Page 76 of The Widow and the Wanted

I swallow. “What does it mean?”

Boone’s mouth quirks, reluctant. “Means what it means,” he says, then sighs, as if he knows that won’t satisfy me. “We didn’t go tellin’ that fella what it meant. We told him it was a service mark. A luck sign,” he adds, quieter. “But it’s really Okee. Me. That spot between is whatever fire holds us together.”

My chest goes tight, fingertip hovering over the ink. I feel the heat of him under it—the steady beat beneath my finger.

“That’s lovely.”

Something about their vows feels deeper than anything I’ve ever known.

Not marriage as I understood it. Not two people joined because their mothers wanted them looked after, or because the town expected it, or because a woman needed a roof and a man needed a wife.

This was different.

They loved each other so enormously that ordinary I love yous were not enough. They had to make a promise big enough to hold it.

We rest a while, until the edges of the afternoon blur. The exertion from tending to Boone’s wounds all day and night finally catches up to me and I drift off to sleep.

The sound is like a dream, faint through the wind and muffled by snow. Hoofbeats through the dark. I only realize they’re real the moment I hear Okee’s voice.

“Well. I see the two of you have found a way to pass the time.”

“Christ,” Boone spits, the sound sending him leaping out of bed. He rushes quickly to his feet before I can rise, cursing under his breath as he scrambles for a set of clothes. He rustles through the trunk where I’d set his clean laundry and quickly dresses, nearly falling over before catching himself on the table with his good arm, swearing again, louder this time, then limping as quickly as he dares toward where Okee has fallen into a chair, half lit in firelight.

I hurry to fix myself, but I have scarcely time to smooth my hair, all tumbled and disordered from sleep. Lord above. All it took was a kiss to have me on my back for him. It seems I had not accounted for what winter, loneliness, and the constant company of handsome men might make of a woman. And Boone—I had not expected him to be built so generously. The sight of it nearly robbed me of what little good sense I had left. A cock belonging on a barnyard animal. Long, thick, and rigid. It was impossible not to imagine being stretched full of him. All that restless energy channeled into giving my womb a proper beating.

Okee pulls off his gloves finger by finger, clumsy with cold, and lays them neatly in his lap. His hands are raw at the knuckles, the cold rising off him like an icy phantom.

I move the kettle aside and fetch another cup without asking, a bitter ache in my stomach.

“Let’s get you warmed up,” Boone says. He kneels in front of Okee and begins helping him with his boots. “What’d old man Collins have to say for himself?”

Okee leans forward, pushing on his boot while Boone pulls, eyes on the floor. “Wait till spring.”

The room stills.

“What?”

“Says no marshal worth the badge will come riding through the Territory in this weather.”

Boone looks from one of us to the other. “Spring’s too long.”

“I know,” Okee says quietly. For the first time he seems to notice the barrel standing inside. “Why is that barrel in here?” He follows the signs of it to the heap of clothes and the rug gone dark with spilled water.

I clear my throat. “He was feverish. I wanted some way to bring it down.”

Okee looks at the floor, the pile of Boone’s wet clothes, then back at me, before fishing in his pocket. “Hmm,” he says. “And bedding him. I suppose that was part of the treatment?”

It’s dry, not cruel, but my face flashes with fire nonetheless. Boone simply huffs a laugh and scratches his head, then says, “Ain’t what it looks like. We ain’t done nothin’ ’cept kiss, which I reckon makes us about square.”

Okee does not so much as pause over it. Does not ask how I came to be there, or what passed between Boone and I beneath the blankets, or whether I mean to be ashamed. That, more than if he had pressed me, leaves me unsettled. I cannot tell whether he is sparing me, trusting me, or setting the matter aside for later.

“Water’s no friend to a house in winter,” he says, finally. “It gets into the boards, into the bedding, into the very air.”

His tone catches at me, so fatherly for a moment that I almost bristle at it. The way a man speaks when he is often heeded and seldom wrong.

“I’ll feed the stove,” I say. “Hang the things to dry proper, and open the door a crack once the wind settles.”

He pulls the reward poster Boone brought from the nearby settlement. “We might wait quite a length of time for that. The trail was brutal. Hollister’s offered a rich reward for a reason. He cannot be bothered to lift a finger himself. Let the common man rip us to shreds. A couple of hungry bounty hunters throw us in a wagon and drag us back to Fort Gibson.”