Chapter Eight
After paying for a room at the inn, Wesley returned to his office.
There was no case to preside over right now, but he always found that it was good to keep consistent office hours.
That way, if people needed to get hold of him regarding other cases that he was presiding over or had presided over, they knew where to find him.
His father had taught him to always be reliable in business, and this was his way of making that happen.
As he sat in his office, he turned the second letter from Miss Peterson over to look again at the description she had provided of herself. It would be helpful to have a notion of who to look out for when she arrived in Bakersfield. By all accounts, he expected to be meeting a beautiful young woman.
Why no one had thought to adopt her boggled his mind.
Of course, she didn’t necessarily need a family of her own to call Washington, D.C.
home. She could easily start a family here if she decided that marrying him would be enough.
He hoped that she would find him to be enough.
Especially now that he had declared what he did for a living.
She was the only one of the women he had written to who had found out. And he wanted to keep it that way. Now that she was to meet him in person, he had written to the other women to say he had found someone and that he was sorry if he had gotten their hopes up.
He only hoped that none of those women would hold it against him because the decision to send the money to Miss Peterson had been so out of the blue that he hadn’t been sure he wanted to do it until the letter was in the mailbox.
After that, his only course of action was to write to his other pen pals, if he was to be honest. Dishonesty would not be tolerated if he were to maintain his respectability as a judge.
That, and he didn’t want to be dishonest with these women. They all deserved a chance at finding love. A true chance, not one fabricated by him being dishonest and not sharing that he was already spoken for.
As he looked over her description again, he wondered how all of these features came together.
She hadn’t described her features in any detail.
Then again, neither had he. She probably did not need to know that he wore his blond hair messy and disheveled when he was out of the office because he couldn’t be bothered.
When he was in court, not a hair was out of place. He needed to keep a certain fa?ade up for the town, after all. Particularly in the courtroom.
“Well, I suppose the only thing I can do is wait to see her when she arrives. I hope this description will be enough to help me find her. It sounds so generic…”
He shook his head. That was a problem for another day, though. For now, he decided to do some paperwork for a case that would be coming into his courtroom tomorrow.
When the paperwork was done, he moved on to another case.
And so the rest of the day went, until the end of office hours.
When dinner time came, he promptly shut his office and locked it behind him.
If anyone needed to get hold of him, they could do it tomorrow.
In the case of an emergency, he could always be reached.
He’d have to warn Miss Peterson that he was very much public property and was often sought out while at home if they decided that they were going to be in it together for the rest of their lives.
After arriving home, Wesley sorted through the incoming mail, which showed nothing of any interest apart from two letters from existing respondents to his advertisement.
He did his due diligence, read them, and then wrote up responses that he was spoken for, and his advertisement was to be removed in the next run.
Now that he knew Susannah was on her way for certain, this decision felt less rash than it had originally.
She would be happy to know that he was honoring the way this was supposed to work, he thought. Then again, she had not seemed to be all that au fait with the normal workings of The Matrimonial Times.
As he sat down at the dining room table, he looked around his home. It was clean and acceptable, and although he did his best to keep it decent, he was failing at that. He felt ashamed to be living this way as a judge.
He wasn’t sure what he expected Miss Peterson to do to help, especially if she decided that she wanted to work instead of staying home. That would allow them to save for a family and make sure she could stay home with the children when the time came.