Page 115 of Conveniently Wed
“Are you…angry now?” she asked softly.
Was he? She’d nosed into his business without his permission. But she’d given him a gift no one else had been able to. “No. No, I’m not angry.”
He turned to her, straddling the bench. His gut clenched. She’d been open to him since he’d come in. Now it was time to make his declarations.
She deserved the best of him. And that meant opening his heart. Even if it was the scariest thing he’d faced. What if, after everything that had happened, she found him wanting? The only thing more frightening was the thought of losing her.
He opened his mouth.
And the door burst open.
“Lunchtime yet?” Seb called out.
Emma followed him in, though Daniel was nowhere to be seen.
“Do you want some help with the recipe cards?” Emma asked, coming to the table.
Seb banged around the kitchen.
They obviously weren’t leaving, and he didn’t intend to say what he needed to say with an audience.
“You want to take a walk?” he asked.
Fran followed Edgar from the house and past the barn. When she and Emma had been at the ranch overnight that first day, she’d been exhausted from travel and fear. Now that she’d had a couple of days to learn the lay of the land, she loved its unique charm.
The main cabin had obviously originally been built with only two or three rooms, and then been added on to multiple times. The barn was older, the bunkhouse newer to serve the growing family. Extending off the back of the barn was a large corral with several horses. Across the valley, she could see another cabin tucked in among some trees. A small creek cut across the land and sparkled in the late morning sunlight.
Edgar marched her past all of it. He seemed like a man with a goal, intent on reaching some destination.
She followed him, her heart light although she was unaccountably nervous. She’d been surprised that her letter had been answered so quickly, but Edgar’s neighbor had been in a nearby town and picked it up for him. She’d been even moresurprised that Edgar hadn’t been angry, that he’d opened up to her.
It had increased her hope exponentially.
They passed the creek and climbed a gentle hill, moving through prairie grasses that reminded her of the moments they’d shared lying out in the field near the chuck wagon.
She slowed without really realizing it, swirling one hand through the tops of the soft grasses.
He turned back. “Am I walking too fast for you?”
“No. I’m just dawdling. Daydreaming.”
He reached out one hand to her, and she took it, his large, warm clasp welcome. He drew her to his side and she looked up at him—all the way up to his dear face.
“Don’t send me away,” she demanded, as softly and cajolingly as she could. “I…” And then she paused, unable to say she loved him without knowing how he truly felt. “I want to make our marriage work. We are a good fit for each other.”
“You think so, hmm?” He asked the question in such a level voice, without inflection and with no expression on his face, that for one moment her stomach dipped low.
Then he hauled her into his arms and pressed his face into her hair, his breath hot on the crown of her head.
“I love you,” he murmured.
She could feel him shaking. She wrapped her arms around his middle and hung on as tightly as she could.
“I didn’t want to, not at the beginning,” he said, ducking his head to brush a kiss on her cheek and speak into her ear. “You turned my life upside down and showed me that I needed to be shaken out of my safe rut.”
He pulled back and framed her face with his hands. “Do you…are you sure you can be happy in Bear Creek? On this ranch? With me?”
She saw the genuine fear behind the question, the remnants of that little boy who had watched and waited for his mother to come back for him every day.
