Page 62 of Texas Glory
Her eyes darkened with concentration. He wanted to see them darken with passion.
Gently, she tapped the nail, the furrow deepening, her teeth digging into her lip, her knuckles turning white. He thought about giving her some more instruction,
but some things in life were better learned through trial and error. After a dozen hits, the nail had settled into its new home.
She rubbed her fingers over the nail. “Is that what building a town feels like?” she asked.
He’d never thought about it, didn’t know how to answer her question.
She looked at him with wonder in her eyes. “Children will crawl over this floor. Then they’ll walk over it and run across it. If this house remains for a hundred years, what you have done today might touch children you’ll never meet. It’s the same with your town and your ranch. Everything that you do reaches out to touch so many people. The things I do touch no one.”
She laid the hammer on the floor and rose quietly to her feet.
He fought the urge to grab her ankle and halt her steps away from him.
“I could use some help,” he growled. “Tell Houston to get his butt up here.”
She disappeared through the doorway. He pressed his thumb against the nail she had embedded in the wood, and damned his pride. He hadn’t wanted her to leave. He didn’t want to hear her laughter and not be part of it. He didn’t want to witness her smiles from a distance.
He hadn’t been able to bring himself to ask her to stay, to share the task with him, to lighten his load with her presence.
If he couldn’t ask her for something as small as that, how in the hell did he think he was going to ask her to welcome him into her bed?
CHAPTER
TEN
With the flowers wilting in his hand, Dallas walked through the house. Every room was empty. Every room except the kitchen, and there, he only found the prairie dog.
He’d come in from the range early with the thought of asking his wife to take a ride with him, and he couldn’t find her.
He stalked out of the house and headed to the barn. It didn’t ease his mind any to see the empty stall where Cordelia’s mare should have been.
“Slim!”
His foreman came out of the back room. “Yes, sir?”
“Do you know where my wife is?”
“Yes, sir. She went to town with Austin.”
“Thought she went to town with him yesterday.”
“Yes, sir, she did, and the day before that as well.”
Trepidation sliced through Dallas as remembered moments rushed through his mind: Austin holding Cordelia outside the general store. Austin lifting Cordelia into his arms and spinning her around at Houston’s house.
Cordelia talking to Austin during meals without the aid of her topic list.
In the evening, Austin had begun to come into Dallas’s office and listen to Cordelia read. Dallas would occasionally look up from his ledgers to find Austin gazing at Cordelia as though she were the most wonderful woman in the world.
Dallas hated himself for resenting Austin’s intrusion. Austin had been five when their mother had died, and he’d grown up with no other women in his life. Dallas knew he shouldn’t begrudge Austin the pleasure he found in Cordelia’s soft voice—but he did.
“You want me to stop saddling her horse?” Slim asked.
“No,” Dallas answered quickly. “No, she’s free to come and go as she pleases.” He tossed the flowers into the empty stall and strode back to the house.
Dusk had settled over the land before they returned.
