Page 22 of Mail-Order Lady

For a moment she lay still, letting the silence of the hotel room soak through her. The peacefulness.

The trembling that had taken her last night after Robert left her at the door—she’d thought it was fear, or the strain of the day catching up with her finally.

Yet there had been a weight that her mind took a moment to name.

Married.

She turned her face into the pillow and let the word sit a while.

How strange it was to be married to a man who didn’t sleep in the same room as her. In the same bed.

She turned onto her back.

The other side of the bed lay smooth and untouched. If this had been a different sort of marriage, Robert would be here.

Heat flushed through her before she could push the thought aside.

She didn’t mean—she wasn’t thinking of him that way. It was just that married people generally shared a bed, and she was a married woman now. The strangeness of that fact was settling through her in pieces.

Robert wouldn’t push her.

That much she had no doubt. He wouldn’t have presumed anything she didn’t give him leave to. He would have lain on his side of the bed with his hands resting across his middle, the way men did, and asked if she was warm enough, and let her sleep without expecting more from her than she was willing to offer.

The picture of it settled in her mind, and her chest tightened.

She sat up.

That was enough of that. She had not married Robert Balfour to lie in bed and imagine him there with her like a girl with a sweetheart. She had married him so her mother couldn’t take her back to Columbia.

She pushed the covers back and reached for her wrapper.

The water in the pitcher was cold, and splashing her face with it shook off the remnants of sleep. Was Robert, at this same moment, standing at his own washstand in his own room down the hall? Maybe he’d not yet risen, though he was often the first one up at the ranch. Bea had told her he’d been that way since he was a boy.

His voice drifted from the hallway. Low and unhurried, the way it always sounded.

She couldn’t make out the words, only the cadence of them, but something in her chest eased at the sound. Somehow, that voice had become the sound of home. That even, laidback tone that had read to her for hours through the worst of the fever.

The voice that had said “Drink this,” and “I’ve got you,” and “Easy now” in the long-blurred nights when she hadn’t been sure she would survive.

She paused with her fingers on the drying cloth and let her smile come as she listened.

Then another voice sounded, and her chest went tight.

She knew its owner before she could even make sense of the words. The tone of it—smooth, pitched just so. Lethal. It moved through the wall and through her chest, then settled at the base of her throat like a stone.

Her mother was in the hallway.

She dropped the cloth and strode to the door. Robert shouldn’t have to face Mother alone. She was Clara’s mother after all, and she should help resist whatever charge the woman had brought so early this morning.

She turned the handle and pulled the door open.

Her mother stood two steps away in the hallway, dressed as though she’d been awake for hours—hair pinned, gloves on, every inch of her composed and purposeful.

Robert faced her, still in his shirtsleeves, his expression the careful mask he wore when he was working hard to reveal nothing.

“—spoke to Sheriff Garrett himself this morning.” Her mother’s voice was low and absolutely furious beneath the surface. “He told me the ceremony took place yesterday afternoon. Yesterday. Here. Not before you left the ranch.” Her chin lifted a fraction. “You looked me in the eye and told me this marriage had already happened. You stood in that parlor and⁠—”

“Mrs. McKinney.” Robert’s voice didn’t rise.