Page 30 of Mail-Order Lady

He nodded once. “Sleep well.”

She moved to the wagon without looking back.

He should bed down too. Who knew what they’d face tomorrow. And no matter what, he had to be ready.

CHAPTER 8

The silence had lasted two hours so far, and Clara had run out of story to tell herself.

Not that she’d spoken any of the tale aloud. The saga had been living entirely inside her head—a princess in a castle, which was where she always started when she needed somewhere to escape—but even that had dissolved after the first hour, worn thin by the rhythmic creak of the wagon and Robert’s endless silence.

It wasn’t the comfortable kind. Had she done something wrong the night before?

She appreciated companionable quiet. Bea produced it without effort, the sort of stillness that felt like a warm room. Even Kate’s silences, when they came, had texture to them—simmering just beneath, something that would boil over eventually in a useful direction.

Robert’s silence this morning had sharp edges.

The mountain country rolled past as she tried to put a name to what she was feeling. Not quite hurt. Something more like the sensation of standing at a door that had been open two days ago and finding it closed and nailed shut today, with no explanation and no way to knock without seeming foolish.

The wedding. That was when it had shifted.

Before, in all the months of illness and recovery and the long journey to Fort Benton, he had talked to her. Not abundantly—Robert was never abundant. But steadily, in a peaceful cadence that had settled the churning in her chest.

He’d read to her.

He’d answered her questions about the ranch, about the territory, about the maps he was always annotating. He’d asked her things in return, careful questions that suggested he’d been listening to her previous answers. There had been an ease between them that she hadn’t recognized as precious until it was gone.

Now he sat beside her like a man wary of everything.

He checked behind them again. The third time in the last quarter hour.

His jaw had that set to it—not clenched exactly, but held. Was he still worried her mother would follow? She’d figured out partway through yesterday that must be why he kept looking back. As far as she could tell, though, no one trailed them.

The road behind them was empty. Had been all morning, just the pale ribbon of trail unwinding back toward the plain, nothing moving on it but dust and distance.

It was good that he watched. She didn’t begrudge him that. Not when his diligence made her feel so protected.

But when he turned forward again, his gaze skimmed across her face the way it had been doing all morning—brief, careful, as though she were something that might chip if he looked too long. Then away. Back to the road ahead and the horses. Back to whatever calculations lived behind those steady eyes.

She folded her hands tighter in her lap.

It wasn’t worry. Or not only worry.

She knew what fretting looked like in Robert—it was a focused, outward thing, directed at problems. This was pointed inward. At himself. At whatever invisible rule he’d decided to follow since the moment the sheriff had closed that book.

Before Fort Benton, he had looked at her. Not stared—Robert would never stare. But he would meet her eyes when she spoke and hold her gaze long enough that she knew he heard what she said.

Now the glances came and went like something he couldn’t be caught doing.

She needed to do something with her hands. With her mouth. With the hours of silence pressing against the inside of her chest.

Stories would sometimes help break through to Kate. Maybe the same would reach Robert? Yet the princess in the castle wouldn’t do for him. She could never let him know the fantastical things that wandered through her mind.

A true story then. Maybe…

“Robert.”

His eyes cut to her. Not the glancing kind. The real kind, the look that held. “Yes?”