Page 58 of Mail-Order Viscountess

He smiled into the darkness and closed his eyes. This wasn’t how he’d imagined his wedding night. But lying here beside Kate—the warmth of her presence drifting across the distance between them, hearing the quiet rhythm of her breathing—he didn’t mind at all.

They had time.

CHAPTER 19

Kate had never known a household could feel like this.

She sat at the round work table in the kitchen, afternoon light streaming through the window as she worked her needle through the worn cuff of a flannel shirt. Around her, the comfortable sounds of women at work filled the space—the rhythmic thump of Mandie kneading bread dough, the soft scrapings of Rose’s knife as she peeled potatoes, and through the open door down to the cellar, Clara’s bright laugh at something Mrs. Wang said.

Or rather, Bea. The older woman had insisted all the women call her by her Christian name. Her dark eyes had warmed as she’d pressed Kate’s hands between her own. “You are family now. My girls call me Bea.”

Family. The word still felt so foreign, like a language she was only beginning to learn.

Two days. Kate had been married for two days, and already the rhythm of the Balfour household had begun to seep into her bones. Breakfast at dawn with the whole family crowded around the massive dining table, voices overlapping in easy conversation. Then the men would disappear to the barn and pastures, leaving the house to settle into its own quieter industry.

And Kate had found her place in it.

She’d discovered the mending basket on her first morning—overflowing with shirts missing buttons, trousers with torn seams, stockings worn thin at the heels and toes. A ranching household of four brothers generated no small amount of work for a needle, and from the state of the pile, it had been neglected for some time.

Now the mending pile had shrunk by half, and Kate moved on to washing—scrubbing work shirts clean, then reinforcing seams and patching worn spots before they became holes.

“Kate.” Mandie’s voice pulled her from her work. The woman stood at her shoulder, flour dusting her apron, examining the shirt in Kate’s hands. “Is that Enoch’s old work shirt? The one with the tear along the shoulder?”

Kate lifted the garment so Mandie could see the repair. “I added an extra layer of fabric underneath, then reinforced the seam with a double stitch. It should hold through another season at least.”

Mandie’s eyes widened. “I was going to use that for rags. I thought the fabric was too frayed.”

“I think it can go through the spring.” Kate smoothed her hand over the nearly invisible stitches. Good work, even if she wasn’t objective.

“You’re wasted on simple mending.” Rose leaned forward to peer over the pile of potatoes. “These repairs are works of art.”

Heat climbed Kate’s neck. “They’re just practical. No sense throwing away something that can be fixed.”

Bea appeared at Kate’s other side, wiping her hands on her apron. “Practical and beautiful can live in same.” She lifted one of the finished shirts from the stack beside Kate’s elbow—one of Thomas’s, the blue cotton she’d washed and mended that morning. “Look at this buttonhole. Perfect. And this elbow—I can barely see where the hole was.”

“It’s what I was trained to do.” Kate set down Enoch’s shirt and reached for the next item in the basket—another of Thomas’s shirts, if she wasn’t mistaken. He’d worn this green flannel the first morning after they reached the ranch, when he gave her the three choices, and she chose marriage.

The fabric held the faint scent she was coming to know as his—horse and leather and something uniquely him. Something that made her pulse quicken.

She worked her needle quickly through the worn cuff, her fingers coaxing the fraying threads back into order. This, at least, she understood. Fabric and thread—problems with clear solutions.

So much simpler than the complicated tangle of emotions whenever she thought about her husband.

Her husband. Two words that still didn’t quite fit together in her mind.

Last night had been their second night sharing a bed. Like the first, Thomas had kept carefully to his side, maintaining the space between them. But this time, that distance had felt smaller somehow. A foot instead of two. Close enough that she could feel the warmth radiating from him in the darkness, could hear each shift of his breathing.

And in that darkness, they’d talked again.

It seemed to be their ritual—this strange intimacy that only existed when they couldn’t see each other’s faces. In the night, with the covers pulled up, and the world reduced to darkness and murmured words, she said things to him she’d never told anyone.

And Thomas... He listened in a way no one ever had. Not even Clara. Not waiting for his turn to speak. Not judging. Just...listening.

He told her about the first horse he’d ever trained on his own—a half-wild mare everyone else had given up on. How he’d spent weeks just sitting with her, letting her come to him, earning her trust inch by inch. The triumph he’d felt when she finally let him touch her.

“That’s what I felt like,” Kate admitted into the darkness. “After my mother died. After Father remarried so soon. And his choice seemed to hate me so. I felt like a wild thing everyone had given up on. Only there was no one patient enough to sit with me.”

“But later you had Clara,” Thomas said quietly.