Glorious
Polished, and entirely too handsome, Major locked his eyes on me. And my knees felt like crepes. Without the dust of the road on him, without the wind-whipped roughness, he was dangerous. He tipped his hat, and my throat worked to get the oatmeal down.
“Everywhere you are, there is Major,” Lessie said pointedly.
I’d still not found my voice, but Major’s eyes hadn’t left the spoon in my mouth. He hadn’t even looked up at Lessie. When I pulled the spoon out and placed it on the counter, his eyes did not follow it.
“Care to take a walk, Miss Caroline?”
“On the main street?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Lessie, I’ll take Freddie Karol and let you work in peace for a spell,” I said.
She had agreed too fast. And Lessie’s eyes moved over me.
It was indecorous, entirely unbecoming of a woman of poise, and I knew it.
Knew it the moment I had bundled little Freddie Karol too haphazardly, my hands unsteady, my movements rushed, until Lessie had to gently pull her baby near, securing the wrap herself, and said, “Daylight still gonna be there when you get outside.”
I nodded and let her secure the baby on my back.
The walk was warm. Stifling.
I kept my chin high, my posture perfect, but my pulse was another thing entirely, wild and out of rhythm.
Beside me, Major walked with that maddening, unhurried grace of his, his presence stretching into the space between us, filling it with something too big to ignore.
“I thought I’d tell you something,” he said, voice smooth. “Something that might help make your decision.”
All around the little plaza, the good citizens of Carsondale were trying their very best not to stare while absolutely, unequivocally staring.
The shopkeepers. The men tipping their hats like they had somewhere better to be.
The wives pretending to be fascinated by cookie tins.
All of them side-eyeing Major and me like we were a two-horse parade.
No malice in it, not really. Just the lean of curiosity, of knowing something was happening, even if they didn’t know what shape it would take yet.
Major didn’t seem to notice. Or rather, he did, and simply didn’t care.
“I’m settin’ roots,” he said, in that low, sturdy way of his that always seemed to start from the boots up. “I been reading law,” he added. “Under the county judge. Figure I’ll take the Colorado bar in a year’s time, practice right here.”
I blinked. “So… bounty hunter to barrister?” I laughed, and the sound came out lighter than intended, girlish, like something from someone with a ribbon in her hair. Even Freddie gurgled behind me.
Major smiled at the boy. “Gotta keep things interesting. Besides—”
And here he paused. The whole air around us shifted. He took a step closer, and the heat rushed up my neck.
“I need you to see I’m serious,” he said. “That I’m stayin’. That I’m not just followin’ you around like some stray dog who got too attached.”
My gloves were damp. My brain knew I should say something refined. But instead, my stomach dropped into the soles of my shoes.
“Major, your brother—”
He cut me off, already gearing up for rejection. “I know you came here to marry him,” he said quickly. “But if there’s even the smallest part of you—any part—that might give me a chance…”
I opened my mouth. “Your brother chose Bertha.”
That stopped him.
“What?”
“Your brother,” I said, “chose the French chef.”
He blinked like I’d spoken another language myself.
“She’s about as French as fried chicken,” he said.
“And yet.” I raised both brows.
He let that sit for a second, then shook his head. “So you’re tellin’ me,” he said, softly now, “you came all the way to Carsondale, Colorado… and you don’t even have a fiancé?”
“It’s a tragedy,” I said, trying to sound dry. It came out a little breathless.
And then…
He did it.
“Oh, marry me, Caroline,” he said, blurting it like it had been bouncing around inside him for days. The raw, earnest truth of the question pulled at my navel. It wasn’t a performance. He didn’t angle his voice for the listening crowd. The question was for me alone.
“I can’t make you the wife of the richest man in town. But I can make you the wife of the happiest.”
I did not speak.
Mostly because I couldn’t remember how.
He looked at me like he meant it.
“I figure we could use a trained nurse here,” he added quickly, like that might tip the scale. “Or, if you didn’t want to work, you wouldn’t have to.”
I saw the life he was offering, whole and tender and unplanned.
Slow Sundays and loud kitchens. Freddie growing tall and bossy. Lawbooks open on the table, buttered biscuits cooling beside them. Lessie visiting with new recipes and laughter that spilled into the hall. The hound we hadn’t named yet. The little porch. The windows that steamed in winter.
It was—absurdly, achingly—perfect.
In New Orleans, marriage had been a gilded cage: you married the lightest man you could manage, roamed your three tidy blocks of the French Quarter, curtsied to your neighbors, repeated your schedule until death or scandal pried it open. Safety was the whole point. The sameness was the prize.
And I had told myself I wanted that.
But what Major was offering felt like something else entirely.
It felt like freedom.
“Caroline?” he said again, softer now. The crack in it undid me.
“Oh my goodness,” I said, blinking at him, stunned at myself. “I thought I said yes already.”
He laughed then, and Freddie caught and pulled a frizzy curl of my hair, tilting my face up toward Major.
And because I couldn’t help myself, because I loved knowing things before other people did, I said, “By the way… Lessie is L. Mae.”
He froze.
“You don’t have to go looking for her,” I added, grinning now. “She’s been with us the whole time.”
It took a second. Then—
“That—” he started, but I was already laughing. It was too good.
I reached for the folded ticket half hanging from his vest pocket.
I took it.
He blinked. “What are you—”
I folded it carefully, tucked it into the pocket of my dress like a keepsake.
“You won’t need this where you’re going,” I said.
And then, right there in the center of Carsondale, under God, gossip, and the watchful eye of three shopkeepers and a cow, I found myself at the heart of the biggest scandal the town had seen since the traveling dentist ran off with the mayor’s wife.
Because Major, the brother of the richest man in town, had just kissed his brother’s fiancée full on the mouth. In broad daylight. With witnesses. Children.
And not just kissed me—kissed me. Like a man starving.
Like he’d known me longer than my own mother, and was just now allowed to come home.
There was no ring on my finger, no announcement in the paper.
Just two people, holding nothing back, in the center of the square, like a pair of fools who’d finally figured it out.
The whispers started before we even pulled apart. I didn’t have the good sense to care.
The town buzzed for weeks. I had neighbors dropping by with rhubarb pie and pretense, pretending to borrow sugar but really just angling to hear the story straight from the horse’s mouth.
And I told it. Every time.
Because for once, it was my story to tell.
And next time you hear it back east—turned inside out, sharpened into scandal, passed around parlors like teacups—maybe I’ll be a cunning mail-order bride who fell into a torrid affair with her intended’s wicked brother, or a con artist, or a runaway heiress.
But just so you know:
It was me.
And it was glorious.