Chapter Twenty-Four
Sam hitched the mule to the buckboard in the dark because dawn hadn't arrived yet and because doing the work before Evelyn came downstairs meant he could do it without looking at her.
He checked the harness, adjusted the traces, and tested the brake.
Routine work. It was the kind his hands could do while his mind went elsewhere—which it did, because Sam Cooper's mind had been going elsewhere for about twelve hours straight, and showed no signs of coming back to a place he could use.
He'd told Sarah about Wilkes after Evelyn went up to the loft last night.
Evelyn had given her the basics, but Sam now explained it fully.
Sarah's face went through every stage between shock and fury before settling on the particular brand of Cooper determination that meant she'd already started making plans.
She'd wanted to send for the marshal. She'd wanted to board the windows.
She'd wanted to ride to Foster's office herself and demand a full posse.
Sam had talked her down from all three by promising to handle it, which he intended to do, because handling dangerous men covered his trade and because the alternative required admitting he needed help, which he'd rather take another bullet than do.
But that conversation, hard as it had been, hadn't been the one eating at him. The one eating at him had never happened because it sat in the loft above his head, ready for a seven o'clock stage.
Evelyn came out through the front door while the sky turned gray at the eastern edge.
She carried her travel bag in one hand, her coat was buttoned to her chin, and her bonnet was tied under her jaw.
She'd dressed for traveling, not for the homestead; she wore her good dress instead of the work calico, and her town boots instead of the farm boots.
She'd already stopped being a person who lived here and started being a person who'd visited.
She set the travel bag on the buckboard bed without speaking.
Sam took it from her, wedged it behind the bench seat where it wouldn't slide, and offered her his hand to help her up onto the bench.
She took it. Her fingers closed around his, warm despite the morning cold, and held on for about half a second longer than the climb required.
He let go first.
They pulled out of the yard while Sarah stood on the porch in her shawl, one hand raised. Evelyn looked back at her. Sam looked at the road.
The ride to town took the better part of an hour on a good day—longer if the road had frozen into ruts overnight, which it had.
The mule picked its way along the track, the buckboard jolting over the rough ground, the bench seat transmitting every bump through Sam's still-healing side.
He kept his eyes on the road because the road required watching, because the ruts required navigating, and because every reason he could construct for keeping his eyes forward served the dual purpose of keeping them off the woman sitting eighteen inches to his right.
She sat with her hands in her lap. He held the reins. The mule plodded. The road unwound ahead of them, white with old snow, the ruts filling in where the wind had drifted fresh powder overnight.
About a mile in, Evelyn broke the quiet.
"Sam, is everything between us all right?"
The question landed in the buckboard between them with the weight of a dropped anvil.
He'd been waiting for it since he'd hitched the mule.
He'd been waiting for it since he'd lain on the kitchen floor last night staring at the ceiling.
He'd been waiting for it, if he was honest about the timeline, since the moment he'd kissed her at the fairground and then watched Amos Wilkes materialize thirty yards away like a judgment delivered by a God with a taste for dramatic timing.
This covered the moment. The one he'd been dreading since before he could put a name to the dread. The moment when Evelyn Granger asked him a question and the only honest answer would either keep her here or send her away, and he had to choose which.
"No." He adjusted the reins between his fingers, a thing to do with his hands, a reason to look at the leather instead of her face. "No, I reckon things between us ain't all right."
She turned toward him on the bench. He could feel her attention the way he could feel weather coming; a pressure change in the air that preceded the storm itself.
"Then talk to me, Sam. We got an hour on this road. That's more time than you've given me since the fair. Use it."
He should lie. He should tell her the kiss meant nothing, that he'd gotten caught up in the moment, that proximity and stress and two weeks of forced cohabitation had produced a temporary confusion of feelings that would clear up the minute she got on that train.
He should tell her all of that because it would make her leaving clean, would let her walk away without the weight of a man who couldn't follow her, and make her free to go back to Springfield to build a life that didn't include a bounty hunter with a bullet wound in his side, and a murderer circling his property.
