Page 17 of Mail-Order Lady

He didn’t answer immediately.

The clock on the mantel ticked through several seconds. Outside, a horse’s hooves struck the packed earth of the street, then faded.

“It isn’t small. But I’d like to do it.”

She turned from the window. He sat with his forearms still resting on his knees, watching her with that same unhurried attention he’d brought to every difficult moment of the past months. He didn’t look like a man who had just offered something he wished he could take back.

“You’ve already given up a great deal.” She pressed the handkerchief flat against her palm. “The journey here. The weeks at the ranch when I was ill. I have no way to repay any of it.”

“I don’t want to be repaid.” Those eyes were so earnest. Did she dare believe them?

He was the same as he always was—dark-haired, unhurried, with those quiet brown eyes that missed nothing and asked for nothing and somehow still managed to make her feel that she was being seen in a way no one ever had. Not even Kate.

He had sat beside her bed for weeks while she burned with fever and had not once made her feel like a burden.

He had walked with her into this hotel parlor half an hour ago, then stood behind her with his hands on her shoulders and told her mother she was married, and his voice had not wavered.

I would be honored.

Could he truly mean that? It didn’t seem possible. Yet Robert had never lied…not to her or anyone else. It didn’t seem part of his nature.

If she said yes to this…she would be part of the Balfour family. Truly, permanently, with Kate next door and Thomas and Mrs. Wang and the ranch she had somehow, without meaning to, begun to think of as home.

She would never have to sit in her mother’s parlor in Columbia and smile at Chester Whitfield. She would never have to be the daughter who came back, who failed, who settled for an awful, frightening arrangement.

She’d been sitting quiet too long. She had to say something. Yet what answer should she give? She could only manage the one that felt like the only possible path. “Can I have time to think about it?”

If it were possible, his expression softened even more. “Of course.” He straightened a little, and his gaze turned different, like he was calculating something. “Though if we’re going to move forward, I think we’d want to have the ceremony tomorrow. Your mother is likely already searching for a solicitor, and I don’t want to give her the upper hand.”

She nodded. Tomorrow. If she could simply clear the muddle of her thoughts, she might even be able to give him an answer today.

CHAPTER 5

The map he’d been drawing of the Montana Territory needed work.

Robert reached for his pen and added a notation he’d been meaning to make—a new trading post at a bend in the Marias that Enoch had mentioned before they left. He dated it. Set the pen down.

Then picked it up again.

The letter to the sheriff in Virginia City lay half-finished on his left. The one to his contact in Helena sat untouched on his right. Both were correspondence alerting the men about his Uncle Reginald and asking for them to watch out for a new round of rapscallions that murderer might have hired. He’d been staring at the pages long enough that the ink on the first paper had dried without him finishing the sentence.

He pulled the master map closer.

This was the work he was good at. While Enoch watched the fences and James watched the horizon, Robert watched the maps and the letters and the slow movement of information across the territory Reginald’s men might also be moving through.

He added a second notation. A ford across the Teton that wasn’t marked on the surveyor’s version but should have been. Small things. But small things were how you built a picture large enough to see.

He dated that one too. Set the pen down.

Clara’s face moved through his mind again, unbidden. The sadness in her eyes when she’d asked for time to think about his offer. Had there been hope there too? Maybe the hope was only on his side.

He pushed those thoughts aside and reached again for the letter to Virginia City.

The difficulty was that he couldn’t estimate Clara’s answer. He’d turned the variables over a dozen times and still couldn’t land anywhere certain. Whether the security of staying—Kate nearby, a real place in the family—would outweigh the cost of tying herself to him for the rest of her days. Whether her mother’s world still pulled at her in ways Clara didn’t name aloud. Whether Chester Whitfield’s three-story house and gardens looked less like a prison from inside Clara’s mind than they did from where Robert was sitting.

He’d made the marriage offer plainly, and he didn’t regret it. Not one word of it.

What he regretted was the waiting.