Page 101 of My Heart Will Find You

“It’s more than that. You are...” He hesitated. “You don’t seem like a wild horse fighting to get back to open land.”

His perception made her smile. “Even after I nearly knocked you down?”

“Especially then.”

“I’ve come to appreciate what I have at this moment. Here. Now. Not the past. And certainly not the future.”

He pulled back to look at her. “You have no impossible tasks to do? No one to save? No marriages to plan?”

She laughed. “Well, actually, I did have a dream that the Cheyenne rode through the town before they attacked the Kanzas on the fourteenth of May. Tomorrow. Sunday.” She was holding her breath, her eyes begging him to believe her.

He looked at her for a moment, then gave a smile. “Then we’ll visit them. Many of us will go. With rifles.”

She released some of her fear. “But the next day they might show up.”

“I’ll warn the agent and he’ll warn me. Forewarned is forearmed.”

“Thank you.” The rest of her fear left her. She’d known that Max would know what to do. Yet again, he was the savior.

“What else?” he asked.

She didn’t want to start listing things she felt needed to be done. She looked at the familiar interior of the sod house. Max’s childhood home. How could it disappear so completely?

“Well?” he asked. “What more do you plan to fix?Whoelse?”

“I did think of Henry.”

He looked blank.

“The painter?”

Max leaned over, picked up his trousers off the floor, and withdrew the miniature portrait and opened it. “What was it you told me to do? Hide it in the desk?” He was amused.

She tried not to remember how she’d awakened in Henry’s house and how she’d searched for the portrait. Or how miserable she’d been when she found it. She was glad she’d shown Pat where to hide it.

“You’ve gone off again. What about the painter?”

“I want to invite him to dinner. I want him to meet Martha Garrett.”

Max gave a scoff of disbelief. “That’s not good. Henry is a gentle, quiet man. I’ve seen him walk into half a dozen prancing, nervous horses and they calmed down. But Martha...”

“She walks into a pack of sheep and they start fighting?”

“Worse. She’d probably pick Henry up, break him into pieces, and throw him to the hogs. I don’t think putting them together is a good idea.”

“I agree with whatever you think we should do.”

He rolled over to look at her with wide eyes. “Did you just say that I might beright?” He put his hand to his ear. “Tell me again. I want to remember it always.”

She repressed a smile. “With the law of averages, you’re bound to be right at least once.”

With a groan, he rolled off of her, but she stretched out on top of him, touching nothing but him. “It would just be a dinner party. We’ll see what happens.”

“Your last dinner party made Alice say she hated me.”

“And look how that turned out. Cornelia no longer tries to cut your ears off, and Alice is madly, passionately in love.”

“With an oversized blacksmith. I’m afraid he’s going to fall on her and crush her.”

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