Her daughter turned and darted off, the snow scattering around her boots as she tromped through it.
“Jess?” Thomas’s forehead drew down. “Is everything all right?”
All right? How could he ask such a thing? “You’re supposed to be on your way back to South Dakota. Didn’t the sailors leave this morning?”
He leaned an arm against the shop, half trapping her between a wall made of wood and another of big, towering man.
That wouldn’t do at all. He was entirely too close and entirely too big and entirely too impossible to ignore. How was she supposed to keep her wits when his scent twined around her and his breath heated her cheeks?
He even had a bit of scruffy whiskers on his chin. Had he been too busy to shave, or had he remembered how she’d once liked to brush her fingers over the stubble on his face? To raise up and plant a kiss against the short bristles?
“I don’t know what the sailors are doing this morning, seeing how I’m not going with them.” His words sent another puff of warm, clean breath across her face.
“W-why not?” She could barely force her tongue to move. Could he not take a step back? Give her some room to think? “I told you to leave yesterday, remember?”
He bent his neck, lowering his head until she had no choice but to press fully back against her building or bump foreheads with him. “I’m staying, Jess.”
“For how long?” She wet her dry lips. It was just as Tressa had asked upstairs, just as she’d worried herself. Did this mean she owed him another chance at their marriage?
“However long it takes.”
“However longwhattakes?” Couldn’t he see he was messing everything up? Or maybe he knew exactly how much of her life he was messing up, and he simply didn’t care. He’d never seemed to care what she wanted before either, otherwise they’d not have wasted their savings on that ridiculous mining investment he’d claimed would make them money.
“Getting you to come with me.”
Tears smarted her eyes, but she wouldn’t shed them, not in front of the man who’d once promised her the world and then left her with nothing but ashes. “I told you yesterday. I can’t go with you.”
Thomas shifted away from his wife, giving her a bit of space. Staying was supposed to make her happy. After all, wasn’t she glad he’d returned? Glad he’d decided to stick things out in Eagle Harbor for a few weeks rather than dart back to South Dakota?
Instead, she looked ready to dissolve into tears.
He rubbed the back of his neck, stretching his sore shoulder at the same time. He was going about things all wrong again, but what was he supposed to do differently? “Look, Jess. I’m not trying to fight with you or rile you. I promise. I’m just trying to make the best of things.”
“Make the best?” Her voice stung, the low tone as piercing as the wind off the harbor. “Did it ever occur to you that the best was not to abandon your family?”
“I wanted you with me.” His own voice shook this time, and he wasn’t quite sure why. From anger? From frustration? From the sensation of standing close to the woman he’d pledged his life to and yet feeling as though a hundred miles separated them? “You’re the one who refused to come.”
“Because we couldn’t afford to take four people across the country while you chased dreams of wealth! I wanted you with me too, but not in California or South Dakota or any of the other places you went. I wanted you here in Eagle Harbor. It’s hardly my fault you refused to listen.” She shoved her hands into her pockets, which had to be nigh frozen since she wasn’t wearing mittens.
“I didn’t know what else to do. Staying here longer… it wouldn’t have been good, not after we lost our savings.” He’d exhausted himself trying to make enough money for them to live on here. “I needed to leave, and part of you should be glad I did. I own a hotel now. My ideas for wealth weren’t just dreams.”
Besides, lots of families that settled the frontier sent the husband first and then the others followed later. He hadn’t done anything unordinary.
But waiting five years to collect his family himself when they’d failed to come after he’d repeatedly written and asked them to join him?
He shifted closer again, but not so near she pressed up against the building. “That day I left, I never thought we’d beapart so long, and I never once imagined you weren’t getting the money I sent. It was enough for you to live on. That should count for something. It’s not as though I left you and expected you to fend for yourself. I left you so I could better provide.”
“And yet I ended up fending for myself anyway.” Her words weren’t angry but soft, resigned, a mere whisper of the truth both of them already knew.
“Yes.” He barely rasped the word over his aching throat.
“You weren’t the only one who made mistakes, Thomas.” The wind whipped at her hair, tugging a handful of flaxen blonde tresses out of the pristine twist at the back of her head and blowing them across her face, yet still she met his eyes. “I was wrong too. I realized it after you left, but I never had the chance to tell you. I was too focused on money, too apt to believe that having more of it would solve our arguments and problems.”
“You spent ten years living in one of the filthiest, poorest tenements in Chicago.” Before her mother had died and she’d gone to live with her second cousin. What a shock it must have been to leave behind the squalor of that one-room apartment and move in with a warehouse owner who could afford to host dinners and clothe himself and his family in fine suits and dresses. “I don’t blame you for wanting to make sure you never ended up back in those tenements, even if it caused arguments between us.”
“Thank you for understanding, but I still shouldn’t have let money—what little of it we had—come between us. I’m sorry.”
A smile crept across his mouth. Here she was offering him an apology when he hadn’t even been in town twenty-four hours. Maybe if she was willing to admit she was wrong about before, she’d be willing to forgive him and come to South Dakota now. “I… I agree, we both made mistakes. I’m sorry too.”
