Odelia

She plans to study marriage. He refuses to be her specimen. One hasty wedding may prove love is the wildest variable of all.

Odelia Bellamy trusts facts, not feelings. Determined to protect her romantic younger sister from rushing blindly into matrimony, the practical nineteen-year-old joins the same mail-order bride company and plans to investigate marriage from the inside. But when Delly helps a gruff mountain healer save an injured man on the Wild Rose Ridge docks, she decides Jebediah Simms meets every requirement for a sensible experimental husband.

Jebediah Simms has stopped expecting tenderness. Amused and alarmed when the sharp-tongued researcher proposes a practical arrangement, the solitary camp healer agrees to marry her the very next day-provided she understands he is a man, not a set of findings in her notebook. As Delly transforms his lonely cabin into a home, Jeb risks giving his heart to a wife who may only value him for what he can teach her.

Even though Delly is falling for her husband's quiet kindness, steady hands, and deeply hidden humor, admitting her experiment has become real, means surrendering the control that has kept her safe for years. And although Jeb is captivated by his brave, maddening bride, an old failure-and the discovery of what she has written about him-may convince him he was never truly wanted at all.

Can Delly stop studying love long enough to trust it, or will her careful research cost her the husband who has already captured her heart?

Odelia is part of the delightful Summer 1886 Wild Rose Ridge Historicals Christian historical romance series. If you enjoy marriage-of-convenience mishaps, dry banter, wounded healer heroes, and faith-filled frontier communities, you'll love Christine Sterling's warmhearted tale of an experiment that changes everything.