“I Haven’t Seen A Woman In 10 Years” — The Mountain Man Said, Then Kissed The Bride And Married Her

Chapter 9

Clara did not close the door.

The knob stayed in her hand, the warm rectangle of lamplight spilling past her into the darkened main room, and she watched Silas’s face go through a dozen different expressions in the span of a heartbeat — surprise, hope, fear, and finally a tenderness so raw she felt it in her own chest.

“I’m not asking you to,” she said. “I only meant — I don’t want you to sleep alone anymore. Not unless you want to.”

He crossed the room slowly, the way a man approaches something he’s afraid to startle, and stopped a step away from her. “Clara. Are you sure? Because I don’t want you to feel like you owe me anything. You don’t.”

“I know I don’t owe you.” She reached up and touched his face, her fingers tracing the hard line of his jaw. “That’s the thing. You’ve given me everything and asked for nothing. And I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the cruelty to start, and it just — doesn’t.”

“It never will,” he said, very quietly.

“I know.” She smiled, and it felt like the first true smile she’d given anyone in years. “That’s why I’m still here.”

He kissed her then, slowly and carefully, like a man relearning a language he’d forgotten he knew. His hands cradled her face with a gentleness that made her chest ache, and she kissed him back without fear, without reservation, without the shadow of Harold Fitzgerald anywhere in the room.

That night, for the first time, they slept in the same bed.

The days that followed were the strangest and most wonderful of Clara’s life. She woke each morning to the sound of the axe, learned to tell the difference between the fire’s hungry crackle and its contented murmur, and slowly, piece by piece, built a life out of the materials of Silas’s quiet world. She burned more biscuits. She learned to shoot — badly at first, then passably, then with a steady hand that made Silas watch her with something like pride. She mended his shirts, patched his coat, and planted a small garden of her own at the edge of the clearing, using the seeds from his mother’s book.

In the evenings they read together from the library of worn volumes. She discovered he had a quiet, dry humor that surfaced when he least expected it, and he discovered she could quote whole poems from memory and would perform them with such feeling that even the wind seemed to stop to listen.

He built her a bathing tub, carved and sanded smooth, filled with water heated on the stove. She cried the first time she used it — kneeling in the warm water and crying for her father, for her mother, for the girl she’d been and the woman she was becoming. And when she came out, Silas wrapped her in a quilt without asking questions and held her until she stopped.

A storm came in the third week, a wild spring tempest that rattled the windows and tore the fog into rags. They spent it by the fire, playing cards with a deck so worn the faces were almost gone, drinking coffee and trading stories against the thunder. When the storm grew too loud for talk, they sat in silence and listened to the wind tear at the roof, and Clara realized she had never felt so safe in her entire life.

“I think I love you,” she said.

The words came out before she could think about them, and for a moment she was terrified. But Silas only turned to look at her, his gray eyes soft in the firelight.

“I think I fell in love with you the moment I saw you close your eyes in that church,” he said. “I just didn’t know what to call it. I hadn’t had a name for anything good in ten years.”

She laughed, and it turned into a sob, and she crawled into his lap and held him like he was the only solid thing in a shaking world.

They were married in every way that mattered now, and Clara began, slowly, to believe in the future again.

The rider came on a gray afternoon, leading a foam-flecked horse up the last stretch of trail. He was just a boy, fifteen at most, with a face white as birch bark and a letter clutched in his fist.

“Mr. Boon,” he panted, sliding from the saddle. “I came as fast as I could. It’s the banker. He’s telling everybody in town you stole Miss Win, that you’re a criminal, that he’s got a claim on her and means to take her back. He’s hired men. Real ones. Coming up the mountain.”

Silas went very still. “When?”

“Maybe tomorrow. Maybe tonight. He’s in a fury, Mr. Boon. He’s been drinking and shouting all week. And he’s got the sheriff talking about a warrant.”

Clara stepped out onto the porch, and the boy’s eyes went from Silas to her and back again. Something in his face said he’d expected to find a prisoner and had instead found a woman standing straight and unharmed, with a rifle within easy reach.

“I’ll ride out,” Silas said. “Meet him on the trail.”

“No.” Clara’s voice was quiet and absolute. “No more blood on your hands, Silas. Not for him. Not for anyone. We’re going to do this differently.”

He looked at her, and for a long moment she saw the old war in his eyes — the man who had met the Kellermans at the property line, who had buried three of them before dawn. But then something shifted, and he nodded.

“Then we get ready,” he said. “And we see what kind of man Harold Fitzgerald really is, when he’s faced with a truth he can’t buy.”

The sun was setting behind the ridge, painting the sky in shades of gold and red, and somewhere down in the valley, a band of men was already saddling their horses.