Page 63 of Conveniently Wed
Seb’s face closed. He didn’t actually take a step back, but he looked like he wanted to. Uncomfortable.
“He doesn’t like to talk about it,” Seb hedged.
She knew. “I gathered that. I don’t want to use it against him. Iamhis wife….”
She could see Seb softening. She’d grown to like Edgar’s brothers even though she’d really only interacted with them in the evenings around the campfire.
“I want to make a go of it,” she said softly, for the first time voicing her intentions. “I won’t hurt him.”
Her words seemed to loosen him. Just enough.
“What do you want to know?” he asked reluctantly.
“How did he come to be on the orphan train? At what age?—”
Movement from behind her arrested her words and she turned in time to see Edgar sidestep his horse around the wagon.
His face was dark, a thundercloud of deeply drawn brows, and she knew he’d overheard her pressing his brother for information. “What’s going on?”
“Just talkin’,” Seb said before she could make her frozen vocal cords work.
“About me.” Edgar’s voice was low and dangerous—even more so than when they’d been at the creek earlier.
“I asked,” she inserted.
His eyes flicked over her and back to Seb, almost as if she hadn’t spoken. As if she was being dismissed.
Edgar opened his mouth, but she couldn’t let Seb take the blame for something that was her fault.
“I want to know you,” she burst out. “You wouldn’t tell me, so I asked your brother. That’s all.”
“You want to know me? Know all about me?” Edgar wheeled his horse, obviously agitated, but didn’t bolt like she expected.
Behind her, she heard Seb mount up and gallop off. She didn’t blame him; she could face her husband’s ire.
“You want to know that my own mother abandoned me to a Chicago orphanage when I was four years old? That she promised she’d come back but she never did? Is that what you want to know?”
Her heart ached for him. Both for the little boy he’d been, all alone, and for the man whose closely held pain now clenched his jaw.
“Edgar—” She stepped toward him, but he wasn’t finished.
“Or maybe that the director claimed to love me but put me on that orphan train anyway, when all I wanted was stay with her? She promised that I would find a family, but no one wanted me! Is that what you want to know?”
Her breath caught in her chest. “Of course I wouldn’t have wanted those things for you?—”
“Well, now you know.”
The finality in his voice as he wheeled his horse, this time bolting away, shook her to her core.
He was gone.
And now she knew.
But she’d hurt him, too, with her insistent pushing.
She couldn’t keep Emma safe. She couldn’t talk to her own husband. Her failures were mounting higher and higher.
Edgar rode in the opposite direction of the herd. He couldn’t face his brothers right now. He couldn’t face anyone.
