Page 38 of Mail-Order Lady

The fire had burned to orange embers. The cottonwoods stood dark against the darker sky, their branches just visible where the firelight reached. Past them, nothing. The horses stood motionless.

Clara’s warmth seeped through the wool of his trousers.

He set his jaw and looked at the cliff. At the horses.

Both geldings stood easy, heads low. No tension in their ears. Whatever had been out there—whoever had been out there—had withdrawn after the shot, or was holding very still somewhere in the dark. Still enough that not even the horses sensed him.

Maybe he could rest.

But a glance down at Clara dissolved every other thought.

The moonlight shone across her cheekbone and the curve of her jaw, turning her honey-colored hair to something pale and luminous against the dark wool of her blanket. Her lashes rested against her cheek. Her lips parted a little, and the slow movement of her breathing wove through him like a peaceful stream on a summer day.

His jaw ached.

He had made her a promise. Separate rooms, her own space, nothing would change unless she wanted it to.

He’d thought he could do it. But every part of him ached with the need to touch her now. More than the contact of her arm against his leg through layers of clothing.

To ease down onto his blankets and stretch out beside her. Beside his wife. Just to hold her.

He pressed his eyes shut and focused on deep breaths in and out. I need strength, God. If I’m to keep my word, I need a strength far greater than what I have now.

CHAPTER 10

The wagon had been climbing through pine country since breakfast, but Clara kept her eyes on Robert.

He was holding the reins the way he always held them—both hands, low, the off rein wrapped once around his right palm against the steepness of the grade. The same hands she had watched on these reins for six long days.

The same careful posture, the same easy reading of the team, the same small adjustments through every switchback that she had stopped noticing as separate movements days ago and had started seeing as a single action.

He still drove the team well, but he seemed to be fading a little more every hour.

The shadows beneath his eyes had deepened since the mountain lion. He’d barely slept that night. She had barely slept either. Every time she’d surfaced from the thin, restless dozing, he’d been upright beside her. The rifle across his knees, his gaze moving through the dark in that slow, methodical sweep. She had kept her breathing even and her eyes mostly closed because she hadn’t known what else to do for him.

That had been three nights ago.

Since then he’d not slept more than two hours at a stretch, as far as she could tell. And he had spent every night sitting up in the wagon. Perched beside her with his rifle across his thighs. He had not slept lying down once that she had seen.

Now, he glanced behind them again.

The motion was practiced enough that someone who hadn’t been watching him for six days might have taken it for an idle glance. A man admiring the country they’d come through, or checking the weather building over the eastern peaks.

But she’d learned the difference. The glance lasted perhaps a second. His chin turned, his gaze swept the trail behind them, and then he was forward again, adjusting the near rein as the trail bent around a shelf of rock.

She had counted eleven of those glances in the last hour.

Something was wrong. Not the mountain lion kind of wrong. A danger that had been sudden and terrible, then over. This was the slow, grinding kind. The kind that had been building since they left Fort Benton, maybe.

She had asked him every day. In different ways and different moments—once when they were making camp, and she’d tried to make it sound casual, once when they were washing dishes at the creek, and the dark had given her a kind of courage she didn’t usually possess. She’d tried directness, and she’d tried the sideways approach that sometimes worked with Kate.

Each time he’d given her an answer that almost sounded right. The road. The team. The weather coming in over the western peaks.

Each time, she’d let it go.

The road bent left around a stand of pine and opened onto a longer flat stretch where the team could ease their pace. Robert clucked them forward and let the lines slacken a little.

His shoulders dropped half an inch. A moment later, his chin dipped. Came back up. Dipped again. Slower this time.