Chapter Three
Mrs. Andersen’s Boarding House, near Bozeman, Montana Territory
Lord, she thought, I am going to need considerably more patience than I currently possess. I would appreciate a fresh supply at Your earliest convenience.
“Zoe,” Wade said at last.
He turned the brim of his hat through his fingers, slowly, and studied the cat as though it had volunteered the afternoon’s only sensible counsel.
“What I have to say,” he said quietly, “is going to disappoint you.”
“Oh,” Zoe replied lightly. “Well. I have been disappointed by men before, Mr. Collins. I survived. So you can out with it.”
His pale blue eyes touched hers for a brief second, surprised. His gaze returned to the bays.
“I had thought,” he said, slow and careful, “to ask you to stay at the ranch under a one-month trial.”
The words sat on the bench between them like a third passenger.
A trial. Zoe held the word in her mind and turned it over. A horse was put on trial before the buyer paid for it. So, apparently, was a woman of twenty-six.
Lord, she thought, give me ears for this. Also, give me a tongue I will not regret. We had this conversation already today, and You were very good about the pine, and I am grateful, but I find myself in need of a second wind.
She drew a careful breath through her nose and let it out.
“A trial,” she repeated evenly.
“A month. As governess to my niece. Room and board. A small wage. At the end of the month, if we suit, we marry. If we do not, I pay your passage to anywhere you care to go.” He kept his eyes on the road.
“It’s not what you crossed the country for.
I am sorry for it. I will not insult you by pretending otherwise. ”
“You’ve been thinking on this for some time, Mr. Collins.”
“Since I saw you across the street.”
A heat rose behind her ears. Zoe pressed her hands lightly against her thighs and counted to four.
“I’m not what you expected, then,” she said.
“You are not what I prepared myself for.”
Zoe lifted her chin a quarter of an inch and looked at the man on the bench beside her. Wade’s profile was set against the gold cottonwoods, broad and weathered, and the smallest muscle in his jaw was working. He had the look of someone bracing for anger.
She had braced herself for hostility on this bench. She had braced herself for the easy carelessness Bonnie wore like a well-cut dress. Honesty caught her so far off guard that for a moment she had nothing at all to say.
“Mr. Collins,” she said slowly. “If we are to discuss the rest of my life, I would much prefer to do it with a cup of tea between us. I have been traveling for the better part of a week.”
“All right, Zoe,” he replied with an understanding nod.
He climbed down. The wagon shifted under his weight, and the bench beneath her tilted half an inch with the loss of him. He came around to her side and held up his large hand, palm broad and weather-darkened, the calluses along the heel of it visible even in the shade of the cottonwoods.
She set her gloved fingers in his.
Her boots touched the dirt, and in that instant, her knees buckled. Her shoulder dipped.
Wade’s other hand came up under her elbow before she could fall.
The warmth of his palm reached her even through the sleeve of her travel dress.
He had moved quickly, more quickly than a man of his size ought to be able to move, and now he was very close, she could see the small white scar at the edge of his beard, close enough that she could smell pine resin and saddle leather.
Zoe took two steps back.
She set her shoulders. She lifted her chin. She removed her elbow from his hand with the precise, polite dignity of a woman who refused to be steadied by the same man who had just dragged her up a cottonwood track to disappoint her.
“I am fine, Mr. Collins. Thank you.”
“Wade.”
“Mr. Collins, for the next half hour, I think.”
The corner of his mouth did something that, on a more practiced face, would have been a smile. He let his hand fall to his side and gave her a small nod, and she walked past him toward the porch.
Behind her, she heard him exhale once, slowly, through his nose.
Lord, Zoe thought as she climbed the porch steps, I will say this for the man.
He is honest, and he is quick on his feet, and he smells of pine and leather rather than the various unfortunate alternatives I have been imagining for the last four days.
He is also stubborn and abrupt and has revised the terms of my entire life inside of an afternoon, and I have not yet decided whether to forgive him for the revision. I trust You will guide me.
The front door of the boarding house opened.
“There you are. Wade Collins! You stubborn boy, I was beginning to think you’d gotten lost between the livery and my front gate. Miss Preston. Welcome! Come in, come in, the tea is steeping, and I will not have it sit and stew a moment longer than it’s meant to.”
Mrs. Andersen filled her doorway. She was a tall, broad-shouldered woman of perhaps fifty-five, with a wide, cheerful face, grey hair escaping a neat white cap, and forearms that had clearly kneaded a good deal of bread in their day.
