Montana Bride. Jillian Hart

ticks of the clock in the front room. Austin’s breathing slowed into the rhythm of sleep and she dared to watch him. Dark hair tousled over his forehead, he expelled air in quiet huffs. Austin was so big he took up more than half the bed, but he hadn’t hurt her.

      He hadn’t done it.

      Tears burned behind her eyes with the memories of a long string of nights of misery and pain. The hopelessness as Jed’s wife had wrapped her in a thick cocoon on that first wedding night, when she’d been too wounded and shamed that not a single tear would come. She’d lain awake half the night, too hurt to move and felt the girl she’d been wither away and all her hopes for happiness with them.

      Love did not exist. It was a falsehood, a story told to girls so they would want to get married in the first place. A lie to trick them into a life of servitude and bleak survival, trying to make the best out of a bad situation.

      But at least she knew her married life here would not be as hard as it had before. Tears filled her eyes, ran down her cheeks and tapped onto the pillowcase, tears of relief and gratitude she could not stop.

      The poor gal sounded real sick this morning. Austin shrugged out of his coat, scattering snowflakes to the wood floor. The fires crackled in the cookstove and hearth as he hung up the coat, wincing in sympathy as he heard Willa retch once more behind the closed bedroom door. Following his sister’s advice, yesterday he’d left a clean chamber pot in easy reach of her side of the bed. Hating that she was ill enough to use it now, he stepped into the kitchen to fix his breakfast. Let her go back to bed, he thought, and rest up after that.

      He put coffee on to boil and filled the teakettle. The scrape of a door opening surprised him. Willa stood in the threshold, white-faced and shaky, in a faded and patched blue dress that was so old it was hard to see printed flowers on the calico.

      “Good morning.” He set the kettle on the stove. “You don’t look as if you ought to be up.”

      “I’m fine.” A dark lock of hair escaped her neatly plaited braid and swept across her forehead. She looked too beautiful for that poor sad dress and too young to be a wife twice over. Not a lick of color could be found in her ashen face. Halfway to the kitchen she stopped, placed a hand on her stomach and swallowed hard, perhaps debating a dash back to the chamber pot.

      “You don’t look fine, darlin’.” His bride. His chest swelled up at that thought. He crossed over to pull a chair out at the table.

      “I just need to get a little tea.” Big blue eyes avoided his, but she hesitated at the chair he’d drawn out for her. She studied it for a moment, as if considering it, before slipping onto the cushion.

      “My sister gave me an earful about expecting women.” He resisted the urge to tuck that stray lock of hair behind her ear or to give her shoulder a squeeze of encouragement. “That’s why I’ve already got the kettle on.”

      “That’s good of you, Austin.” She tipped her head back to look up at him. The sorrow in her eyes got to him. No woman, especially one so young, should have eyes like that. As if she’d known a world of sadness. In the full light of morning, he could see her clearly, more than he’d been able to in the lamplight last night.

      She was hardly more than a girl, a young woman who ought to be sewing on her hope chest and giggling with friends her own age about fashion and parties and attending her final semester at the schoolhouse. Tenderness wrapped around him, making her sorrow his.

      “If I don’t treat you right, my sister will have my hide.” He chose humor and put distance between them, when he wanted to move closer, and lifted a fry pan from a bottom shelf. “Evelyn may be smaller than me, but she can enlist the help of my brothers’ wives and as a combined force, they outnumber me.”

      A hint of a smile curved the corners of her mouth. Sagged in the chair, she was wrung out and weak. He set the pan on the stove and cracked an egg on its rim, thinking of Evelyn standing in this very kitchen giving him the what-for on pregnancy.

      “A man just can’t understand,” Evelyn had said, one hand on the small bowl of her stomach barely visible beneath her skirts. “The babe wears on you. The sickness takes you over and drains everything from you those first few months. You make sure to let her rest when she needs it and fix on doing for the both of you. At least until she’s back to her strength in around her fourth month.”

      “I’ll do my best,” he’d promised.

      “Even then, you help out with the housework.” Evelyn gave him a piercing look. “You don’t want her to regret marrying you. You’re lucky she’s settled for the likes of you.”

      Remembering her laughter, he shook his head, cracked a final egg and gave the mixture a stir. Scrambled eggs and toast might be nice to go along with Willa’s tea. The kettle whistled, he whisked it off the stove and poured steaming water into Ma’s old teapot.

      “I can take over now.” Willa stood at his elbow and took charge of the spatula he’d abandoned in order to pour her tea. She stood so close he could see the soft porcelain texture of her skin, the luxurious curve of her lashes and the contour of her Cupid’s-bow mouth.

      A mouth made for kissing.

      A bashful rush of desire ebbed into his veins as he watched her, heart pumping. He drank in every movement she made stirring the eggs—the sweep of her arm, the turn of her wrist, the placement of her slender fingers on the wooden handle—and was amazed by the sight of her in the soft gray morning light. Lamplight found her, drawing gleaming ebony highlights in her dark hair and kissing her face with a golden glow.

      His bride. He still couldn’t believe it. He hadn’t quite known what to expect when he’d written his proposal to her and enclosed a train ticket in the envelope. All he’d known at the time was a deep abiding commitment to her he couldn’t explain and the soul-deep hope that because she needed him so much, she might love him more than all the rest—the way he wanted to love her.

      He swallowed hard, set the kettle on a trivet and debated trying to talk Willa out of possession of that spatula. For a wee bit of a thing, she looked determined to hold her ground and he remembered her words last night, how doing the dishes had been important to her to prove her worth to him.

      Darlin’, you don’t need to prove a thing, he thought, a ribbon of tenderness wrapping around his heart. Just being here was enough. He left her at the stove to unwrap the loaf of bread Evelyn had baked for them. As he sliced, bread knife in hand, he had to admit it was fine sharing the morning with Willa. Her presence changed everything. There would be no more empty mornings spent alone in his cabin. When he came home from work tonight, she would be here to greet him. His long span of lonesomeness had come to an end.

      “Evelyn said to make sure you had toast in the morning.” He moved to her side to open the oven door. He liked the sound of her petticoats swishing as he knelt to place the slices of bread on the rack. “She also brought ginger tea to help settle your stomach.”

      “That was mighty thoughtful of her.” When Willa spoke, her dulcet alto held him like no other voice ever had. “And thoughtful of you. I can smell it steeping.”

      “Here, let me hold the plates for you.” He closed the door and stood, intending to whisk around her but something stopped him. The sight of the ridge of bones along her back. Through the thin cotton of her dress he could count her vertebrae, the poke of her shoulder blades and the faint hint of her ribs.

      She wasn’t merely too thin, as he’d thought when he’d gotten a good look at her in the church. She hadn’t been only homeless living out of a barn, but she’d been hungry, too. Very hungry. His hands fumbled with the plates, nearly dropping one. He swallowed hard, hating the circumstances Willa had endured.

      But no longer, he vowed, as he watched her load one plate with the bulk of the fluffy scrambled eggs. He would move mountains to provide for her. No wonder her big blue eyes shone somberly. Everything he learned about her broke his heart.

      “Is that enough for you?” Her gaze found his, and the look on her face asked a deeper