Page 30 of Conveniently Wed
She stared out over the gently flowing grasses to the cattle well ahead of them, small black and red specks in the distance. Ah, there was a rider, kicking up a plume of dust.
“He just left you there?” Edgar prompted. “Abandoned you?”
Her eyes stung and she sniffed, squinting in the sunlight. She shrugged. “I don’t know what happened to him. I can’t countenance that he would’ve just left us without any correspondence. We weren’t close, but…he wouldn’t have just forgotten his responsibility to us.”
“So you think something happened to him?”
“I don’t know. Our grandparents were already gone, and there was no other family to contact. I tried contacting my papa’s business associates, tried writing our old neighbors. Someone told me there had been loans taken against our family home—that they defaulted with my papa’s death. The house and its contents were sold at auction by the bank.”
Tears burned behind her eyes at the remembrance. Not only had Daniel disappeared, but the house she’d grown up in had been lost to her. There had been no money, no support, nothing.
She’d lost everything.
She looked over her shoulder again, through the back flap of the wagon, ostensibly to check on Emma again, but really to try and escape the painful conversation. Emma dawdled behind the wagon with the white dog. With the wide prairie behind her, Fran should be able to see any approaching threat. But the relative security of the prairie didn’t remove her unease, her sense that something—someone—was still coming for them.
“Emma!” she called. “Come into the wagon for a while. You’ll burn under the sun.”
Emma waved. Whether that meant she was coming, Fran couldn’t tell.
“You coddle her,” Edgar said.
“Don’t you spoil your younger sister?” she asked.
She felt his gaze on her as she focused on navigating what must’ve once been a dry creekbed.
“Breanna has chores like the rest of us.” He paused a moment, as if considering. “She does have an independent spirit.”
“And seven older brothers.”
That won a smile. It was a small smile, but she counted it as a victory.
“All young women should be spoiled and pampered by those who love them,” she said. She turned once more, to see Emma approaching the wagon.
“And you?” he asked.
She purposely misunderstood him. With Daniel gone, she was not likely to be spoiled or pampered. And she had Emma’s safety to think of.
“I’m all she has left,” she murmured.
6
Moments after her emotional disclosure, Edgar waited as Fran pulled up the horses. The wagon rolled to a stop, and she allowed time for her sister to hop into the back.
How’d he get here, anyway? Stuck in a wagon with two females while his brothers drove the cattle. Doing his job for him.
They’d barely gotten moving again when the dark head so like his wife’s popped behind them in the back.
“Will we stop for lunch?” Emma asked softly.
She was quiet as a mouse. Her knees were tucked up against her chest, making herself as small as possible. Fran’s comment about Breanna had hit him particularly hard. He couldn’t help comparing the two. Breanna was brash and independent, free-spirited. Emma was quiet, withdrawn. What had happened to her?
“We didn’t yesterday,” Fran reminded her sister gently. “There were a couple of biscuits left over from breakfast. I wrapped them in a cloth—there on top of the crate?—”
Twisting next to him, his wife’s dark hair brushed his jaw and sent sparks flying through him, just like the campfire the night before.
“You mind?” he asked as mildly as he could.
“Sorry.”
