Page 59 of Conveniently Wed
“What do you mean?”
“Well…I know you came to be with your family after being on an orphan train. But how did you come to meet Jonas?”
Her massaging fingers must’ve scraped away some of his inhibitions, because he found himself telling her, “Bear Creek was the last stop. And there I was, standing on the platform at the front of the schoolhouse with no one to take me in. By that time, Jonas had taken in Oscar and Seb, and then Matty after the homestead had been settled. Someone said my pa might take on another orphan and they fetched him to town.”
He didn’t like remembering the pain—kind of the same sting as that soap that had gotten into his eye—of standing there alone.
Of not being chosen.
He’d been humiliated and desperate, but Jonas had simply clapped a hand on his shoulder and said, “Let’s go home.” And they’d gone.
“Jonas came and got me.” That’s all he could tell her. The rest was too painful to share.
She pushed him forward until he was worried he might fall into the creek, and then she poured another icy bucketful over his head.
She rinsed him twice more, running her fingers through his hair as she did so, removing all the soap.
Then she pushed him back on his haunches again, combing his hair away from his face.
She smiled at him again. Gently.
She took a comb from her pocket and began sliding it through his heavy, wet locks. Unknotting. Untangling.
Settling him, like he’d seen his brother Oscar do with a horse and brush before.
She walked around behind him and used both hands to set him facing straight forward. He felt her pick up a hank of hair.
She snipped and the hank fell onto his shirt.
Snip. Snip.
Thankfully, it didn’t look like she was giving him a lopsided cut.
“And what about before that?”
She’d lulled him into such a relaxed state with her hands and her manner that it took him a moment to track back to their conversation.
“Hmm?”
“What about before you got on the orphan train?”
His head jerked to one side, and she gasped as the shears snipped again.
“Don’t!” She dropped the shears to the ground and came to his side, gripping his chin with one firm hand and the back of his head with the other. She brushed his hair away and touched his ear.
His ear. It was a part of him that he barely ever thought about—except to remember to wash behind—but somehow it was entirely too intimate.
“I thought I’d cut you,” she murmured.
He couldn’t remember anyone else ever touching him there. And it seemed so close that he jerked away. Stood all the way up. Realized he was shaking.
“Is that why you brought me out here?” he demanded. “Did you think you could trade a haircut for my past?”
Fran looked up at Edgar. All the way up.
He’d risen to his full height, and she knew she’d hit on something tender.
Not his ear, because blessedly, she’d somehow managed not to cut him when he’d jerked his head to the side.
