and a plank backrest onto his freight sledge, and tells her to sit. The marshal gives them until the first of March to bring a marriage paper or the truth. Up at the cabin there are swept planks, a shelf of Dickens, a creek gauge notched in feet and inches, and a page in Lucius's tight hand with a sum written beside one letter. Her father's man Sullivan Brack is already in town with a red kerchief and a wire. What Dora finds in the ledger, and what a short surveyor's chain and a rotten ice dam above the only ford will do on the night the thaw comes, is about to decide whose land it is, and whose wife she is. This western historical romance audiobook features a scarred, quiet recluse who reads the creek's height every afternoon and gives up his own bed without a word, a heavy, sharp minded bookkeeper who can shoulder a fallen beam off a man, and the idea that a lie told to save someone can be truer than the paper that follows it.