“Ethan… we’re alone.”
The words were barely louder than the wind scraping snow across the cabin roof.
The cowboy stood beside the stone fireplace with one hand resting on the back of a heavy wooden chair. He had faced stampeding cattle, armed thieves, blizzards that erased the horizon, and men who had drawn revolvers before deciding whether conversation was worth the trouble.
Yet the woman standing in the bedroom doorway somehow made him forget what to do with his hands.
She wore white.
Not the plain wool dresses she had worn during the weeks since arriving in Wyoming, but an ivory frontier gown she had carried from the East folded beneath blankets in the bottom of her trunk. Long sleeves covered her arms. Fine lace followed the neckline without making the dress ostentatious. The bodice had been carefully altered to fit her exceptionally large body, and the full skirt fell almost to the floor around her.
She was nearly three hundred kilograms, dramatically heavier than any woman most people in Dry Creek had ever seen.
She knew it.
She had spent nearly her entire life knowing when strangers noticed.
The cowboy knew she knew.
That was why the expression on her face troubled him more than the storm outside.
Her cheeks were flushed.
One hand gripped the wooden doorframe.
The other extended toward him as though she wanted to reach for him but had not yet decided whether she had the right.
“You've been quiet since we came home,” she whispered.
The cowboy glanced toward the fire.
“I’ve had things on my mind.”
Her face tightened.
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
He looked back immediately.
“Afraid of what?”
She swallowed.
“Me.”
The wind struck the cabin.
A shutter rattled.
The cowboy slowly straightened.
The woman forced herself to continue.
“You don’t have to protect my feelings anymore.”
“I’m not.”
“Please.”
Her voice cracked.
The cowboy stopped.
She looked down at the white dress.
“I know what happened in town bothered you.”
“What happened in town made me angry.”
“At them?”
“Yes.”
“Only them?”
His eyebrows drew together.
She finally looked at him.
“You heard what they said.”
He had.
Everyone in the general store had.
The storekeeper’s wife had looked directly at the woman beside him and remarked that a desperate rancher could apparently order anything from the East now, provided he was willing to pay the railway freight.
A few men had laughed.
Someone near the stove had whispered that the cowboy would need to reinforce the floor.
The woman had pretended not to hear.
The cowboy had not.