“I don’t understand.”
“How old you are doesn’t much matter, Miss Middlebourne. I wanted a stronger wife.”
Jane stared at him. “And you saw that in Rebecca?”
He looked at it again. “She has bold features and large bones. She is broad across the chest and shoulders. She’s sitting down, but you described yourself as tall—and you are—but now that I know you’re you and she’s someone else, I figure she’s probably got a few inches on you. She’s maybe as tall as I am. Am I right?”
She nodded. “Almost six feet.” That elicited a soft whistle from Morgan. Jane bristled slightly. “Do you need your wife to pull a plow? Don’t you have animals for that?”
Morgan ducked his head and stared at the floor for a moment. He cleared his throat before he answered. “No, Miss Middlebourne, I don’t need my wife to pull a plow.”
She sniffed. “You were laughing at me.”
He shrugged and looked at her again. “A little.”
“Rebecca is widely acknowledged to be a beauty.”
“So you wrote.”
“I wrote it so you would understand that I know I am not. I wrote it so your expectations would not be unreasonable. Rebecca closely resembles her mother, and Cousin Frances has always been accounted to be a handsome woman.”
“She’s very fair.”
“Yes. She is. Waves of golden hair. Eyes the color of a cerulean sky. Alabaster skin. The photograph hardly does her justice.”
“Your complexion is fair.”
Jane shook her head. “An illusion. I have not been allowed to show my face to the sun in years. Not since Cousin Frances observed that I brown like a pie crust.”
“I see. What did Cousin Frances have to say about your hair?”
“An unremarkable, unflattering shade of brown. She is straightforward in her assessments.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “She is. And your eyes?”
“You can see for yourself that they are green. Like yours.”
“Not like mine,” he said.
“No,” she said. “Not like yours. You have flecks of blue and gray. Pine green. Spruce green. Evergreen, I would say.”
“And yours are just green.”
Jane did not flinch in the face of his plain speaking. “Yes.”
Morgan finally leaned back in his chair. He did not tilt it backward, but he did slide down a few inches and stretch his long legs. His dusty boots disappeared under the bed. He removed his hat, tossed it over his shoulder. It landed squarely on the seat of the wing chair. He folded his arms across his chest.
“How do you suppose your cousin’s photograph came to be in the letter you wrote?”
That was still a question in Jane’s mind. What she said was, “I can only guess.”
“Guess.”
“I’m imagining that Rebecca put it there. She removed mine and inserted hers.”
“Why? And I realize this will be another guess.”
“Well,” she said slowly, “I suppose because she wanted to make mischief.”
