that his best days were behind him. He’d been forced to settle for a mail-order wife because no one who knew him would have him.
“Tate?” Warmth softened her dulcet alto, tempting him to look up and meet her gaze, but he had to resist. He squared his shoulders, drew himself up straight and clamped his jaw tight. Prepared, her disappointment in him would hurt less.
“It’s awkward, isn’t it?” She rustled closer, fine shoes tapping on the plank platform, her hand tucked tightly around Gertie’s. “What do you say to a stranger you are about to marry? I’ve pondered it the entire trip and I just could never think of the exact right thing.”
“Me, neither.” The words came out gruffly. He shifted his cane as if he didn’t know what to say next.
“I figured you for the shy sort, since you let Gertie answer my first letter.” She stopped before him, petticoats swishing. A cold wind gusted hard, blowing a piece of rattling paper across the platform like a leaf in the wind, and she shivered. “My youngest sister was shy, too, so I understand completely. I will try not to be too exuberant. It’s a fault of mine.”
“I see.” He didn’t so much as blink his long dark eyelashes. Tate Winters wasn’t at all what she’d imagined from Gertie’s written descriptions of her beloved pa. Like those descriptions, he was tall. He did have dark blue eyes, but that was where the similarities ended. This man walked with a cane. This man’s gaze looked shadowed and full of pain.
“That’s your trunk?” His baritone was colder than the gusts knocking her back a step. He still hadn’t looked at her.
“Yes. Just the one.” She pitched her voice, turning toward him, willing him to see her. Didn’t he like her? Couldn’t he at least be polite? A terrible foreboding gripped her stomach. Had she made a mistake in coming? Had she chosen the wrong man?
As he lumbered by, all six feet plus of him, she remembered the exact moment she’d decided to answer his advertisement. Wife needed, she read on that crisp September morning, skimming the ads as she always did while sipping coffee. The clatter of steel forks on ironware rang around her in the dining room of the Iowa boardinghouse where she’d lived. She had bent closer, interested enough to keep reading. All I want is someone to be kindly to my daughter, he’d written. Little Gertrude deserves a good ma.
Her imagination had taken off at those words. She’d set her cup into its saucer, stared out the window where clothes slapped on a line, where her life was a string of long lonely days, and pictured a father who loved his little girl so much, he put concern for her first.
Wasn’t that heartening? Time had robbed her of all but a few memories of her father, but the impact of his kindness remained. Smallpox had taken her parents when she was young.
As she watched the man with the bitter expression grab a handle on the end of her trunk and heft it onto one brawny shoulder, she forced herself to remember his advertisement. When she read his simple request, she had instantly come to care about him, a perfect stranger, hundreds of miles away. Her trunk might be heavy but he handled it as if it were weightless, balancing its bulk with his free hand. He was a strong man, powerfully built, handsome when he took an awkward step and the sunshine touched his face. Strong bones, straight nose, a generous mouth that may have once smiled.
His gaze, when it finally swept over her, was hard as stone and hit her like a punch. It wasn’t dislike of her, but desolation she saw. The smothering, human pain of someone who had lost all hope. Bleak despair echoed in the depths of his eyes and turned her to ice before he swung away.
That was when she noticed the fraying sleeves of his coat, in want of mending. A small tear near the hem of his faded denims. He wore no muffler or gloves on this frigid December day, nor did Gertie, whose hand felt fragile cradled in her own.
Hardship was everywhere. It had ruined her family, taken her parents and separated her from her sisters. How close had hardship come to destroying this family? She gazed down into the girl’s face and into eyes full of silent need. It had been a lifetime since someone had held on to her this tight or wanted her as desperately.
Felicity thought of the letter tucked inside her reticule, written in Gertie’s careful print. Please be my ma for Christmas. I promise to be really good if only you will come.
Love at first word, that’s what this was, the deep abiding tie that had instantly bound her spirit to the girl’s only strengthened. She knew what it was like to ache after a mother who was gone and to long for a mother yet to be. Too many years she’d been a little girl standing in the yard waiting hopefully whenever a married couple came to choose among the orphans. She’d prayed with all the power of her soul to be the one selected. She’d been passed by every time.
Gertie seemed to sense something was wrong. Tears brimmed, one after another. “You’re gonna stay, aren’t you, Felicity?”
“Wild horses couldn’t pry me away.” She saw herself in Gertie’s eyes, longing to be loved. She brushed at the girl’s tears with the pad of her thumb, already a mother to this child. The wedding ceremony was merely a technicality. “Let’s go catch up with your pa. Take me home, Gertie.”
Chapter Two
This was a disaster of epic proportion. Tate ground down the depot steps, aware of the tap of a woman’s shoes directly behind him. The whisper of her petticoats, the rustle of her skirt, the low melody of her voice as she chatted with Gertie grated, and he clamped his jaw tight. He closed his ears to the sound of that pleasing tone. Best not to listen to a thing she said. Best not to get attached because the woman wasn’t staying.
He heaved the trunk onto the wagon bed, wondering what frills and foppery the woman had brought with her. Fancy women like that liked fine frocks. No doubt her hands beneath her gloves were soft and smooth, never having known a day’s work. He grimaced as he latched the tailgate, the chain chattering in the cold. He shook his head. No, he could not imagine the woman who swept into sight was any happier with this situation than he was. Once she saw there was no maid to wait on her, no housekeeper to order about, she would race for the next train out of town so fast she’d be a blur dashing down the platform. No doubt about that. He squared his shoulders and steeled his chest, his only defense against her nearness.
“Pa, guess what?” Gertie stumbled up to him, nearly tripping with her excitement. He couldn’t remember the last time her big blue eyes had sparkled like that, nor the last time he’d seen her dear smile framed by twin dimples. Something in the vicinity of his heart caught, a muscle spasm of sorrow.
“Felicity brought me a surprise!” The wind rustled the ends of her curls and brushed the stray flyaway strands against the side of her apple cheeks as if with a loving hand. “A present. And it’s not even Christmas yet.”
“Huh.” He kept his gaze low as he grabbed hold of his cane and ambled around the side of the wagon. The yellow ruffle of the woman’s skirt stayed in his peripheral vision, following him. Whatever was going to happen to Gertie when the fancy lady took off, he didn’t know. Her heart would be shattered, those sky-high hopes grounded.
Helplessness twisted inside him and wrung him out. He should have put his foot down at the depot. He should have refused the woman, ordered her back onto the train before it departed, pushed her away before she had a chance to win his daughter’s heart. Look how the girl was already captured, one small hand clinging so hard to the woman’s fine-knit glove it was a wonder she wasn’t causing a bruise.
“She has one for you, too.” Gertie bounced in place,
