Page 34 of Conveniently Wed
“Seems like you been derailing everything since I met you.”
She cocked her head at him, but her eyes were soft and shadowed. “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I didn’t see the drop off.”
And for some strange reason, he wanted to comfort her. “Neither did I.”
He realized he was still holding on to her elbow, even though they were both on solid ground, and he dropped it quickly.
Emma huddled on the ground nearby. She seemed okay, if shaken. The white dog nuzzled her hand, licked what it could reach of her chin.
“Will you help me unharness the horses?” he asked.
“Let me see your hand first. I heard you cry out—you landed on it, right?”
His ears went hot that she’d heard him squeal like a girl. Ithadhurt. He held out the appendage for her inspection. It was probably quicker than arguing with her.
“Does it hurt worse than before?”
Looking down on her dark head bent over his hand, that same uncomfortable warmth from the morning lit his chest again. “Not really.”
She turned his hand, and her gentle, cool fingers traced the lines on his palm. “It looks a little better than it did last night, I guess.”
She tilted her face up to his, and her eyes were still shadowed. Had they always been that way and he hadn’t noticed before?
He looked back at her sister. They needed to talk, but now wasn’t the time.
Walking up to the front of the wagon, he could see the herd was farther off. His brothers apparently hadn’t noticed they’d fallen behind. It could be a while, and if the wagon went over now, the horses could be injured. Better to unharness them and put them back in the traces when his brothers had gotten the wagon back up.
“What will we do if they don’t come for us?” she asked.
“They will.” He knew his brothers.
She took a good long look ahead, all around them.
Her sister was sitting on the grass behind the wagon, still shaken up.
“Don’t you ever get scared…being out here? Without any help close by? What if that bite on your hand would’ve been worse? And…no neighbors? It seems sorta lonely.”
He followed her gaze across the rolling plain, far out to the horizon. “I guess I’ve been here long enough to see it different.”
He gestured back the way they’d come. “There’re neighbors. Old man Miller and his family live over that way, less than an hour on horseback. Longer in the wagon. With Oscar’s family nearby and all the rest of us at the homestead, it’s never quiet there. And when Maxwell gets back, we’ll have our own doc, won’t we?”
She gazed up at him, still not fully understanding. He pointed her to the first buckle on the harness, knowing he wouldn’t be able to undo it with his injured hand.
He watched her for a moment, making sure she’d gotten what he wanted. She had.
“I guess there’s a…freedom to it,” he tried to explain.
She went to the next buckle.
“It’s like…when we were teasing back in the wagon, about manners. Out here, they don’t matter as much.”
She looked up at him sideways as she went to the next and last buckle.
He didn’t know if he was botching this explanation or if she was purposely misunderstanding. “I can do what I want to do,” he went on. “If I want to raise cattle, I can. Or sheep, or horses. If I keep to myself, no one’s going to bother me.”
She wrinkled her nose as she trailed him around the front of the horses to the other side. “Don’t you mean no one will have any expectations of you?”
He froze, the depth of her question surprising him. “What do you mean?”
