And so when he tries to initiate sex with his wife, what does Sarah do? She shoots at him. But then she starts asking him to sleep by her side, then kiss her, then touch (but nothing more!), and after he takes all that without complaint, she starts parading before him naked - because she wants to feel like a woman, you see! And he doesn't seem very affected by her. Right from the start, she refuses to sleep with him and he promptly backs off. And yells and insists that he's an awful person. And when he tells her the facts, she doesn't believe him, of course. She believes the very worst about him in every situation, even though she knows nothing about him and has no reason to believe these things. (I'm not kidding, this is an actual scene from the book) When he falls down and hits his head on her metal sewing box, she's worried about the sewing box. I bet sex is not very high on his current list of priorities, especially when he's unconscious. When he passes out in a fever near her, and all she's worried about is that maybe he'll try to have sex with her.

Again, no compassion whatsoever to the fact that he's in agony.

What about Sarah? Oh, she just yells at him for drinking, because she doesn't like alcohol. So Sam has to just drink whiskey and sleep, hoping to heal. They have to run away, and there is no time to see a doctor, no medication available. How heartless do you have to be, to see another human dying before your eyes, your husband no less, and not give his life or pain any mind, only worrying about the mild discomfort caused to you by TAKING THE KNIFE OUT OF HIS BACK?!! When Sarah sees him bleeding and he asks her to take out the knife she tells him he owes her, because she doesn't like the sight of blood. The first day of their marriage her new husband gets stabbed in the back. So it starts out with a mail-order bride trope.

This book was SO DUMB I'm afraid reading it might have caused some brain damage.

When a Texan Gambles by Jodi Thomas