Page 2 of Mail-Order Lady

He signed. Snatched the keys from the man. Paid for a week, though he had no idea if they’d need to stay that long. Or longer.

“Any steamboats arrive in the past few days?” He kept his tone casual.

The clerk rubbed his jaw. “One came in yesterday morning. The Benton Belle. Another’s due tomorrow if the water holds.”

Yesterday. Robert kept his expression neutral, though his pulse kicked up. If Mrs. McKinney had boarded that ship as she’d planned, she would be in town now. “Do you have a Mrs. McKinney staying here, by chance?”

The clerk flipped back a page in the ledger, then another. “No one by that name’s checked in this week.”

Robert nodded. It didn’t mean she wasn’t here—only that she hadn’t registered under her own name.

Or mayhap she’d found lodging elsewhere. Fort Benton had boarding houses. Private rooms above the saloons. A dozen places a person with means could stay if she wanted to avoid notice.

“Thank you.” He collected the keys and turned back to Clara and Mrs. Wang.

Clara’s expression remained bright and pleasant. The same face she’d worn that morning when Mrs. Wang had asked if she’d slept well in the wagon bed. The same countenance she’d given him yesterday when he’d asked if she needed to stop and rest. He’d known she did, but somehow she kept her fatigue from showing.

The wood creaked under their feet as they climbed the stairs, and somewhere above them, a door opened and closed. The hallway at the top stretched long and dim, with sunlight slanting through a window at the far end.

Room seven. He unlocked it and pushed the door open for Mrs. Wang. She stepped inside, glanced around, then nodded. “Very good.”

She would have been happy with anything, but he wouldn’t let her stay in anything less than decent. While she was the housekeeper at the Balfour ranch, she was more like a mother to him and his brothers. She’d practically raised them, especially after their real mother passed only two years after they arrived in the Montana Territory as young boys.

He crossed the hall to room eight and unlocked it. Pushed the door wide and stepped inside before he let Clara pass.

One window, overlooking the street. A decent latch on the inside. He checked it, then the door itself—solid, with a lock that didn’t look recently repaired.

The room was plain but clean. A pitcher and basin on the stand. A bed and a narrow chair. A hook on the back of the door.

He still stood in the middle of the barely adequate space, trying to figure out how he could possibly allow Clara to stay here when Clara appeared in the doorway.

“It looks lovely.”

It didn’t. It looked like exactly what it was—a frontier hotel room that had seen too many souls pass through without caring about any of them.

But Clara stood there with that expression gracing her lips, the one that said she would find a polite word to say about a tent in a rainstorm if she thought it would make someone else feel better. And there really was no other choice.

“The lock is solid.” He nodded to the door. “Keep it fastened when you’re inside.”

“Of course.” She tipped her chin at an angle, the corners of her mouth tugging upward.

He set her bag on the chair. Checked the window latch again. Anything to keep his hands occupied and his mind on practical matters instead of the way she stood there, so beautiful and so perfectly composed. As if her mother weren’t somewhere in this town with plans he couldn’t yet anticipate.

“Robert.”

He turned.

“You don’t have to worry quite so much.” She spoke softer now, soothing the edge from her words. “I’m not going to fall apart.”

How could he answer that?

She wouldn’t fall apart—that was the problem. She’d hold herself together through whatever her mother intended, and she’d do it with that careful grace and lovely smile. No one would know what it cost her except the people who’d learned to read the small signs. The way her hands stilled. The precise spacing of her words.

“I know you won’t.”

She tilted her head. Studied him the way she sometimes did, as if she were trying to solve him like an equation. “Then why do you look like you’re preparing for a siege?”

“Because I am.” He kept his voice level. “Your mother is likely in town. She came here with a purpose. Until I know what that purpose is, I’m going to treat every possibility as a threat.”