Page 3 of Mail-Order Viscountess

“So you bought me a wife?” The absurdity of it choked him. “You think shackling me to some stranger is going to make me want to stay? I don’t need settling.” Thomas clenched his hands into fists. “I need to be left alone to live my life.”

“You don’t know what you need.” Rose spoke for the first time. She set down her parcel in the wagon bed. “Thomas, I understand how you feel. Truly, I do. But sometimes the very thing we think will trap us is actually the thing that sets us free.”

He barked out a laugh. “That’s easy to say when you chose your husband. When you had a say in your own future.”

The hit landed—he saw it in the way Rose’s face tightened—and a sliver of remorse slid through him. Given her past, that was an especially low blow.

Yet his chest felt like it might crack open. His brothers had betrayed him. All of them. Enoch, Robert, and James. Even their wives, and probably Mrs. Wang too.

They’d sat around discussing his life, his future, as if he were a problem to be solved rather than a man with his own mind. Sure, he was the youngest in the family, but how incapable did they think him?

“When does this stage arrive?” He bit out the words.

James glanced at the sun’s position. “Three hours. Maybe four.”

Three hours until some unsuspecting woman showed up looking for her new husband. A husband who hadn’t asked for her, didn’t want her, and sure as Montana winters were cold wouldn’t marry her.

“You’ll send her back.” He grabbed his gloves from where he’d dropped them and started toward the main street.

“We can’t do that.” James moved to block his path. “She’s traveled all this way. Given up everything⁠—”

“Not my problem.” Thomas shouldered past him. “I didn’t invite her. I didn’t write to her. I didn’t make her any promises. You did.”

The rage felt good—clean and hot and righteous. Better than the hollow feeling that had been eating at him for months. Ever since that ill-fated event in Fort Benton with the queen’s cousin that ended with him being knighted for failing to protect a man.

He stomped down the alley between buildings, splashing through half-frozen puddles. The main street of Butte stretched before him, crowded with freight wagons and miners and the usual chaos of a town flush with silver money.

Somewhere in this mess of humanity, there had to be a saloon. Not that he’d drink more than coffee. He’d never been able to stand that rot-gut whiskey. But he needed to lose himself somewhere.

James called after him, but Thomas didn’t turn back.

James, of all people, should have understood. James had been the one who listened when Thomas talked about California, about starting fresh somewhere nobody knew the Balfour name or cared about English titles that meant nothing out here. James had nodded and said he understood the restlessness.

Apparently understanding and respecting were two different things.

Thomas shouldered past a group of miners arguing about claim boundaries. The smell of unwashed bodies and stale tobacco smoke hung thick in the winter air.

A painted sign swung from chains ahead—The Silver Strike. Good enough.

The interior was dim after the bright winter sunlight, and Thomas paused inside the door to let his eyes adjust. The place reeked of whiskey and sawdust, with an undertone of something sharper. Cigar smoke, maybe, or the particular desperation that clung to men who spent their days underground working for barely enough to survive on.

A handful of men clustered around tables, nursing drinks despite the early hour. A few glanced up at his entrance, their gazes watching—the way men in rough towns always sized up strangers.

He ignored them and headed for the bar.

The barkeep, a grizzled man with more scars than teeth, wiped at a glass with a rag that looked dirtier than the glass itself. “What’ll it be?”

“Coffee. If you have it.” He’d need his wits to get out of James’s trap. Especially without saying or doing something he’d regret.

One eyebrow climbed toward the man’s receding hairline. “Coffee.”

“That a problem?”

“No problem at all.” The man set down the glass and turned to a pot sitting on a small stove behind the counter. “Just don’t get many asking for it.”

Thomas leaned against the bar and tried to let the anger drain out of him.

Not an easy feat.