He balled the garment up and shoved it under his arm. “Certainly, but Miss Brogan, Aileen…” He reached for her, though what, precisely, he should do with a woman fighting back tears, he didn’t know.
And it didn’t much matter since she took a step away from him and huddled in on herself.
A knock sounded on the open door, and Thomas stepped in from the hallway. “We found a set of footprints in the alley behind the building, but that’s it. They were impossible to follow once they got out to Center Street. Mac’s replacing the locks on the doors, and Elijah went to rent a horse and wagon from the livery. He figured Miss Brogan might want to stay with them until the vandals are caught.”
A horse and wagon. Why hadn’t he thought of that? She absolutely couldn’t be left here alone. He turned to Aileen. “Are you willing to stay with my brother and his wife, or do we need to make some other kind of arrangements for you?”
“Yes, please, I’ll stay with Victoria or… anywhere.” Her hands fluttered nervously about her midsection. “Just don’t leave me here by myself. What if they come back at night when I’m sleeping and…?” She pressed a hand to her throat.
He met Aileen’s frightened gaze with his own, then waited for her to calm. “We’ll catch them, I promise.” And it was a promise he fully intended to keep.
The only trouble was, he’d been trying to catch the thieves for two months already, and he didn’t seem any closer to finding the culprits now than the first day he’d pinned a badge to his chest.
So much for going to the candlelight service with his family, or even getting home at a sane time of night. Thomas rubbed his bleary eyes as he climbed the dark stairs to his apartment. He’d watched the bakery for hours, hoping whoever had broken in earlier hadn’t realized Aileen was staying with the Cummingses. Yet he’d seen nothing—just like all the other nights he’d been on patrol with Isaac. They’d split up tonight, with Isaac patrolling The Pretty Penny and The Rusty Wagon, but Isaac hadn’t seen anything suspicious either.
Thomas huffed out a breath. There were criminals either in town or somewhere close enough to easily visit, so why were he and Isaac having such trouble finding them? It had been five weeks since the arson, and they didn’t have so much as a suspect. He unlocked the door at the top of the stairs and opened it, then blinked at the soft light. His wife lay curled on the couch, a dressing gown tied about her waist.
Why was she there? Had she been trying to wait up for him? He hung his coat on the peg and moved toward the couch, where he lifted her into his arms. He sucked in a sharp breath and winced at the pain that shot down his shoulder and into his fingers, but it was worth it to hold?—
“What are you doing?” She jolted awake.
“Taking you to bed.” He pushed the door to their room open with his foot, only to find a dim lantern burning on the dresser.
“Thomas, your shoulder.” She trailed her fingertips over the wounded muscle, her touch so light he couldn’t feel it beneath his flannel shirt and union suit. “You can’t carry me.”
“Sure I can.” He set her gently on the bed, but she scrambled off the mattress to face him.
She laid her hand over where his arm met his shoulder, her touch still too tender to cause pain. “But it hurts you.”
“Sometimes.” Did she realize how close she stood to him? That her breath brushed his chin when she spoke? That her hair shone like a waterfall of spun gold in the lamplight? He reached out to finger a strand.
“You should have told me about the accident in the mine.”
He offered a lopsided smile. “I assume the girls let you in on my not-so-secret secret?”
“It should have never been a secret.”
“I didn’t intend for it to be, which is why I told the girls. They asked why I’d come back the day we built the snowman.”
A smile tilted the corners of her mouth, carefree and beautiful like the smiles she’d given him when they’d first met a decade ago. “You’ve built three dozen snowmen. That hardly narrows things down.”
“Not three dozen.” Possibly two dozen though. “I’m just glad they’re willing to spend time with me considering how much of their lives I’ve missed. I thought of telling you a couple times, but the timing never seemed right.”
The smile left her face, and her gaze fell to where her hand still rested on his shoulder. “Is there a wound?”
“More like a scar. It’s healed now, or as healed as it will get. The doc in Deadwood said there’d be no changing the damage on the inside, though some days I think it’s getting worse.”
She wet her lips. “I want to see it.”
He took a step back, letting her hand slip from his shoulder. “It looks like I spent seventeen hours trapped beneath a rockfall. Beyond that, there’s not much to see.”
And yet there was so very much to see. How imperfect he was, how close he’d come to not returning to his wife and daughters. How his body bore the flawed, painful marks of five years of his life gone wrong.
“I want to see it anyway.”
And since she was his wife, she had every right to see it.
She didn’t help with his buttons this time, but stood back and watched as his thick, fumbling fingers pushed the wood circles through their small holes. Once he removed his shirt, he undid the top half of his union suit, then paused. The scarred skin already peeked out from the opening around his neck, nothing like the tight skin and hard muscle that covered the rest of his torso.
