Romance: Mail Order Bride "The Ideal Bride" Clean Christian Western Historical Romance (Western Mail Order Bride Short Shorties Series) (163 page)

Chapter 5

It was astonishing, how difficult it was to get to know a man who didn’t want to be known.  Caroline found herself constantly wondering what William’s reaction to her and the children might be.  She had been at the Ryan Ranch for a little over two months, and she still felt no closer to understanding or knowing the man she was supposed to marry at all.  It was to the point where she had started to wonder if they actually
would
marry, or if they would just continue on in the same strange pattern they had established.

The oddest thing, at least in Caroline’s opinion, was that the two of them had yet to discuss the three children she was to be mother to.  She had tried, only once, to ask him of their origin, and that had been such a disaster of a conversation that thinking of it now, weeks after it had taken place, still made her shudder.  The timing had been atrocious as well. She had brought the topic up when she felt as if the two of them were finally starting to get closer to each other, once she started to feel like his walls might be coming down ever so slightly.  She had managed to undo that quickly enough. 

He had been in the kitchen, preparing himself something small for breakfast.  The ranch had a cook, and an excellent one as far as Caroline was concerned, but William seemed to prefer to fix his own food.  He was very independent, sometimes independent to a fault from what Caroline could tell.  She had joined him in the kitchen, feeling that same jolt of electricity she had experienced the first time she had seen him and then every time after that.  She sat quietly at the table, not wanting to disturb him, and just as quietly he finished preparing his eggs and toast, served the food out onto two plates, and set one in front of her as he sat beside her and started to eat.  She was surprisingly touched by the gesture and felt her eyes go hot with tears she absolutely refused to shed.  There was something so sweet about it, the idea of him cooking for her, and it was simple gestures like that that she downright craved.  Those were the things that showed that he might care for her in some way, after all, which was something she rarely saw from him.  She had heard whisperings before of loveless marriages, marriages where the women vied constantly for the attention of men who could not have cared about them less.  While she understood that it was something that worked for some women, women who needed things other than love, she did not believe it would work for her.  Of course she wanted security and all of those practical things in life, but she also wanted love.  She could not imagine where she would be required to live without it.  And the truly strange thing was that she had developed feelings for him over the weeks, despite his distant nature and frequent visits away from the ranch and her and the children.  There was a certain kind of strength about him that she found intoxicating and a tenderness he displayed with the children that she did not see in him for anything else.  There was a depth there that she could not seem to access, which only made it all the more intoxicating.  Yes, she felt for this man and she wanted desperately for him to feel for her as well.  Perhaps this breakfast was the first real sign that he did.

“Thank you, it looks wonderful.  How is it that you learned to cook?”

“Well, I’ve been a bachelor these fifteen years,” William smiled with a little twinkle in his beautiful eyes that made her breath quicken. “and it wasn’t always true that I had a cook.  It was either learn to make food for myself or starve.”

“Well you learned it well.  Truth be told, I don’t know that I can cook half so well as you.”

“That’s fine.  I don’t expect you to cook.  I’ve got a cook, I didn’t bring you here to be another.”

They ate in silence for a moment, but it was a silence full of possibility.  This was also the first time he had really mentioned his reason for her being here and she wondered if that might mean they would marry soon.  The further away from the devastation of losing Jeremiah she moved and the more interested in William she became, the more difficult she found it to live under the same roof as him in this way.  She was ready to become his wife, ready to be all things to him and for him to be all things for her as well.  She wasn’t convinced that what they needed was the same, but she had hope and she had her faith.  She prayed about it every morning and she thought that just maybe this was the beginning of those prayers being answered. 

“Where are the children this morning?”

“Still in their beds, I imagine.” William grinned, his fondness for the children shining through clearly. “I let them stay up a might bit too late last night playing and making up stories.  I thought I might as well let them sleep today, especially since I’ll be going away again.  It’s only for two weeks this time, but I know how they hate to see me go.”

Caroline wondered whether he knew how she hated to see him go as well.  She supposed she did a better job of hiding it than the children, but inside she felt every bit as dejected and crestfallen as they appeared.  She understood that these trips were part of the running of the Ryan Ranch, but she also understood that it didn’t have to be him who went.  At least not every time.  She knew that he had been a man on his own for quite some time and that old habits died hard, but if he didn’t at least try to break his habit of leaving, at least some of the time, they would never make any real progress with each other.  The way they were going now, it was always one step forward, two steps back.  She took a bite of her food (which really was good) and thought that perhaps it was best to change the subject to something that wouldn’t leave her feeling so blue.  That was when she had asked about Celia, Tommy, and Trevor, a question far more incendiary than she had any cause to believe it would be.

“May I ask you a question about the children?”

“What about them?” he asked carefully, his voice level but also somewhat strained.

“Are they yours?”

“What do you mean by that?  They’re here, aren’t they?”

“Well yes,” she stammered, taken aback by how hostile his tone was when only moments ago they had been getting along so well. “It’s just that they look nothing like you.  That is to say, I was only wondering if you were their biological father.”

Everything about William changed.  Eyes that had moments ago been soft and warm were now flinty and distant.  Everything about him was removed and he stood quickly, so quickly in fact that the chair beneath him clattered to the floor.  Half of his breakfast still sat waiting for him on the plate, but it was clear that he had no intention of eating it now.  Without meaning to, Caroline had made him terribly unhappy, and although she wanted to fix it somehow, all she could do was sit and look up at him in shock.

“What does it matter if they belong to me biologically or not?  They
belong
to me, and now to you as well, and that’s what matters.  I’ll not have you bothering them about that kind of thing.  I’ll not have you asking them about their mother.  Is that understood?”

