“Others will, though, won’t they?”
He was finally getting to the heart of the matter, she thought. “Not your father, certainly, but Fiona? Yes. Fiona will have doubts. More than that, she will have objections, and she will not keep them to herself. Do you want to hear them? Because I don’t. Not when there are so many things still undecided.”
“For instance?”
“Where we will live. That is at the top of my list. You’ve thought about that, surely.”
“I don’t have a list.”
“Then you should probably start one.”
“Hmm.” Remington held the horses up when they reached the stream and watched the flow of the water, the force of it against the rocks. “Stay close,” he said. He did not offer to take her reins. “Mind your step and hers.”
“I’m calling her Thundercloud,” she told him as they started across.
“No. You’re not.”
“Lightning?”
He lifted an eyebrow in a truly skeptical arch.
“McCauley, then. You can’t talk me out of it.”
“She’s a mare,” he said dryly.
“Mrs. McCauley. You don’t know, perhaps the old man was married once upon a time.”
“All right. Mrs. McCauley.” He looked at the mare, whose preferred gait was less like walking and more like moseying, and said, “Hard to believe, but I think it suits her.” When they were safely on the other side, he urged Bullet to increase his pace. Mrs. McCauley came along, but reluctantly. “Is it New York?” he asked.
Phoebe frowned. “What? I don’t follow.”
“Where we will live. Is it New York?”
Her frown merely deepened. “Do you want to live there?”
“No.”
“Well, neither do I. Sometimes, Remington, you astonish me with the odd turn your mind takes.”
“Me? Have you heard the one about the pot and the kettle?”
She pursed her lips. “I know it.”
“What was I supposed to think?” he asked.
“You are supposed to think that maybe we should have a house of our own, a place where Fiona and your father do not sleep down the hall. A place where we are not undertheir thumbs and they are not under our feet. I, for one, would like to be able to lift a pot in my own kitchen or set a table without getting rapped on the knuckles with a spoon.”
“Ah. You’re talking about Ellie.”
“I am. Don’t think that means I want to live in the kitchen or at the washboard or beside the fireplace darning your socks.”
“Trying to imagine it,” he said. “Can’t.”
“Good, because I will want help doing those things and I know you can afford it. I will also want to ride with you and sleep under the stars and drink coffee from a pot that’s been heated over a fire. And don’t tell me I’ve read too many dime novels and romanticized my vision. I know the riding will be hard, the ground will be cold, and the coffee will be vile, but I’ll be with you, sharing something you love, and that’s what I want.”
For a time he said nothing, then quietly, a little roughly, he told her, “I don’t think you can imagine how much I want to drag you off Mrs. McCauley right now.”
Phoebe laughed, not because she couldn’t imagine it, but because he’d used Mrs. McCauley’s name. It just was the brake she needed to apply before she dismounted the mare without his help and pulled him out of his saddle.
