Chapter Two
Bozeman, Montana Territory
The clock above the bank struck two.
The Salt Lake stage came in at four minutes past in a cloud of fall dust, with the four-horse team blowing hard and the driver standing in the box and pulling them in across the boardwalk.
Wade Collins stepped off the boardwalk and stayed at the corner of the dry goods store.
Hat brim down and eyes on the door of the coach.
The driver opened it.
A man in a black coat climbed down first. An older couple followed, the gentleman handing his wife down with the tender care of many years of practice. A young woman descended next with a child of two on her hip. Wade didn’t move.
Then, she came.
She stepped down onto the boardwalk in a grey travel dress with the dust of four states on the hem.
Her hair was braided in a heavy rope down her back, and a curl had escaped at her temple and lay against the side of her face with a tired determination of its own.
The driver heaved her trunk down behind her.
She turned in a slow circle on the dirt street and raised her face to the Bridgers, and the breath went out of her, audible across thirty paces, in a single soft sound.
“Lord,” she whispered, to no one in particular, “You did not exaggerate.”
He had spent thirty-one days steeling himself for a sensible woman of plain face who would love his niece for the price of a roof.
He had spent no time at all preparing himself for this.
The woman who had stepped off the Salt Lake stage was lovely.
Lovely in a way that made him understand, with a small jolt under his breastbone, that he had been very poorly briefed.
She was tall, narrow at the waist, broad enough across the shoulders to have done real work in her life.
Her dress was plain but neatly mended. Her boots had once been polished.
Her hair was the deep dark brown of walnut bark in autumn, and her skin, where the sun had caught her in four states of travel, had taken a faint warm color along the line of her cheekbones.
Her eyes, even at thirty paces, were dark blue.
Mrs. Keller’s letters had passed over the matter of her eyes.
She set her trunk against the post of the stage office and folded her gloved hands in front of her.
“Lord,” she said again, more quietly, “I have arrived. You will tell me what to do next, I trust.”
The wind shifted and brought a fresh draught of pine off the foothills.
“That is a good start, thank You.”
Wade Collins drew a slow breath through his nose and took the internal step of revising his afternoon.
He had ridden in with a plain, businesslike plan: meet her, take her to Inga Andersen’s boarding house for the night, give her a clean bed and an honest conversation in the morning, then carry her home to Sadie.
He had told himself it was decency. Standing now at the corner of Larkin’s dry goods, watching this small, dark-haired stranger speak to the Almighty about pine trees in the middle of a public street, he understood it had been cowardice.
He had been buying himself one slow evening before he had to hand his niece over, and the woman on the boardwalk deserved better than that.
She deserved a way out, written plain. A trial.
A month. Marriage if they suited. Paid passage anywhere if they did not.
He had been turning the word trial in his pocket since August and refusing to write it down. It had a name now.
Underneath the decision sat something he liked less.
Nora used to talk to the Lord exactly like that; at the stove and at the garden gate, as though the Almighty were a neighbor with whom she had unfinished business.
He hadn’t heard anyone do it or done it himself in three years.
And here was this stranger on a public street, thanking God for the smell of pine as if He had never let her down, and Wade felt the old raw place under his ribs flare up at her, hot and unfair.
She had no right to sound that easy. He had no right to be angry at her for it.
He was angry anyway. He stepped into the street.
“Miss Preston.”
His voice came out of him quiet and rough at the edges, and she turned.
Her hands stayed folded in front of her, and her dark blue eyes lifted to his face and held there for a long moment without blinking, taking him in: the beard, the close-trimmed dark hair, the line of his jaw, the way the hat moved in his hand.
He shifted his weight.
“Mr. Collins,” she said at last.
“Wade is fine.”
“Wade.” She gave him a small nod of her own. “Zoe. And I should tell you, I have just spent thirty seconds thanking the Lord for the smell of your pine trees, so I imagine I will be staying.”
“The Lord did not bring you, Miss Preston,” he said. “The stage did.”
A small pause.
“Zoe,” she corrected evenly.
“Zoe.”
“The Lord and the stage,” she replied, holding his eyes, “are not always in disagreement, Mr. Collins.”
He covered the five paces between them in two strides, set his hat back on his head, and reached for the handle of her trunk before he could remember that he had meant to ask first.
“This is everything?”
“Yes.”
“Light traveler.”
“Practical traveler,” she replied evenly. “The stage from Salt Lake charged by the pound. I left a great deal of New York behind in protest.”
The corner of his mouth almost moved. He did not let it.
He hoisted her trunk onto one shoulder and jerked his chin toward the end of the street. “Wagon’s at the livery.”
She held his eyes a beat longer than was strictly required, then fell in beside him.
He had told himself that he would walk her down this street like a job he had been hired to do; eyes on the livery sign, mind on the road. The small, even sound of her breath at his elbow stayed with him anyway.
