His daughter beamed and returned to her slate, where a row of wobbly Hs marched across the surface.
Ivy's gaze caught his for just a moment—warm, questioning, perhaps a little cautious. He could read the unspoken inquiryin her eyes:Are we all right? Did last night change something between us?
He looked away first. Lest he say the words aloud.I’m broken. You deserve a better man.
After their noon meal, he went to the stable, ostensibly to muck out the stalls but really to put distance between himself and the woman in his kitchen. While he worked—the rhythmic scrape of the shovel, the warm, animal smell of the cow and calf—he tried to sort through the tangle of his thoughts.
What are my choices?
He could continue as he was—employer and employee, with a careful, professional distance maintained at all times. This was the safe option, the sensible one. It protected Ivy's reputation, preserved Jewel's stability, and kept his own treacherous heart under lock and key.
Or.
He could acknowledge what was happening between them—the looks, the silences, the way the air seemed to change when they were in the same room—and face the consequences.
And what would those consequences be?If Ivy didn't return his feelings, their working relationship would become awkward, possibly untenable. She might leave. Jewel would be devastated.
If shedidreturn his feelings.... That led to territories he wasn't prepared to map. Marriage? He was divorced, disgraced, disinherited. What did he have to offer?
Everything,whispered a voice that sounded suspiciously like Hank's.You have everything that matters.
He shoved the voice aside and finished the stalls with the grim efficiency of a man trying to outwork his feelings.
When he returned to the house, Ivy was in the parlor, writing her letter by the window while Jewel napped. When he entered, she looked up. For a moment—just a moment—the afternoonlight caught the gold and green flecks in her hazel eyes. The breath went out of him.
“I'm writing to my sister, Katie,” she said softly, as if offering an olive branch of normalcy. “Trying to describe the Northern Lights.” She shook her head ruefully. “Words seem so inadequate.”
“They are.” He paused in the doorway, knowing heshouldwalk on, knowing he wouldn't. “But words are all we have when the people we love are far away.” When he’d first reached Sweetwater Springs, he’d written to his family members to let them know he and Jewel had arrived safely and so they’d know where to reach him.
But only his youngest brother, Gareth, had corresponded. The boy mentioned writing in secret because their father had forbidden any contact. How Gareth disagreed with the decree and wanted Torin to know that. How he’d write again when he was grown and could do what he wanted.
Something flickered in Ivy’s expression—surprise at his openness, perhaps, or recognition that his words contained more than their surface meaning. She held his gaze for a beat longer than was strictly comfortable.
The silence that followed was charged with everything they weren't saying.
Torin broke it by clearing his throat and stepping back. “I should check the fires.”
“Yes,” Ivy agreed, returning her gaze to her letter. “You should.”
He retreated down the hall, his heart knocking against his ribs, and spent the rest of the afternoon finding reasons to be in whatever room she wasn't.
12
Spring arrived in Montana in fits and starts, advancing and retreating, never quite committing to continual fine weather. One day the sun would blaze from a sky so blue, Ivy's heart ached to look at it, and the remaining snow would soften and shrink, exposing patches of brown earth that smelled of wet soil, with shoots of green pushing through the ground.
The next day, or maybe by the same evening, a storm would blow in from the mountains and bury everything under a fresh white blanket, as if winter had changed its mind about leaving. Then the rain persisted—sometimes showers, other days, storms.
“Don't trust a Montana April,” Torin warned her when she complained after one such reversal, looking out the kitchen window to see a foot of new snow covering the bare and muddy ground of the day before. “Or May, for that matter. The weather's a trickster. She'll show you a warm face and then dump snow on you when you turn your back.” He flipped over the strips of bacon he fried in the big cast iron pan.
“You speak of the weather as though it's a woman,” Ivy observed, returning to the table to pick up her latest project—stitching a feltKin cornflower blue.
His eyes glinted with humor, although his expression remained impassive. “Only a woman could be that unpredictable.”
“Or that beautiful,” she countered.
The corner of his mouth twitched before he turned back to the stove.
But the land knew the truth the sky refuted; spring unfurled underground. Even when the snow returned, the changes continued. The frozen terrain softened, then thawed, releasing scents that were new to Ivy—the rich, dark smell of earth waking up, the sharpness of pine sap running, the sweetness of something green and growing that she couldn't identify but that made her want to stand outside and simply breathe.
