“I suppose if it’s important, he’ll return,” Matthew said. He took his hat off and laid it on his desk.
“Let’s hope not,” Gilbert replied darkly. Then he tilted his head. “Why are you back? I thought you’d left for the day.”
Matthew sighed and fell into the chair behind his desk. “Now that’s a story.”
Gilbert raised his eyebrows. “I’m curious.”
And Matthew launched into what he’d found when he had gone home. Telling Jake made it somehow feel less awful. He even offered to ask his wife to befriend Miss Timperman if she was unable to leave town, and perhaps even find her work up at the hotel.
All would be well. But as he returned to his work, Matthew found it wasn’t Miss Timperman on his mind, but the angry man who’d come looking for him. Who could he have been?
And what did he want?
Chapter Twenty-one
THE FOLLOWING DAY,Matthew lingered at home before leaving for the land office.
“Perhaps I should take the day off from work,” he said, holding Sophia’s hand in the hallway near the door.
“There is no need. Miss Timperman is hardly going to come here and yell at me for marrying you,” she said with a little smile. Just thinking of the thin blonde woman shrieking at her felt so out of character with the Miss Timperman Sophia had met yesterday that it was hard not to laugh.
“I don’t know about that,” he replied. “You didn’t see how angry she was with me.”
“It was merely wounded pride.” Sophia squeezed his hand. “She’s now had time to think on what’s happened, and I imagine she’s trying now to secure funds for train fare home. I doubt she ever wants to see you or me again.”
After a moment, he nodded. “You’re right. I only wish she’d taken me up on my offer to pay the fare for her.”
“Then she’d feel as if she owed you.” She glanced at the clock in the parlor. “You ought to get to work before Mr. Gilbert starts to worry.”
He leaned forward and kissed the top of her head. When he lingered, she thought perhaps now was finally the moment. Perhaps he’d lift her chin and kiss her in the way she’d been thinking about ever since that moment outside of the mercantile. His eyes searched her face, and just as she thought it might happen, the sound of his mother’s humming floated down the hallway from the kitchen.
He chuckled as she sighed, and he brushed the side of her face with his hand instead. “I may ask Jake if he and Mrs. Gilbert would like to join us for dinner.”
“That would be wonderful,” Sophia said as she pushed away the disappointment. “I’ll let your mother know.”
The day passed as most others did, and when Sophia left in the afternoon to purchase eggs from a woman in town who kept chickens, she found Miss Timperman watching her from across the road.
