Chapter 8 #2
“My head’s fine, Momma…it’s been almost a week. The fair was too crowded to try tracking anyone down, and we had to go after Dove and the kid before they got too far ahead. And besides…” I sheepishly rub the back of my neck. “If I hadn’t gone, I wouldn’t have found my own woman.”
“The woman you saved. My son, how proud you and your brother make me and your father. Don’t they, Cornelius?
” She grabs my face as if I were a little boy again, and I’ll be damned if my cheeks don’t burn with a mix of pride and embarrassment.
“Dove told me a little bit about her. Mara, is it? What does she look like?”
Just hearing my wife’s name makes something in my chest tighten.
I don’t want to reveal too much of her past, but they need to know why she might be standoffish.
“Yep. And she’s beautiful, Momma…so beautiful.
Long black hair and pretty blue eyes with the weight of the world inside them.
But she’s real thin like she hasn’t eaten in a good while, and she’s been hurt bad for far too long.
You know how cruel some people can be to Indians. ”
Dalton and Pop stiffen as my mother presses a hand to her mouth. I know them well enough to realize their reactions aren’t because of the revelation of Mara being an Indian but because of the abuse she’s suffered.
“No, the poor, poor dear. Have you been feeding her enough?”
“Every damn chance I get.” I wince at my language. “Sorry, Momma.”
She doesn’t mind, though. No, she briskly wipes away the hint of tears with the handkerchief my father offers her and forces a smile. “It’s a good thing I brought some extra food. It needed to be cooked before it went bad, you know.”
Knowing my mother, that food was still perfectly good.
Something catches her attention, and she peers around my shoulder. “A cradle? Who are you making a cradle for?”
Well, well, well. I suppose Jed and Dove didn’t tell them about Emmaline. “For my daughter. I’m a papa now.” A bittersweet smile forms at their surprise.
“What?” Momma whips around. “She has a baby?”
“We have a baby,” I correct my mother. Pop stills, his clenched jaw proof of his strong suspicion as to exactly how that child came into existence. “Emmaline. She’s just a tiny little thing and only a few days old. But she’s a Shay through and through with how much she looks like me.”
“Claiming a woman and a baby…” Pop squeezes my shoulder with a grip strong from working with cattle and crops. “You do the Shay name proud, son.”
Rough embarrassment burns my cheeks at his praise, but I stand tall. “Thanks, Pop.”
He narrows his eyes. “You took care of whoever did this to her?”
“Not yet.” The memory of her holding Abner’s pocketknife flashes, and my fists itch to kill the men who abused her so much that she felt taking her life was the only escape. “But I will.”
No man does this to a Shay’s woman and lives.
Mara stares out the window through the crack of the curtain as if she didn’t hear me.
I know she did, though, because the trembling of her hand gives her away as she twirls the ends of her dark hair around a slim finger.
The tight line between her eyebrows—the one that mirrors the firm press of her full lips—isn’t from anger, but worry.
As is the tenseness that stiffened her shoulders the moment I told her my parents wanted to meet her.
Sidestepping the drawer where my baby girl lies sleeping all swaddled in a blanket, I lean against the wall beside my wife.
Shit. I don’t want to loom, so I hunch down a bit as she watches my parents pat the horses drinking from the water trough.
Dalton made himself scarce as we left the barn, but it’s not him or my mother Mara focuses on as much as it is my father.
“They’re good people and not gonna hurt you. ”
Silence.
I didn’t think her shoulders could bunch up any higher, but the patterned flowers on her dress are almost clear up to her neck now. Guess there’s only one way to set her mind at ease. “Is it my father? Ever seen him before?”
Mara studies him for long seconds before her words come out in a strangled mess. “I don’t think so, but I don’t know for sure.”
I know she hasn’t—leastways not in the manner she’s accustomed to seeing men—because Shays don’t stray from the marriage bed. Something Mara will come to learn as the years go by.
“He loves my mother, and he’s never hurt any woman in his life.
” Not even when Momma threatened him with his own gun after he stole her away in the dead of night and found a drunken judge to marry them.
Right about then, my father reaches for her hand and presses a kiss to it, and the girlish smile that overtakes my mother’s face is visible even from here. “Does she look scared of him?”
Frowning deeply, Mara shakes her head so lightly that her hair doesn’t even move.
I press further, leaning close enough that my breath almost brushes against the small shell of her ear.
“Only one man. That was my promise to you. And if you’re going to trust me when I say that I’ll never hurt you, you can know damn well I’m not gonna let any man ever lay a hand on my wife and child.
No Shay ever would. They just want to meet the two of you. ”
Heavy blue eyes hazard a glance to mine, but the absence of her words screams in the silence.
“Tell you what.” I straighten and point to my arm. “You put your hand right here and keep it there while we meet with them. The minute you squeeze, I’ll send them away the very same second. What do you say?”
Mara looks at her hand that rests on the curtain and then down to Emmaline. “What will they think of us?” she asks bitterly. “We’re not the same as them.”
“They’ll think that you’re my wife and this is our child,” I calmly answer.
“Just like I told them you were. Nothing more and nothing less. I married you and gave the both of you my name. That makes you a Shay, and if there’s one thing that’s sacred to a Shay, it’s family.
You’re one of us now, Mara, and you get everything that comes along with it.
A husband and his family who’s going to protect you. ”
More silence, but not as long as the first time. “Outside.”
“What?” I lean in closer because her voice is too faint.
She clears her throat and speaks more strongly. “Outside. Not inside.”
“Of course.” My chest tightens. One day she won’t feel threatened by being in a closed space with men. This is not that day, but it is progress nonetheless because of the silent understanding that I’m going to keep her safe.
When she slowly gathers Emmaline into her arms, I lean in to press a kiss to our daughter’s head. Mara’s breath hitches at my closeness, but she doesn’t flinch away, and I offer my arm to her with what I hope is a reassuring smile. “Ready?”
The tentative hand that grips my shirt in response makes me want to beat my chest in triumph as I lead her to where my parents wait on the porch. A willing touch from my untouchable wife. Yes, I believe we’ve reached a turning point, Mara and I.
“Hello, Mara,” my mother softly says when we cross the threshold.
Her gaze flits over my wife for no more than a second, but I know nothing escaped her.
Not Mara’s thinness, her too-big dress, nor the wary flatness of her demeanor.
“I’m Eleanor, and it’s so wonderful to meet you.
” Mara stiffly nods in response, but my mother fills in the silence before it even has a chance to become awkward.
“And this little one must be our granddaughter.”