But Sam Cooper, who could track a man across three territories and face down armed criminals without flinching, could not lie to Evelyn Granger while sitting next to her on a buckboard headed for a train station. That particular skill sat outside his range.
"I ain't built for this, Evelyn." He kept his eyes on the road.
"I ain't built for what you're askin' me about.
My whole life's been movin'. Town to town, bounty to bounty.
I built that homestead for Sarah, not for me.
I built it so she'd have a place to come home to, and a place to be safe in, while I did what I do.
I come and go. I leave money on the table.
I fix what's broke. Then I ride out again, because that's all I know how to do. "
He adjusted the reins again. The mule didn't need adjusting. The reins didn't need adjusting. His hands needed occupation because the rest of him had started shaking in a place he couldn't identify, somewhere internal, somewhere the cold couldn't reach.
"A man like me, he don't offer a woman a life.
He offers her worry. He offers her empty chairs at supper—and letters that come late or don't come at all—and the particular joy of wonderin' every night whether tonight's the night somebody faster draws on him, and he don't come home.
" He swallowed. "And now there's Wilkes.
Wilkes, who burned my parents out and killed 'em both and spent twenty years runnin' from it.
He has now come back to finish whatever he started.
I got that man circlin' my home, Evelyn.
Circlin' the people I lo—the people in my life.
If you stay, you're inside that circle. If you stay, I can't promise I can keep you safe from what he is. "
The words cost him more than the bullet had.
Each one came up through his chest like a fishhook, barbed, tearing its way out.
He wanted her to stay. God help him, he wanted it so bad the wanting had become a physical thing, a weight pressing against the inside of his ribs.
Those same ribs still ached from the stitches, and the fight, and the night on the kitchen floor.
He wanted to say: Stay. Stay in my house.
Stay in my kitchen. Stay in the loft, or hell, stay in my room.
Stay wherever you want, but just stay. Don't get on that train.
Don't go back to Springfield. Don't go back to the cracked plaster and the wobbly table and the town that whispers about you, because this place is yours now.
You made it yours with your hands and your pie, and your scarves, and the way you say my name, and I can't un-know what this house sounds like with you in it.
He gripped the reins tighter.
"I reckon the best thing, the safest thing, for everybody concerned, is you go on back to Springfield. Go back to your life. Let what happened here stay here, in Montana, and don't carry it with you. It'll fade. These things do, if you let 'em."
The quiet that followed ran about ten seconds.
Ten seconds of mule hooves on frozen ground and buckboard wheels grinding through ruts.
Ten seconds of Sam Cooper's heart doing a thing in his chest that he refused to acknowledge because acknowledging it would require admitting he'd just told the woman he loved to forget about him.
The hypocrisy of that instruction coming from a man who couldn't forget the smell of her soap on the staircase should have shamed him more than it did.
"You're a liar, Sam Cooper."
He turned his head. Evelyn sat upright on the bench beside him, her hands balled in her lap, her cheeks flushed from the cold, or the anger, or both.
"You sit there holdin' them reins, and you tell me to forget what happened like it's easy.
Like I can just set it down by the side of the road and walk on past. Like two weeks of livin' in your house and cookin' in your kitchen and sewin' at your table and bein' carried up your stairs in your arms amounts to a thing a person can just, just let fade.
" Her voice cracked on the last word, but she pushed through it.
"You ain't even tryin', Sam. You ain't tryin' to find a way to make this work, because tryin' would mean lettin' somebody in, and lettin' somebody in terrifies you worse'n Amos Wilkes ever could. "
"Evelyn—"
"Don't you 'Evelyn' me. Don't you dare. You kissed me, Sam. You kissed me at that fair. You put your hand on my face, and you leaned in, and you kissed me, and you cannot sit there now and tell me that isn’t significant.
You cannot tell me to forget it, because I won't. I won't forget it, and you know I won't, and if you had a single honest bone in that stubborn body of yours, you'd admit you won't forget it either. "