She Was Forced To Wed The Cowboy She Feared, Until She Found Kindness Behind His Quiet Eyes

PART 2

He led her up a wide staircase, past a living room with a stone fireplace big enough to stand in, and stopped in front of a door that wasn’t the one at the end of the hall.

“My room?” Flora asked, confused. “Don’t you mean our room?”

Something crossed Tucker’s face — discomfort, maybe, or its cousin.

“No. Your room.” He opened the door onto a four-poster bed, a wash stand, a small sitting area by the window. “The master bedroom is down the hall. This one’s yours. I thought you might want time to adjust.”

He left her there before she could figure out how to respond to that kind of consideration from a man she’d been told was a killer.

That night, after a strained supper and a housekeeper named Mrs. Winters who watched her like she was doing sums, Flora lay awake listening to a storm hammer the windows and telling herself she would not cry in this house.

She cried anyway.

By morning the storm had washed the world clean, and by the end of the week Flora had learned things about her husband that didn’t fit anywhere in the stories.

That he rode fence lines beside his men instead of watching from a porch. That he’d built small cabins for his married ranch hands because a man works better when his family’s close — something most ranchers in the territory never bothered to consider. That his foreman, a weathered man named Hank who’d worked for him fifteen years, spoke of him the way men speak of someone they’ve decided, after a long time watching, to trust with their lives.

And then came the trip into town.

The whispers started the second their wagon rolled down Copper Creek’s main street. Conversations died. Men who’d have tipped their hats to any other rancher’s wife suddenly found business elsewhere. In the general store, while Tucker spoke with the owner in back, two women pretended to examine canned goods and did not bother to lower their voices.

Poor thing. Sold by her own father to that monster.

Wonder if she knows about the Wilkins boy.

Flora turned to face them directly.

“What about the Wilkins boy?”

The younger woman didn’t hesitate.

“Three years ago. Young Sam Wilkins worked out at the Blackburn ranch. Got caught stealing — a few dollars, they say. Mr. Blackburn had him whipped in front of the other hands. Boy couldn’t use his right arm right afterward. Had to leave the territory.”

Flora felt the blood drain out of her face.

And that was when Tucker’s voice came from directly behind her, cold enough to freeze the air in the store.

“You don’t know anything.”

The women froze. Flora froze. And for the first time since she’d said her vows, Flora Blackburn understood that she had absolutely no idea which version of her husband was about to walk her out that door — the man who built cabins for his ranch hands, or the one whose name made an entire town go quiet.

She was about to find out that the truth was worse than either story — and better than both of them, too.