“I can’t wait to see it.” She pinched her lips together and tried not to look at Roman. She couldn’t believe she’d just made the assumption—aloud—that she’d be here come next spring. Because the only way that would happen would be if he decided he wanted to marry her.
“Me too,” he said.
Clara ventured a glance at him, trying to determine if he meant that he was looking forward to seeing it himself, or if he couldn’t wait for her to see it.
But all he gave her was a quiet smile before gesturing at their lunch. “Would you care to eat?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” she said.
Clara removed her gloves and opened the basket as Roman sat nearby, rather than on the other side. She ducked her head so he couldn’t see the flush she felt creeping up her face. As she removed wrapped sandwiches, cold potatoes, and Miss Darby’s wonderful berry cobbler from the basket, she felt as if she were overly conscious of every move she made.
Both she and Roman reached for the glasses at the bottom of the basket at the same time, his hand brushing against hers. They both laughed, Clara rather self-consciously, as she drew back to let him retrieve the glasses. She went to work opening the sandwiches as he filled their glasses with lemonade.
“I fear I ought to have brought something for us to sit upon,” Roman said as he picked up a forkful of potatoes.
“Well, there don’t seem to be as many bugs here as we had back in Virginia, at least.” Clara examined her sandwich, which appeared to be sliced ham on buttered bread. “We’d be overrun with ants without a blanket or quilt.”
“I can’t say I’ve ever been on a picnic before,” Roman replied.
Clara swallowed her bite of sandwich. “You haven’t? Well, I suppose that now you can say you have.”
“I doubt any picnic I might have had before this one would ever measure up.”
Clara took another bite in the hopes it would keep her from smiling too much. When she finished chewing, she said, “I’ve been on a few. Mostly excursions with other ladies from church, or with a group of Violet’s society friends. And once with . . .” She let the words disappear into the air, thinking she oughtn’t talk about picnicking with Gideon.
“The fellow who broke off your engagement?” Roman supplied as he passed her the jar of potatoes.
Clara took it, grateful to having something to do with her hands. So Roman remembered that she’d written about Gideon. She nodded. “Gideon Maxwell.” It felt strange to say his name aloud again. Despite it being under a week since her arrival here, she felt as if Virginia and her misfortune with Gideon were like something that had happened in a dream.
“He’s the reason you went looking through the marriage advertisements.” Roman spoke the words as a statement rather than a question, as if the fact didn’t bother him one bit.
“Well, not entirely,” Clara said as she speared a potato on her fork. “Some time had passed—he married—”
Roman raised his eyebrows disapprovingly, which made Clara happier than she cared to admit.
“I felt . . . restless, I suppose. None of the men who might have taken an interest in me particularly appealed to me. And I suppose I decided I wanted something different from the life my mother had.” She paused and looked at Roman, who had already finished his ham and butter sandwich and who now leaned back on a hand as he listened to her.
“My family isn’t well-off, but we aren’t poor. We have a small home at the edge of the city, immediately adjacent to those around it. My father works hard each day, and my mother does the same at home. It isn’t a terrible existence by any means, but when I stepped back and realized I would’ve had the same with Gideon—or with any other man who might have courted me—I felt so . . . so . . . disappointed.”
It was funny to put it all into words now, when she couldn’t have articulated her reasoning back when she chose to leave. It was true that she tired of seeing Gideon and his new wife each day, but that wasn’t the entire reason she’d opted to write to Roman Carlisle. It was more like a convenient excuse that both she and those she loved could understand.
But now that she was here, she knew it was so much more than that.
Roman nodded as he mulled over his words. “I felt much the same when I left Kansas City. My brothers all did as they were expected—went to work in business, married, started a family. Each time I thought of living the same life as my father, it felt as if I couldn’t breathe. I have all the respect in the world for him, but it wasn’t the life I wanted.”
“And now you find yourself starting a business and . . .” Clara’s cheeks went warm as she let the sentence drift off.
Roman laughed as he stretched out his legs. “After nearly ten years of drifting and doing everything my father had warned me against.”
“What changed?” It felt like such a forward sort of thing to ask, but Clara said it anyway. She wanted to know everything about him, and he certainly didn’t look chagrined that she’d inquired.
Instead, he caught her gaze with those dark eyes as his expression grew more serious. “I grew tired of that life. Of the men I worked with, the constant moving about, the trail, the insecurity that came with throwing my pay away the moment I received it, the danger I always seemed to find. And I couldn’t figure how I could be surrounded by so many people and yet feel so alone.”
Clara swallowed. She’d felt the same in the last few months before she’d left Virginia—lonely, even when she wasn’t alone. “Is the danger you mentioned how you found yourself with that scar?”
He ran a hand over his lip, where the small white mark cut into his skin. Clara wondered if that was the reason he kept himself clean-shaven. Surely it would stand out more if he wore a mustache.
“It is,” he said, his gaze now on the creek as if his mind had wandered somewhere else.
