“You owe this household,” he would say.
Then her aunt would add:
“And with your prospects, you should be grateful you are allowed to stay.”
The mountain man placed the paper on the table.
“The twenty dollars and horses were the amount he named to cancel every debt he claimed you owed and to sign a written release stating he had no financial claim on your labor, wages or property.”
Her heart pounded.
“You paid him.”
“Yes.”
“So he would let me go.”
“Yes.”
“That is still buying me.”
The mountain man’s expression tightened.
“No.”
“It is.”
“No.”
“You gave him money and took me away.”
“I gave him money because he would have used his false debts to drag you back the moment you tried leaving.”
“You married me.”
“Yes.”
“So you did want a wife.”
For the first time, the mountain man looked uncomfortable.
His gaze moved toward the fire.
“Yes.”
The honesty unsettled her more than denial would have.
He continued.
“But wanting a wife and owning one are not the same thing.”
The bride crossed her arms.
“Convenient.”
“I suppose.”
“Why me?”
He looked at her.
She suddenly hated the question.
Hated that it had escaped.
Because she knew every answer men had given before.
Nobody had wanted her.
Not really.
There had been a storekeeper’s widowed brother who said she had a pretty face “if one could overlook the rest.”
A farmer who asked her father whether she could lose forty pounds before spring.
A blacksmith who pinched her waist at a church supper and laughed that two men would be needed to fit a saddle around her.
She had learned not to hope.
The mountain man looked at her for so long that her anger began turning into humiliation.
Then he said:
“I saw you once before.”
She frowned.
“When?”
“Two summers ago.”
“Where?”
“Mercer’s trading post.”
She searched the memory.
She had gone with her father for flour, lamp oil and thread.
There had been several trappers near the rear.
A man in a brown coat.
A heavy beard.
She had avoided looking at them because her aunt said mountain men stared at women.
The bride said:
“I don’t remember.”
“I do.”
Her chest tightened.
“What did you see?”
“A woman carrying two flour sacks because her father wouldn’t carry one.”
She stared.
The mountain man continued.
“And when one tore, you spent ten minutes helping the shopkeeper sweep flour instead of letting him do it alone.”