by Alice White
Chapter 4
“Where did you get hair like that, miss?”
“Well, I was born with it.”
Born with hair of fire! What luck! I wish my hair was exactly like yours. Don’t you wish it was so, Tommy? Don’t you?”
“No,” one of the little blonde boys who apparently went by the name of Tommy said matter-of-factly. “I like my hair just the way it is. And fire hair would hurt, right? Does it hurt your head? I don’t want my head hurted.”
“Me too,” Tommy’s tiny twin, Trevor, chimed in. “I don’t want my head hurted too.”
“You don’t want your head hurt, either,” Caroline corrected in a soft voice and with a gentle smile.
“I know.”
Tommy looked at his brother and sister with a mixture of bewilderment and amusement, which drove Caroline to peals of laughter. She couldn’t help it. She found the three to be perfectly delightful and she could not have been more thankful to have them there in the vast sitting room with her. Her love of children had in no way been diminished by her jilting, and the idea of not having them around her had weighed heavy on her heart. She had known that there would be children there in her future in one capacity or another, or the stipulation in William’s advertisement that his bride must be willing to care for children would have made very little sense. She hadn’t realized that she would be playing instant mother to three children, however, and although there were many who would find such a task daunting, she was entirely thrilled. The only thing that she was still unsure of at the moment was the man she was supposed to be marrying.
William Ryan was proving to be an elusive figure indeed. Caroline had already been at the Ryan Ranch for several hours now and she had seen nothing of him. She knew that he must be exceedingly busy, of course, it would have been impossible to maintain a place as lovely as this Ryan Ranch without it consuming a substantial amount of time. That being said, she couldn’t help but wonder if him not stopping to meet her could be construed as a bad sign. Perhaps she was particularly sensitive about that sort of thing coming off of her recent experience with Jeremiah, or perhaps it was simply due to her lack of experience with the rougher sex in general, but whatever the reason her doubt left her feeling slightly breathless. She told herself over and over again not to be so silly but she was still a complete bundle of nerves by the time she heard a pair of thick, loud boots striding across the wooden floor of the entrance to the house. She knew it was him. She couldn’t have said how; there were many men on the ranch working in various capacities but somehow she just knew that this man was William Ryan. Her future husband, barring some unforeseen tragedy (six months ago she would have laughed off even the idea of such fatalistic thinking but her thoughts had been inexorably altered on matters of men and women).
“Children! Where’d you get yourselves off to? Did I not say something about helping to make the gardens out front look all nice and tidy? I see your little gardening tools but no little bodies to use them. Are we playing a game? The thing about games is that they’re difficult if all of the participants don’t know it’s happening.”
“No!” Celia squealed excitedly, jumping up and down while Tommy and Trevor giggled and grinned. “Not hiding and not playing a game. We’re in the kitchen. We’re talking to our new mommy!”
Caroline heard the footsteps stop abruptly and she herself took in a sharp breath. From the sound of it, those steps had come to a stop at the kitchen doorway which meant he was standing directly behind her. The looks on the children’s faces confirmed it, their unchecked joy, and ridiculously Caroline wondered if she could just pretend he wasn’t there so that she didn’t have to turn around. She was just so terribly nervous! She had already been nervous about meeting him and now Celia had just called her their new mother, shouted it out so that it seemed to be ringing down the hallways and echoing again and again. What would he make of that? Would he think she had asked the children to call her that? Just the idea of it left her feeling utterly mortified and she could feel her face growing hot with an unwanted and uncontrollable blush. This was not the way she had wanted to meet him for the first time. Not even close.
“Your face is as red as your hair now, Caroline! How’d you do that?”
“Alright, Celia,” the strong, deep voice from behind her spoke. “That’s enough, now. We don’t want to make her feel uncomfortable.”
Too late, she thought to herself, but she was glad of his assistance. She had no idea how to navigate this situation. She hadn’t ever gotten that far in her daydreams of her traveling west. But she couldn’t just sit like a statue for the rest of her life, nor could she live in this house without even speaking to the man she was to marry, and so she rose and turned to face him.
“Hello, I apologize.”
“Apologize for what?”
He asked his question in such a matter-of-fact way that it was almost abrasive. He didn’t look angry, but that tone was enough to make Caroline feel as if she had been rebuked. She had no idea what to make of him. She couldn’t recall ever having been spoken to quite that way before. It was as if he had no emotion invested in the conversation one way or another, which struck her as odd because they were to be wed. She was also taken aback by the look of him. She had never seen a man like this before. He was tall, much taller than she, with thick hair so dark it was almost black. Piercing blue eyes the color of deep pools peered out at her with a clear intelligence and a closed-off quality that made them virtually impossible to read. He had a rather thick beard growing as well, which made him appear extra mysterious to Caroline. She wasn’t accustomed to men with beards like that. Jeremiah had been as smoothly shaven as a newborn baby. She felt her heartbeat increasing by the second and all hopes of the flush in her face fading. She had never reacted to the look of a man this way before and it took her a moment to realize what it was that was taking hold of her so. Finally she realized that she was attracted to this strange man. She was attracted to him in a way she had never been to Jeremiah. She was also completely uncertain of herself with him. She was a beautiful girl who had never struggled to get the attention and admiration of the opposite sex. She wasn’t arrogant about it, it was just something she had become accustomed to and getting such an unreadable reaction from William Ryan was making her feel entirely unsure.