She came down the porch steps in two brisk strides, took both of Zoe’s gloved hands in hers, and pressed them firmly.
“Miss Preston,” she said warmly. “Inga Andersen. You poor lamb. Wade has dragged you here directly from a four-day wagon road, and I see by your eyes you have slept very little in a week. Inside with you. Tea first. Questions after.”
“Zoe, please,” Zoe replied, smiling for what felt like the first time since Nebraska.
“Inga, then.” She turned. “Wade, the trunk.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Wade replied and reached for the trunk. Inga marched Zoe up the porch and through the front door with one strong arm around Zoe’s shoulders.
The smell inside the boarding house struck Zoe at the first step over the threshold: lavender water, beeswax polish, fresh bread, woodsmoke, and the faintest trace of a stew that had been simmering somewhere on a back burner for hours.
The hall floor was wide pine boards scrubbed pale with a small braided rug at the door and a pegboard of hooks along one wall.
Zoe’s coat was lifted off her shoulders before she had fully understood that Inga had taken it. Her bonnet went after it.
“Parlor, please,” said Inga. “Through there.”
The parlor was a small, square room at the front of the house.
Two upholstered chairs in a faded green stripe sat at angles to a low round table.
A worn Bible lay on a side table beside a brass oil lamp with a ruffled glass shade.
A framed, embroidered sampler hung above the settee, and Zoe’s eyes caught the words across the top. Grace and peace be unto you.
The roses around the verse were perfect.
Zoe smiled at the sampler. Her mama, somewhere in the long blue distance, smiled back.
“Sit, sit,” said Inga, herding her into one of the green-striped chairs. “Wade, the other chair. You’ll fold the settee in half, you great lumbering thing. The chair.”
Wade sat. He filled the chair. The cup of tea Inga set in front of him seemed very small against the broad spread of his thumb and forefinger, and he regarded it with wary attention.
“Cream, two sugars for you, Miss Preston, by the look of you. Wade, black, as I have remembered it for eight years. Drink. Both of you. I will be in the kitchen. Lord knows you have business to talk over that is not for my ears, and I have a stew that will need stirring. The door will be open. The Lord and I prefer it that way under my roof. Speak as you need to speak, and when you are ready for me, I will come.”
She swept out. The kitchen door closed gently behind her, leaving the parlor door propped wide. Somewhere down the hall, a wooden spoon began a steady rhythm against the side of a pot.
Wade and Zoe were alone, then, with their tea between them.
He held the cup in his hand without drinking. His fingers were too large for the handle, and he had the look of a man unsure where to put a teacup.
“Wade,” Zoe said gently. “Try a sip. I promise it won’t bite you.”
He took a sip.
“It’s very good tea,” he said.
Zoe lifted her own cup. Her hand was steadier than she had expected. The tea was hot, strong, sweet, and she closed her eyes for a brief second and let herself feel the simple, ordinary blessing of a cup of properly steeped tea.
“Thank You, Lord,” she said quietly into her cup, half-aloud.
“You are welcome,” Wade replied.
Zoe nearly choked on her sip.
“I was speaking to the Almighty, Mr. Collins. You are presumptuous.”
“I am a Collins,” he replied simply.
She set her cup down. The touch of humor had loosened something in the room. She drew a breath and folded her hands in her lap.
“Tell me about the trial, please,” she said evenly. “All of it.”
Wade set his own cup down. He braced his elbows on his thighs and laced his hands together loosely between his knees. He looked, for the first time since the stage, fully at her.
His eyes were a pale, clear blue, like still water under a winter sky.
His dark hair was cut short above the collar, lightly streaked with grey at the temples though he was only, by Elsie Keller’s telling, thirty-three.
A close-trimmed dark beard followed the line of his jaw, and a small white scar ran along the edge of it, the kind a man earns from a horse or a wire fence. He was weathered. He was tired.
“Zoe,” he said, and his voice came out as though he had run out of breath partway through the word.
“I will tell you the plain of it. I wrote to your friend, Mrs. Keller, in search of help, more than I wrote in search of a romance. I have a niece. She is eight. She lost her mother and her father within an hour of each other three years ago. I am her guardian, by their will, and I am very poorly suited to the work. She needs a woman in the house.”
He paused. He lifted his cup, drank, set it down.