way to the bottom of the bottle by the time I had supper on the table.”
“I see.” He reached out again to touch her cheek and rub away the remains of her single tear. “He was a drunk.”
“He was a mean drunk.” She remembered setting down fried salt pork and potatoes on the rickety table in the light of a single battered lantern. It was dark, the ride from the stage stop where the church was had taken much of the day and she’d been still desperately clinging to her illusions.
Maybe he doesn’t drink like this very often, she’d thought, filling two tin cups with water. Maybe once he slept off the whiskey he would be back to his charming self.
I don’t want no water, woman. He’d knocked the cup away from his plate and stood up to slap her cheek. Hard. Get yer lazy ass out the door and fetch me another bottle or I’ll teach ya who’s boss.
“He was abusive to you.” Austin’s voice cut into her thoughts, leading her out of the past and the remembered sting against her face.
“After a while I became numb to it.” Her throat knotted up, refusing to feel all that it had cost her to learn to cope with Jed’s cruelty. “I learned to be grateful for the good days when he was more himself.”
“I see.” The darkness polished him like sculpted stone, accentuating his handsome looks in a powerful and masculine way. Silence settled between them and he loomed beside her, big and strong. He was brawnier and larger than Jed had been; there was no way she could stand up against Austin’s physical strength. She’d also learned the hard way fighting only made the inevitable worse.
Why hadn’t he moved toward her? Fear and dread knotted together in her chest, making her shiver harder. The bed ropes creaked with tiny squeaks in rhythm to her quakes. She could not stop them. She gritted her teeth, willed her muscles to relax while nausea swam in her stomach. The waiting was killing her.
“Do you know how long I’ve been reading women’s advertisements for husbands?” Instead of grabbing for her, his mellow baritone broke the stillness. Instead of wrenching up her nightgown, he levered himself up on one elbow. “A year and a half. I started regularly perusing them, wondering about the ladies who were looking for marriage. Several caught my eye, but I never acted on any of them. Not a one.”
She wanted to ask why but the words wouldn’t come. Cold beads of sweat broke out on her forehead and rolled down her face. She needed all her strength to stay in that bed with him and not bolt to her feet and start running. Memories pulled her backward into the past, where she’d been a naive bride turning on her side to go to sleep. No one had told her what a husband would demand in the dark of night so she’d been unprepared when Jed had risen over her in bed and grabbed her roughly by the shoulder, reeking of whiskey and anger.
Don’t you dare close yer eyes on me, woman. Yer my property now. He knocked her onto her back and ripped her knees apart. You’ll do as I say.
“Why did you write to me?” She shook away the past and focused on the question, hating how small her voice sounded in the night, how lost in the dark. She felt small next to him. He seemed to shrink the walls of the room and take up every available inch on the bed. The memories of Jed haunted her as she watched Austin’s face move in the darkness. He furrowed his brow, and the corners of his mouth went down.
“There was just something about your written words that caught me.” Honesty rang in his voice. “Something about you stuck with me long after I’d put the newspaper down.”
“I seemed desperate.” No, there was no doubt about it. “I was desperate.”
“No, that’s not what stayed with me.” Low and soothing, that baritone, mesmerizing enough to ease some of her fear away.
Did she dare hope that when he reached out for her and pressed her to the mattress with his body weight, that he wouldn’t be as rough as Jed had been? She blocked out that ghostly memory haunting her, of that old terror and helpless and tearing pain that left her sobbing. She died that night and every night he’d forced himself on her. A wife’s duty, she knew, but she dared to hope now that maybe Austin wouldn’t hurt her as much.
“I’d be cleaning stalls at the livery or pounding a horse shoe at my forge and I’d think about you, alone and pregnant.” His confession came closer as he eased a few inches nearer. “You didn’t go on like a lot of women about your virtues or your beauty. You didn’t make promises. You didn’t try to seem too good to be true. Your honesty touched me.”
“It did?” That seemed an odd reason to her. “You could have had a more beautiful wife.”
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You are plenty beautiful enough for me. If I’d known you were homeless and living out of a barn, I’d have answered faster.”
“I’m grateful for what you’ve done for me and the—” She hesitated, her burdens weighing heavily on her. “And the baby.”
The baby. What kind of mother would she make with her heart gone and worn away? “What if you hadn’t chosen my advertisement? I don’t know what would have become of me.”
“That’s over now. This is your home now.” He leaned in, the bed sheets rustling, the mattress dipping, the bed ropes groaning with his movements. Her pulse slammed to a stop.
This is it, she thought. Austin might be kind for a man, but he was still a man, with a man’s appetites and strength. The act of marriage was terrible for a woman and she screwed her eyes shut. It would be best if she didn’t have to look at him. If she could think hard on shopping for fabric for the curtains. There might be plenty of choices in material in a town like this. The mercantile looked like a big store and she might be able to find a pretty calico or maybe something with daisies on it …
“Good night, Willa.” His kiss brushed her forehead as soft as a whisper. That was all, just one kiss and he moved away. The sheets rustled and the bed dipped as he settled onto his pillow to sleep.
She opened her eyes, staring unblinkingly into the darkness, waiting. Waiting for what, she did not know. For him to launch at her, to manhandle her into submission, to force himself on her until she sobbed with humiliation and pain? That the moment she relaxed, then he would surprise her cruelly the way Jed might do.
But minutes passed by, measured in the faint muted ticks of the clock in the front room. Austin’s breathing slowed into the rhythm of sleep and she dared to watch him. Dark hair tousled over his forehead, he expelled air in quiet huffs. Austin was so big he took up more than half the bed, but he hadn’t hurt her.
He hadn’t done it.
Tears burned behind her eyes with the memories of a long string of nights of misery and pain. The hopelessness as Jed’s wife had wrapped her in a thick cocoon on that first wedding night, when she’d been too wounded and shamed that not a single tear would come. She’d lain awake half the night, too hurt to move and felt the girl she’d been wither away and all her hopes for happiness with them.
Love did not exist. It was a falsehood, a story told to girls so they would want to get married in the first place. A lie to trick them into a life of servitude and bleak survival, trying to make the best out of a bad situation.
But at least she knew her married life here would not be as hard as it had before. Tears filled her eyes, ran down her cheeks and tapped onto the pillowcase, tears of relief and gratitude she could not stop.
