Downstairs, a chair scraped across the
floor.
Then her father’s voice rose through the thin ceiling.
“She’s twenty-four.
Healthy.
Knows how to cook.
She’ll make a proper wife.”
A man’s deeper voice answered.
“I didn’t ask for a servant.”
Rosalie froze.
She knew that voice.
Gideon Rook.
The deaf rancher.
Everyone in Coldwater knew him.
He lived beyond the northern ridge where the road disappeared into pine forest and open pasture.
He owned hundreds of acres, more cattle than most families in the county combined, and a house so isolated that children dared each other to ride close to it after sunset.
People said Gideon was half mad.
Some said he had killed a man.
Others said he had gone deaf because the devil had whispered directly into his ears.
Rosalie had never believed any of it.
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