Page 36 of The Winter Husband
“I can’t leave you alone.”
She straightened her back. “I can manage for a few days.”
“A tree could fall on the cabin. A bear could change dens and burrow under the porch—”
“It was just a suggestion. No reason to scare me.”
Scaring her might be the only way to keep her safe, and him sane.
“Then since your occasional absence doesn’t seem to be an option,” she continued, “what can I do to make our situation easier?”
Wash your hair with melted snow so it doesn’t smell of a Normandy spring. Muffle the sound of your skirts as you walk so I won’t dream of your body beneath. Avert your eyes so I won’t imagine you looking at me while you lie on my bed. Refrain from speaking, for every word that falls from your lips makes me want to kiss them—
“I can’t hear a word, Lucas. Though it seems from your expression that you’ve got quite a lot to say.”
He slapped his knees and shot up. “We’re done here.”
She gathered her skirts and took her time standing up. He kept his gaze on the wall as she walked toward the barn door.
“One more thing,” she said, pausing. “If you wish, I could still read to you at night.”
By the saints…did she expect him to sit there, idling, while she looked fetching in the light of the fire, toying with the end of her braid?
“The stories might hold off your nightmares. It used to work for my father.” She cast a gaze toward the crate she’d abandoned, and the bottle atop it. “It’s a better choice than rum.”
Hell.“No need for reading.”
“You’re going to deny me the one useful thing I can do?”
I can think of another, wife.
“Finished talking about rules, Marie?”
“I suppose.”
“Good.” He sat down and seized the half-mended snowshoe. “Go back to your privacy, then. I’ve got work to do.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Marie scraped a broom over the porch, pushing powdery snow onto the drifts around the cabin. No matter how many times she swept the boards clean, she always came outside to find a glittering new layer. This was fool’s work, and she didn’t need any more proof she was a fool.
With a huff, she set the bristles on the porch, wrapped her hands over the top of the handle, and planted her chin on her knuckles. In the five weeks since Lucas had kissed her senseless, winter had closed around the land like a fist. The boughs of the pines that surrounded the clearing hung, weighed down by snow. Her breath was the same frosty color as the ever-cloudy sky. When she inhaled too deep, her chest ached with the chill. The air bit her face numb if she lingered too long outside. She’d made it a game, of sorts, to stand here during the short hours of slate-blue daylight to see how long she could withstand the cold, the silence, and the weight of the place.
Eyeing the spot of white sun so low in the sky, she figured Lucas would return to the cabin within an hour or so. Since their agreement, she saw her winter husband for only a few moments at breakfast, a little longer at lunch, and a fraction of the time at dinner. Every night, he brushed away her coolly extended offers to read to him. Every hour in-between, she remained alone. She, who’d once shared a dormitory with nineteen other girls, taken lessons in embroidery in a parlor full of chatter, and daily walked about the grounds in the company of her friends. She’d already read half the books on the bookshelf in the cabin bedroom. She was trying to translate the Greek in one of the older tomes. She had little else to do while waiting for Lucas to lumber into her presence in all his burly handsomeness, smelling of fresh-cut wood and frost, bringing the winter inside with him. He spoke volumes in the way he avoided her gaze. He barely offered up more than a phrase or two. Sometimes, she counted the number of words he spoke, rejoicing when the total reached twenty. After meals, he would shoot from his chair to head to the barn, his spine as stiff as iron. At this rate, half the trees on this land would be split into quarter-round logs by spring, and she’d be babbling to the rafters.
Her throat narrowed with the threat of tears. Once in a while, during those brief moments in Lucas’s presence, she would catch his smoky gaze. That buzzing moment of connection always made her chest tighten. Anything could happen, if only one of them would say something, do something. How pitiful a creature she’d become, to spend each day living for a single moment.
And here it was again, the creeping desperation. Who did she have to blame for these silly thoughts and thwarted expectations? She could hardly blame Lucas. She’d made the rules. All those weeks ago, she’d had no inkling of how the isolation would stretch her as thin as a deer hide in a frame. She wasn’t sure she could bear to stay here any longer—but neither could she leave.
Beyond the fog of her freezing breath, her gaze fell upon the icicles that grew down from the eaves of the porch. If they grew much thicker, they’d be like bars in a cage. The thought sent a shivering jolt of panic through her. Lifting the broom, she swung it high, whacking at the icicles until they broke free and exploded on the porch. She kept swinging until she’d loosened every one of them, shattering the silence.
Weaving amid a pile of glittering shards, she breathed hard and realized the rules just weren’t working.
She wanted…she wanted…
Lucas.
She set the broom aside and dropped into the porch chair. Tears pinched her eyes. She missed the smell of pine that surrounded him, a fragrant cloud that followed him out. She missed his warmth, the way he filled up the room, how his brow lowered when he was thinking hard. She missed seeing the fold of deerskin that stretched between shoulder and hip when he twisted to hang his coat on the peg behind the door. She missed his kindness.