“Yes,” she said so quietly she wasn’t entirely sure that he had heard her.  She couldn’t tell and she didn’t have time to ask because before she could even get her bearings, he had stormed out of the room and then out the front door.  She could hear him barking instructions to the men outside and then, shortly after, the thunderous clatter of a horse’s hooves as he rode quickly away.  She felt stunned, completely caught off guard by how quickly their morning had gone from perfectly lovely to sour.  And now he would be gone for two weeks, two weeks where all she would be able to do was wonder where those children had come from and how she could possibly stay on this ranch with a man who had looked at her the way William just had.  She had no idea how long she sat there, but when she finally stood again, the food on her plate was cold and her legs felt so shaky she thought she might fall to the floor.  That interaction was just about the last thing she had wanted to happen between the two of them and she would not be able to rest easy.  The very idea of William coming home and deciding to call off their engagement made her feel sick to her stomach.  She could not do that again.  She would rather just vanish in the middle of the night than do that.

*

“Father comes home soon, doesn’t he?  He’s late, but he’s coming home soon?”

“Miss Caroline?  He’s coming home soon, right?”

“Yes,” she said absentmindedly. “Of course he is.  I’m sure he’ll be home any day now.”

But she
wasn’t
sure.  She wasn’t sure at all.  He had telegraphed to say that his work was taking longer than expected, but not to worry because he would be home soon.  This children seemed to accept that with ease (although they continued to bring him up every day) but for Caroline, it felt like torture.  Every day he was gone was another day she went without knowing how things were between the two of them.  Perversely, every day also saw her feelings for him grow until she felt like a bundle of raw, exposed nerves.  All she could think of was the word vanish.  Was that what she should do?  Should she vanish?  Would it be better for all of them if she did?

“Miss Caroline?  Is everything ok?  You look pale and you aren’t eating your supper.”

“Fine.  Don’t worry, I’m fine, Celia.  Just feeling a bit distracted, I suppose.”

“You can practice our play with us!”  Tommy shouted this with glee, Trevor and Celia both nodding vigorously.  They had been practicing a play of their own design from almost the moment of their father’s departure and they were chomping at the bit to put it on.  She had practiced it with them many times, but this time she just couldn’t.  She needed to think, and in order to do that she couldn’t be in this house.

“I don’t think so, not tonight.  I think I’ll go for a walk.  I need to clear my head for a bit.”

“But the sky looks ghastly!  It’s almost certainly going to pour.”

“The sky will wait to unburden itself.  I’ll be back before you know it.”

As much as she had grown to love her three new children,  she could hardly wait to get outdoors.  They had been correct about the weather.  She could feel the rain beginning to splash on top of her head as she fled the property closest to the house and she could see a wealth of activity as the ranch workers scrambled to get things locked down.  This storm was going to be a bad one.  She would probably be smart to go back inside, but she found that she couldn’t.  Instead she wandered further and further out, far from anyone who could recommend she do otherwise.  She walked for what felt like days, a lifetime. She walked with the desperate hope that if she could only walk far enough, she would find the answer to a question she wasn’t quite sure she understood to begin with.

She had walked a great while indeed when she fell.  By that time the rain was coming down in raucous blankets, freezing cold and stinging her skin at the same time.  She could see practically nothing at all and so did not notice the thing that she hooked her foot on, dropping her to the ground and twisting her ankle until she heard a snapping sound.  She let out an animalistic cry of pain and fear and for a moment did not even try to stand.  When she did try, she found that she could not.  She couldn’t stand on her ankle because it was broken, and she had not told anyone just exactly which direction she was going.  She lay there for a long, long time, feeling colder and colder and finally so tired that she couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer.  She couldn’t even tell whether or not she slept or just existed and when she heard the pounding of hooves along the ground she believed it was thunder rolling across the sky so loudly it was as if it came from beneath her head.  It was only when she felt herself being lifted from the ground and turned gently that she realized what the sound actually was.  It seemed to be completely impossible, but it was William.  He was back and he had come for her, come to rescue her from her own folly.  He lifted her into the air as if she weighed nothing at all and pulled her up onto his horse in front of him.  With one arm clasped tightly around her waist and the other working the reigns furiously, he rode them back to the Ranch, into the barn and out of the torrential rain.  Once inside, he pulled her gently down and set her on a bed of hay, wrapping a blanket around her and running his hand gently down the side of her face.

“It’s broken, isn’t it?”

“I-- I think so.  I heard a snap.”

“What were you
doing
out there, Caroline?  Why would you go out in a storm like that?”

She felt her lower lip quiver and for a second, considered keeping it all to herself.  But in the next moment everything came tumbling out of her along with weeks worth of unshed tears.

“I just needed to clear my head.  I’ve been so worried, about whether or not you would come home and if you did, whether you would want me to stay or go.”

“Go?” he asked with a gentle and genuinely surprised voice. “Why would I ever want you to go?”

“Because, you seemed so angry when you left!  When I asked about the children, you seemed so angry and you were only just starting to warm up to me then.  I love those children and having them is all I’ve ever wanted in my life, but I can’t have them and not have you.  It won’t be enough.  And now I’ve gone and said too much, which can’t have helped.”

To her surprise, he began to laugh, then pulled her into his lap.  The movement hurt her ankle terribly, but she was made so happy by his touch that she did not care.  He moved her wet hair out of her face and kissed her gently on the forehead.

“You know, for a smart lady, you’ve gotten this whole thing terribly wrong.”