“I-- well, I don’t know. For being in here without permission, I suppose. The children wanted to give me a tour of the house, and I must admit I was awfully tempted to see it. This was our last stop and we seem to have just settled in.”
“That’s fine. It’s to be your home too, after all. You might as well become accustomed to it. Did they show you which room is to be yours?”
She glanced at the children, the little trio she was feeling more a part of at the moment than she did to feeling like an adult, and they all three shook their heads no. Apparently they hadn’t considered that room to be interesting or important enough to show her. So like children, Caroline thought with a little internal smile, to make a judgement call like that.
“Very well,” William said with a terse nod. “I’ll take you there now. One of my men should have already delivered your things, so you needn’t worry about that.”
With a look that told the children that they would do best to go out and work in the garden the way they had been told to initially, William strode from the doorway. He must have been just expecting Caroline to follow because he didn’t say another word to her. She hurried after him, giving the children a little wink and a smile as she went, and then moving as quickly as was dignified down the long hallway William had started down. He walked impossibly quickly and by the time she caught up to him he had already opened a door and stepped inside of a pretty little room. She stepped inside as well, feeling her flush return at the notion of the two of them alone in a room with a bed. If he saw her discomfort, however, he paid it no mind. She couldn’t tell if it was because it didn’t strike him as intimate or if it was because he was good at hiding his reactions to t
hings. She couldn’t tell because she didn’t know him at all.
“Will this do? I thought it best to have us in separate rooms until we are actually wed. You understand, propriety and all.”
“Yes, of course,” she said just a little bit too quickly. “That makes perfect sense.”
“Alright, well if that’s all, I’ll leave you now. The bell out front rings when it’s supper time.”
He nodded another one of those terse nods and left the room without further comment. She could do nothing but stand there, feeling more confused and shell shocked than she had been before ever meeting William Ryan.
Chapter 5
It was astonishing, how difficult it was to get to know a man who didn’t want to be known. Caroline found herself constantly wondering what William’s reaction to her and the children might be. She had been at the Ryan Ranch for a little over two months, and she still felt no closer to understanding or knowing the man she was supposed to marry at all. It was to the point where she had started to wonder if they actually would marry, or if they would just continue on in the same strange pattern they had established.
The oddest thing, at least in Caroline’s opinion, was that the two of them had yet to discuss the three children she was to be mother to. She had tried, only once, to ask him of their origin, and that had been such a disaster of a conversation that thinking of it now, weeks after it had taken place, still made her shudder. The timing had been atrocious as well. She had brought the topic up when she felt as if the two of them were finally starting to get closer to each other, once she started to feel like his walls might be coming down ever so slightly. She had managed to undo that quickly enough.
He had been in the kitchen, preparing himself something small for breakfast. The ranch had a cook, and an excellent one as far as Caroline was concerned, but William seemed to prefer to fix his own food. He was very independent, sometimes independent to a fault from what Caroline could tell. She had joined him in the kitchen, feeling that same jolt of electricity she had experienced the first time she had seen him and then every time after that. She sat quietly at the table, not wanting to disturb him, and just as quietly he finished preparing his eggs and toast, served the food out onto two plates, and set one in front of her as he sat beside her and started to eat. She was surprisingly touched by the gesture and felt her eyes go hot with tears she absolutely refused to shed. There was something so sweet about it, the idea of him cooking for her, and it was simple gestures like that that she downright craved. Those were the things that showed that he might care for her in some way, after all, which was something she rarely saw from him. She had heard whisperings before of loveless marriages, marriages where the women vied constantly for the attention of men who could not have cared about them less. While she understood that it was something that worked for some women, women who needed things other than love, she did not believe it would work for her. Of course she wanted security and all of those practical things in life, but she also wanted love. She could not imagine where she would be required to live without it. And the truly strange thing was that she had developed feelings for him over the weeks, despite his distant nature and frequent visits away from the ranch and her and the children. There was a certain kind of strength about him that she found intoxicating and a tenderness he displayed with the children that she did not see in him for anything else. There was a depth there that she could not seem to access, which only made it all the more intoxicating. Yes, she felt for this man and she wanted desperately for him to feel for her as well. Perhaps this breakfast was the first real sign that he did.
“Thank you, it looks wonderful. How is it that you learned to cook?”
“Well, I’ve been a bachelor these fifteen years,” William smiled with a little twinkle in his beautiful eyes that made her breath quicken. “and it wasn’t always true that I had a cook. It was either learn to make food for myself or starve.”
