Caleb's Bride

Caleb's Bride is a historical romance by the American writer Norah Hess, first published in 1978 and reissued by Love Spell in 2003. It is set on the western frontier, where the distance from any authority is part of the plot.

Roxanne Sherwood leaves Boston ahead of a typhus epidemic and blunders into a band of Indians, who take her prisoner. Frightened for her life, she is rescued from the immediate danger by a white stranger who claims her as his wife.

The band accepts the claim and attaches a condition: the marriage has to be real, with all the intimacies of a married couple. Roxy finds herself bound to a rough frontiersman she does not know, learning what survival demands of her and discovering that the man she has been given to is not the brute she assumed. The frontier keeps the pair far from any law that could help her, which leaves her dependent on a man she has no reason to trust, and the novel works out whether he can win her heart before she stops treating him as a captor.