spent my first nine years in an orphanage. Then I was apprenticed to a shopkeeper for six years.” More like enslaved by a shopkeeper. The man had owned him, worked him eighteen hours a day and given him only a pile of empty sacks to sleep upon. John could talk about it coldly and rationally, even though the wound festered like a canker deep inside him. “But as for the woman who bore me, she wasn’t much of a mother, was she? She left me to freeze to death.”
“You don’t know that,” said Selina. She ducked her head. “She could have watched until you were found.”
He pulled his hands into his lap and rubbed his thighs under the table, out of her view. “The man who came along wouldn’t have noticed me except I was crying, and he didn’t see anyone around. He looked.”
John relayed the details as he’d been told them. He’d even gone to the place where he’d been left, back when he’d been searching for a place to belong, before he understood there never would be a family for him.
If anything, Selina went whiter. She stared at him, her eyes like dark pools in her face. “Surely, your mother was just trying to make certain you were cared for. She probably couldn’t care for you herself...”
“No, she was trying to get rid of me.” His stomach burning, he leaned back and folded his arms. “I doubt if she cared if I lived or died. She probably just didn’t have the spine to throw me in the bay and live with the certainty of it.”
Selina shook her head slowly, as if she were in shock. She leaned forward. “Don’t you think she was likely an unfortunate young woman who...who may have been abandoned by her beau or—”
“No. There isn’t any fairy tale here. Just a heartless whore who saw me as a burden.”
Selina squeaked faintly, like a small kitten. He examined her stricken face. Was she too softhearted to understand there were evil people in the world? Or was she merely appalled that his mother was a whore?
At least her questions had pulled back his lust to a manageable buzzing. He still wanted her, but with her mouth otherwise occupied.
“Maybe she couldn’t afford to take care of you. Maybe she was trying to prevent you from starving. Maybe she was trying to ensure you had a better life than she could give you. She might not have had family or friends to help her.” Selina’s brows drew together as she persisted in ignoring the obvious conclusion.
Granted, it had taken him years to realize the truth. But if the woman who had borne him had meant well by him, his surname would be Church or Station, where he would have been sheltered inside and was certain to have been found. She also wouldn’t have left the torn-in-half playing card on him, which ensured no family would adopt him for fear she’d be back to claim him. “No good woman would ever abandon her baby, no matter what her circumstances.”
Selina gasped.
That she wanted to find an excuse for his abandonment or simply couldn’t accept that a woman would throw away a child was sweet, even as it poked at raw places inside him.
“No excuse you could make for her will change my mind. Now are we done talking about my past?” He picked up his fork and stabbed a piece of chicken. He would do anything to turn the conversation, and most people loved to talk about themselves. “What is it that you wanted to tell me?”
Color rushed back into Selina’s skin, and her eyes widened. She shook her head. Averting her face, she stared at the window across the dining room.
“Now you don’t want to tell me.” Was she already thinking this marriage a mistake?
Her head jerked back in his direction; her gaze darted to his and then down to her plate. She swallowed audibly. “It is just that I was engaged to another man before I wrote you.”
Her voice was high and thready.
His spine knotted. Was this the flaw he anticipated? He’d known better than to hope. “And?”
“He married another girl, whose father promised him a job.” Selina twisted her fingers together.
“His loss then,” said John.
Her gaze lifted. He’d hoped for a smile, but she chewed her lip. She still had one set of fingers clenched in her other hand. There was more to this confession. Perhaps she had allowed her fiancé liberties she shouldn’t have. If that was it, John really didn’t want to know. His hands balled. “Would you rather be with him?”
Her jaw dropped, then she shook her head. “I don’t think I loved him, but I thought I did then. I just wanted to be married.”
“Well, you are married now. To me.” John didn’t care, really. Still his gut churned. “Selina, I don’t need to know anything more about him. You are my wife now and the past is the past. We don’t need to dredge it up.”
She shook her head, but stared at her untouched plate of food.
He didn’t look back at his past, and he didn’t examine other people’s pasts too closely. “Lots of people in California fled unpleasant lives back East.”
Her lips flattened and her hand fluttered as she creased her napkin. Was she disappointed in what she’d found here? Disappointed in him?
He needed to reassure her, but he was off-kilter from her questions, which exposed his raw underbelly first off. His throat went dry. “I will give you a good life.”
Her lips smiled, but her eyes didn’t. “You already have.”
What he’d given her seemed puny. By eastern standards his store was tiny and crudely built, the goods he carried minimal. Nor had he provided a house. He tensed. “In a couple of years, we’ll build a home. Close to the store. We don’t have to live above it forever.”
“Living above the store is convenient, though, isn’t it?” She earnestly leaned forward. “Your living quarters seem quite large. I lived in a much smaller space with Olivia and Anna.”
He had no idea if she was being honest or trying to be kind instead. “For the two of us, perhaps, but when we start having children...”
Her eyes shut. Her lips pressed together and her chin quivered. What now?
A stone dropped through his stomach. He stared at her, trying to understand what her sudden distress meant. “Don’t you want children?”
“Yes, oh yes!” The words gushed out of her as if she couldn’t stop them. But then maybe she thought he needed reassuring, since his own mother had abandoned him. Selina was the most confounding creature.
“Good.” All his life he’d wanted to belong. He’d never have parents or siblings, but he could have a wife and children. “I’ve always wanted my own family.”
She blanched. Her hand shook as she tried to raise her glass, the stem clinking on the edge of her plate. She set the wine back down on the table without taking a sip and drew her hands into her lap. Her eyes dropped and her lips trembled.
The tension was rising like the river when it had crested its banks last winter. The water had crept up and up until it had sloshed over his toes while he’d rushed to get all his goods off the floor of the store. He’d carried a thousand