Hargrove’s boy held the bays. Wade swung her trunk into the wagon bed, made it fast with three quick knots, and turned at the wheel with one hand held up to her.
Zoe paused.
She looked at his hand. Then at his face. Then at his hand again.
Her gloved fingers came down into his palm. Even through the leather of her glove, her hand was cold.
He set his other hand under her elbow, light and brief, and lifted her up to the wagon bench. She was lighter than he had braced for. Her boots touched the foot board, and she steadied herself with one quick hand against the side rail.
“Mr.—”
“Wade.”
“Wade,” she corrected, with the smallest tightening at the corner of her mouth. “Thank you.”
She moved across the bench to the far side and arranged her skirt neatly over her knees, leaving a foot of empty pine between them.
He walked around the wagon and climbed up beside her, and the foot of pine between them felt three feet wide and entirely deliberate.
He clicked his tongue twice. The bays leaned into the harness.
The wagon rolled out of the livery yard and down the dirt main street of Bozeman.
For half a block, Wade held his silence. He had grown into silence as some men grow into a coat. The coat fit. He kept his eyes on the road.
Zoe held her own silence beside him with the quality of someone accustomed to letting a difficult man find his words.
By the third block, she gave up on him.
“It is such a beautiful country,” she offered, looking out across the rooftops at the long shoulders of the Bridgers. “Mrs. Keller said the Lord was louder out here than in New York. I am beginning to see her point.”
“Mm,” Wade replied.
He immediately regretted the mm. He had a lifetime of mm. The mm had served him from age eleven to age thirty-three: it had kept his father at arm’s length, his ranch hands in their place, his sister’s fiancé out of the kitchen before the wedding. The mm had no business being aimed at this woman.
“Mm, yes, or mm, no?” she asked sweetly.
“Mm, I heard you, Miss Preston,” he replied, and behind his beard, the corner of his mouth moved without his consent.
“Zoe.”
“Zoe.”
He clucked at the horses again. The bays picked up to a brisker walk. A baker’s shed they passed sent up a cloud of warm, yeasty air that made Wade’s stomach answer it. He let the bays drift to the right of the rut.
Beside him, the woman drew a small breath through her nose. He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. Her face had gone very still. She was looking at the baker’s shed, and her gloved hand had pressed itself, very lightly, against her ribs under her shawl.
Whatever she had left in Albany lay outside his map of her. He held the reins steady, kept his eyes forward, and gave her the small mercy of his pretended ignorance.
“Sadie is well, I hope,” she said after a moment.
“Sadie is at the ranch.”
“That is not quite what I asked.”
He glanced at her sideways. The look was brief. It was also, he thought afterward, the moment he started to suspect that he had brought home a perceptive woman, and perception in a houseguest, in his experience, was a difficult gift.
“She is well enough,” he said, after a pause.
“Thank you,” she replied softly.
The town thinned. The shops gave way to a few small frame houses set well back from the road, then to fenced pasture with cattle moving in small dark groups against the green.
He kept the wagon at a steady pace.
“How far is the ranch?” she asked.
“Eight miles.”
“That is closer than I had imagined.”
“We’re not going to the ranch.”
She turned her head and looked at him.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’ve taken a room for you at Mrs. Andersen’s,” he replied evenly. “It’s on the edge of town. Quiet and clean. She’s a widow and a churchgoer.”
“Mr. Collins.”
“Wade.”
“Very well, then, Wade.” She drew a careful breath. “I have come some distance. I had thought I would be going to your ranch.”
“You will.”
“When?”
“After we’ve spoken.”
The wagon turned off the main road onto a narrower track climbing between two stands of cottonwoods, the leaves already turning the soft gold of early autumn.
“Where, exactly, is Mrs. Andersen’s boarding house in relation to the ranch you described in your letters?”
“About a mile inside the town limit.”
“And the ranch?”
“Eight miles out.”
A pause.
“I see.”
She turned her face toward the cottonwoods. Her jaw twitched. Wade chose to leave it alone.
“I have ridden three trains, four stages, and a mail wagon I would prefer to forget. I am, at this moment, four days unwashed and one hour from the meal I was promised in your last letter. If you have something to say to me, I would consider it a kindness if you said it now, on this road, between these very pleasant trees, rather than wait for me to discover it across a parlor table in front of a stranger.”
The corner of his mouth tried to move; he didn’t let it.
“All right,” he said.
The wagon crested the rise. A small white-painted boarding house came into view at the edge of a cottonwood grove. Geraniums bloomed red at the front step. A grey cat sat on the top stair and regarded the wagon with the proprietary calm of a creature in charge of the property.
Wade pulled the bays to a halt and wound the reins around the brake.
He turned on the bench and looked at her directly for the first time since the livery.
“Zoe. Before we go any further, you and I need to come to an understanding.”
She folded her hands more tightly in her lap, lifted her chin, and met his eyes as steadily as she was able.
“Then let us understand.”