“You can have it.”
He frowned.
“What?”
“The ham. The bacon. Everything in this smokehouse.”
Her voice trembled.
“If that's what you wanted, you could have asked me.”
His face changed.
He was thirty-eight, extraordinarily handsome, with long dark-brown hair, a thick rugged beard, piercing blue eyes, and a body hardened by nearly twenty years of working cattle, clearing mountain trails, and surviving brutal winters.
His shoulders were enormous beneath his dark-brown fur-lined vest, and the cream-colored linen shirt underneath hung open slightly at his chest. His leather trousers were stained with mud, and snow clung to his heavy boots.
But the expression on his face was not the confidence of a man who had come to collect something.
It was the devastation of a man realizing the woman he loved had spent the entire afternoon believing he had abandoned her.
“Who told you I wanted your smokehouse?”
She laughed bitterly.
“Does it matter?”
“It matters to me.”
She lowered her eyes.
“The banker said you'd take it after the wedding. The merchant said a man like you wouldn't marry a woman like me unless there was something valuable attached to her.”
The rancher's jaw tightened.
She continued before he could answer.
“And when you didn't come, I thought perhaps they'd been right all along.”
He took another step.
“Darling—”
“Please don't.”
Her voice cracked.
“I spent the whole morning telling myself you were coming. Every time I heard a horse outside, I thought it was you.”
He stopped.
She looked toward the snowy doorway.
“Then the minister left. The candles burned down. And I kept waiting.”
Her hands began shaking beneath the weight of the ham.
“I thought maybe you had finally looked at what you were about to marry.”
The rancher stared at her.
For several seconds, he seemed unable to understand what she was saying.
Then his expression hardened with pain.
“Looked at what?”
She tried to smile.
“Myself.”
The single word nearly broke him.
He looked at the beautiful woman standing in front of him, her enormous bridal gown glowing in the warm light of the smokehouse.
He saw the careful flowers in her braid.
The swollen eyes from hours of crying.
The way she tried to hold her shoulders proudly even while preparing herself to be rejected.
And he understood that the hours he'd spent away had wounded her more deeply than he had imagined.
He moved closer.