sign, the tears in her eyes pooling, threatening to fall. She did not use tears to sway him, only her love that lit her like candlelight on a dark night, that warmed her like fire crackling in a home’s hearth. When her gaze found his daughter, longing shone within her. He could see a mother’s love as she ached for the crying girl.
“I’m not sure I can leave her. Please, don’t make me.” She whispered the words but they seemed to fill up the street, silencing the noise and chasing away the setting sun. Rosy light painted her, a coincidence, he told himself, not the hand of God pointing the way.
“I’ve had one wife run off on me. I can’t have another.” He gave the trunk a push, shoving it deeper into the wagon box. “Gertie can’t take one more loss.”
“Neither can I.” The tears standing in her eyes shimmered like pieces of a long-ago broken spirit.
He’d been quick to judge Miss Sawyer based on her looks, perhaps so quick because he’d feared she would look at him and do the same. Now that he gazed deeper, he saw they were more alike than different. He was sorry for that. He knew what it was to wait for someone to return, refusing to give up hope. He knew what it was like for that hope to die and your soul right along with it.
The chains rattled as he secured the tailgate. He didn’t want to face her reaction. Best not to see the disappointment on the woman as she realized in gaining Gertie she would be getting him. “This means you will need to marry me.”
“I shall try to endure it.” A hint of humor played in her words, her silent message saying she didn’t mind too much, and it made the place between his ribs sting unbearably.
He refused to like her. Common sense whispered to him that he was a fool but he helped her step onto the running board, anyway. Gertie would have a ma. A ma he believed would stay.
He hoped he was right as he circled around to his seat and took the reins.
Chapter Three
What am I getting into? She braced herself on the seat as the runners struck another rut. Tate sat as stoic as a mountain, reins in his capable hands, attention on the late-afternoon traffic. She wanted to dislike him except for his words that stuck in her head. I’ve had one wife run off on me.
He’d been abandoned? And Gertie, too? She studied the child’s small hand tucked into her own, lost in the too-large glove. Felicity sighed. That explained why he’d been unsure about her. He’d been trying to protect his child. Her child, now. She would not fault him for that. She’d never seen anyone with so much pain in him.
Festive candles flickered in shop windows, decorated for Christmas. This day that should have been filled with promise; she only felt a strange ache settling deep into her chest, refusing to budge. Perhaps her optimism had been a tad high for a mail-order bride. She thought of Eleanor McBride, the young woman she’d befriended on the train. When they’d discovered they were both journeying to marry men they’d never met, they had struck up an instant bond. Eleanor had disembarked at Dry Creek while she’d gone on to Angel Falls, and during that last leg of her journey she had time to imagine an awful lot. But she hadn’t been prepared for the real Tate Winters. Had Eleanor’s experience been similar? Eleanor’s groom had not met her at the train.
Her teeth clacked together as the runners hit an extremely bumpy rut. He needs to get to know me better, she decided. Maybe once he saw who she was and how much this family meant to her, things would be different. Stubborn hope struggled for life as she dared to study him out of the corners of her eyes. Severe, he looked like a sculpture carved out of pure marble. How would a smile change his face? She pictured his unforgiving lines softening with humor and his midnight-blue eyes dancing with laughter.
Her stomach fluttered and not from nerves. She held on to the edge of the seat as the horse drew them over a small berm and into a side street, where twilight turned shadows into darkness. Tate became a silhouette, an impressive outline of masculinity and might, and the flutter moved upward toward her heart. He would be quite handsome, she guessed, if hopelessness didn’t rest so heavily on his iron shoulders.
“That’s the feed store where Pa works.” Gertie pointed out as the runners jounced onto the next street. The lighted windows of storefronts reflected warmly on the long stretch of ice. “It’s Uncle Devin’s store. It used to be Grandpop’s store, but he died.”
Felicity caught a glimpse of a barrel behind the shop’s window before Patches drew them onto a residential street. She glanced around. Not exactly a prosperous place. One tiny shanty slumped in the darkness. Another one peered at them from behind a grove of scrawny trees.
“And that’s where we live. Right there. Do you see it?”
“It’s too dark.” She leaned forward, straining through the thickening duskiness. Emotion choked her and stung in her eyes, making it hard to see the dwelling. A lamp burned on the other side of a curtain, casting just enough light to see a crooked porch and lopsided eaves, yellow clapboard and a sturdy front door.
“Now do you see it?”
“I do.” No more boardinghouse meals and temporary rooms or a bed that had never been her own. This was her home. Her first real home in seventeen years.
Thank you, Lord. She let the gratitude move through her. Hebrews 11:1 promised hope and a good future, and she’d never felt the words touch her more. Patches nosed down the narrow driveway, drawing them up to the small yellow house, shabby with poverty and neglect.
“It isn’t much.” Tate’s baritone held no note of emotion. He didn’t move, a brawny form, radiating a challenge. As if he expected her to find fault or prove him right by deciding to cut her losses and leave now.
Not a chance. He didn’t know her well, but he would. When she made up her mind, nothing could sway her. An icy plop fell onto her cheek, accompanied by a hundred taps onto the frozen ground. Snow. Heaven’s reassurance. Like grace, snow make things fresh and new.
“This house is just right.” She lifted her chin, determined to let Tate see she wasn’t going anywhere. “It’s the nicest place I’ve lived in for a long while.”
A deep “hmm” resonated from his side of the wagon, as if her answer surprised him. His movements rustled, echoing faintly in the silent stretch of dark as the last dregs of twilight vanished from the sky. Inky blackness descended in full, making Tate a part of the night as his steely hand gripped her elbow, helping her to keep her balance as she sank ankle-deep in snow.
“Careful there.” The smoky pitch of his words enveloped her briefly. Unaware of his effect on her he pulled away, leaving her to trudge along a shoveled path toward the porch steps.
“C’mon, Felicity. Follow me.” Gertie shivered with anticipation as she charged up the steps. The front door flew open in a wash of lamplight.
“I thought I heard you pull in.” A woman about twenty-three or twenty-four, Felicity’s same age, came into sight in a carefully patched dress. Her voice had a smiling quality, the sound of a friend. “Goodness, Gertie, don’t drag Felicity around like that. Felicity, I’m Ingrid, Tate’s sister.”
“Sister?” She hadn’t known. Gertie hadn’t written of an aunt. She hurried up the steps. “I’m delighted to meet you, Ingrid.”
“Call me Ing.” Ingrid hauled her through the doorway and into a welcoming hug. “It is wonderful you
