Plainly, she was exhausted. From the way her face had fallen as she’d read that letter, which she’d finally wadded up and stuffed into the pocket of her cloak with an expression of heartbroken disgust in her eyes, she’d suffered some bitter disappointment.
All he knew for sure was that nobody had died, since he’d asked her that right off.
Lincoln tried to imagine what kind of news might have thrown her like that, even though he knew it was none of his business.
Maybe she’d planned to marry the man who’d written that letter, and he’d spurned her for another.
Lincoln frowned, aware of the woman’s softness and warmth in every part of his lonesome body. What kind of damned fool would do that?
His shoulder began to ache, since his arm was curved around Juliana at a somewhat awkward angle, but he didn’t care. He’d have driven right past the ranch, just so she could go on resting against him like that for a little while longer, if he hadn’t been a practical man.
The wind picked up, and the snow came down harder and faster, and when he looked back at the kids, they were sitting stoically in their places, bundled in their blankets.
The best part of an hour had passed when the lights of the ranch house finally came into view, glowing dim and golden in the snow-swept darkness.
Lincoln’s heartbeat picked up a little, the way it always did when he rounded that last bend in the road and saw home waiting up ahead.
Home.
He’d been born in the rambling, one-story log house, with its stone chimneys, the third son of Josiah and Cora Creed. Micah, the firstborn, had long since left the ranch, started a place of his own down in Colorado. Weston, the next in line, lived in town, in rooms above the Diamond Buckle Saloon, and published the Courier—when he was sober enough to run the presses.
Two years younger than Wes, Lincoln had left home only to attend college in Boston and apprentice himself to a lawyer—Beth’s father. As soon as he was qualified to practice, Lincoln had married Beth, brought her home to Stillwater Springs Ranch and loved her with all the passion a man could feel for a woman.
She’d taken to life on a remote Montana ranch with amazing acuity for a city girl, and if she’d missed Boston, she’d never once let on. She’d given him Gracie, and they’d been happy.
Now she rested in the small, sad cemetery beyond the apple orchard, like Josiah, and the fourth Creed brother, Dawson.
Dawson. Sometimes it was harder to think about him and the way he’d died, than to recall Beth succumbing to that fever.
Juliana straightened against Lincoln’s side, yawned. If the darkness hadn’t hidden her face, the brim of her bonnet would have, but he sensed that she was embarrassed by the lapse.
“We’re almost home,” he said, just loudly enough for her to hear.
She didn’t answer, but sat up a little straighter, wanting to pull away, but confined by his arm and the cloth of his coat.
When they reached the gate with its overarching sign, Lincoln moved to get down, but the Indian boy, Joseph, was faster. He worked the latch, swung the gate wide, and Lincoln drove the buckboard through.
His father and Tom Dancingstar had cut and planed the timber for that sign, chiseled the letters into it, and then laboriously deepened them with pokers heated in the homemade forge they’d used for horseshoeing.
Lincoln never saw the words without a feeling of quiet gratification and pride.
Stillwater Springs Ranch.
He held the team while the boy shut the gate, then scrambled back into the wagon. The horses were eager to get to the barn, where hay and water and warm stalls awaited them.
Tom was there to help unhitch the team when Lincoln drove through the wide doorway and under the sturdy barn roof. Part Lakota Sioux, part Cherokee and part devil by his own accounting, Tom had worked on the ranch from the beginning. He’d named himself, claiming no white tongue could manage the handle he’d been given at birth.
He smiled when he saw Juliana, and she smiled back.
Clearly, they were acquainted.
Was he, Lincoln wondered, the only yahoo in the countryside who’d never met the teacher from the Indian School?
“Take the kids inside the house,” Lincoln told Juliana, and it struck him that rather than the strangers they were, they might have been married for years, the two of them, all these children their own. “Tom and I will be in as soon as we’ve finished here.”
He paused to lift the two smaller children out of the wagon; sleepy-eyed, still wrapped in their blankets, they stumbled a little, befuddled to find themselves in a barn lit by lanterns, surrounded by horses and Jenny Lind, the milk cow.
“I’ll tend to the horses,” Tom told him. “There’s a kettle of stew warming on the stove, and Gracie’s been watching the road for you since sunset.”
Thinking of his gold-haired, blue-eyed daughter, Lincoln smiled. Smarter than three judges and as many juries put together, Gracie tended toward fretfulness. Losing her mother when she was only five caused her to worry about him whenever he was out of her sight.
With a ranch the size of his to run, he was away from the house a lot, accustomed to leaving the child in the care of his now-absent mother, or Rose-of-Sharon Gainer, the cumbersomely pregnant young wife of one of the ranch hands.
The older boy’s gaze had fastened on Tom.
“Can I stay here and help?” he asked.
“May I,” Juliana corrected with a smile. “Yes, Joseph, you may.”
With that, she leaned down, weary as she was, and lifted the littlest girl into her arms. Lincoln bent to hoist up the smaller boy.
“This is Daisy,” Juliana told him. “That’s Billy-Moses you’re holding.” The girl who’d spoken of working for her keep at the Diamond Buckle ducked her head shyly, stood a little closer to her teacher. “And this is Theresa,” she finished.
Leaving Tom and Joseph to put the team up for the night, Lincoln shed his coat at the entrance to the barn, draped it over Juliana’s shoulders. It dragged on the snowy ground, and she smiled wanly at that, hiking the garment up with her free arm, closing it around both herself and Daisy.
They entered the house by the side door, stepping into the warmth, the aroma of Tom’s venison stew and the light of several lanterns. Gracie, rocking in the chair near the cookstove and pretending she hadn’t been waiting impatiently for Lincoln’s return, went absolutely still when she saw that he wasn’t alone.
Her cornflower-blue eyes widened, and her mouth made a perfect O.
Daisy and Billy-Moses stared back at her, probably as amazed as she was.
“Gracie,” Lincoln said unnecessarily. “We have company.”
Gracie had recovered by then; she fairly leaped out of the rocking chair. Looking up at Juliana, she asked, “Did you answer one of my papa’s advertisements?