“Well you learned it well. Truth be told, I don’t know that I can cook half so well as you.”
“That’s fine. I don’t expect you to cook. I’ve got a cook, I didn’t bring you here to be another.”
They ate in silence for a moment, but it was a silence full of possibility. This was also the first time he had really mentioned his reason for her being here and she wondered if that might mean they would marry soon. The further away from the devastation of losing Jeremiah she moved and the more interested in William she became, the more difficult she found it to live under the same roof as him in this way. She was ready to become his wife, ready to be all things to him and for him to be all things for her as well. She wasn’t convinced that what they needed was the same, but she had hope and she had her faith. She prayed about it every morning and she thought that just maybe this was the beginning of those prayers being answered.
“Where are the children this morning?”
“Still in their beds, I imagine.” William grinned, his fondness for the children shining through clearly. “I let them stay up a might bit too late last night playing and making up stories. I thought I might as well let them sleep today, especially since I’ll be going away again. It’s only for two weeks this time, but I know how they hate to see me go.”
Caroline wondered whether he knew how she hated to see him go as well. She supposed she did a better job of hiding it than the children, but inside she felt every bit as dejected and crestfallen as they appeared. She understood that these trips were part of the running of the Ryan Ranch, but she also understood that it didn’t have to be him who went. At least not every time. She knew that he had been a man on his own for quite some time and that old habits died hard, but if he didn’t at least try to break his habit of leaving, at least some of the time, they would never make any real progress with each other. The way they were going now, it was always one step forward, two steps back. She took a bite of her food (which really was good) and thought that perhaps it was best to change the subject to something that wouldn’t leave her feeling so blue. That was when she had asked about Celia, Tommy, and Trevor, a question far more incendiary than she had any cause to believe it would be.
“May I ask you a question about the children?”
“What about them?” he asked carefully, his voice level but also somewhat strained.
“Are they yours?”
“What do you mean by that? They’re here, aren’t they?”
“Well yes,” she stammered, taken aback by how hostile his tone was when only moments ago they had been getting along so well. “It’s just that they look nothing like you. That is to say, I was only wondering if you were their biological father.”
Everything about William changed. Eyes that had moments ago been soft and warm were now flinty and distant. Everything about him was removed and he stood quickly, so quickly in fact that the chair beneath him clattered to the floor. Half of his breakfast still sat waiting for him on the plate, but it was clear that he had no intention of eating it now. Without meaning to, Caroline had made him terribly unhappy, and although she wanted to fix it somehow, all she could do was sit and look up at him in shock.
“What does it matter if they belong to me biologically or not? They belong to me, and now to you as well, and that’s what matters. I’ll not have you bothering them about that kind of thing. I’ll not have you asking them about their mother. Is that understood?”
“Yes,” she said so quietly she wasn’t entirely sure that he had heard her. She couldn’t tell and she didn’t have time to ask because before she could even get her bearings, he had stormed out of the room and then out the front door. She could hear him barking instructions to the men outside and then, shortly after, the thunderous clatter of a horse’s hooves as he rode quickly away. She felt stunned, completely caught off guard by how quickly their morning had gone from perfectly lovely to sour. And now he would be gone for two weeks, two weeks where all she would be able to do was wonder where those children had come from and how she could possibly stay on this ranch with a
man who had looked at her the way William just had. She had no idea how long she sat there, but when she finally stood again, the food on her plate was cold and her legs felt so shaky she thought she might fall to the floor. That interaction was just about the last thing she had wanted to happen between the two of them and she would not be able to rest easy. The very idea of William coming home and deciding to call off their engagement made her feel sick to her stomach. She could not do that again. She would rather just vanish in the middle of the night than do that.
*
“Father comes home soon, doesn’t he? He’s late, but he’s coming home soon?”
“Miss Caroline? He’s coming home soon, right?”
“Yes,” she said absentmindedly. “Of course he is. I’m sure he’ll be home any day now.”
But she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure at all. He had telegraphed to say that his work was taking longer than expected, but not to worry because he would be home soon. This children seemed to accept that with ease (although they continued to bring him up every day) but for Caroline, it felt like torture. Every day he was gone was another day she went without knowing how things were between the two of them. Perversely, every day also saw her feelings for him grow until she felt like a bundle of raw, exposed nerves. All she could think of was the word vanish. Was that what she should do? Should she vanish? Would it be better for all of them if she did?
“Miss Caroline? Is everything ok? You look pale and you aren’t eating your supper.”
“Fine. Don’t worry, I’m fine, Celia. Just feeling a bit distracted, I suppose.”
“You can practice our play with us!” Tommy shouted this with glee, Trevor and Celia both nodding vigorously. They had been practicing a play of their own design from almost the moment of their father’s departure and they were chomping at the bit to put it on. She had practiced it with them many times, but this time she just couldn’t. She needed to think, and in order to do that she couldn’t be in this house.