“Why did you agree?” she blurted suddenly.
“What?”
“Why did you agree to the marriage?” She gathered her courage. If she knew the answer, she’d know how to proceed. “You didn’t have to. With your family’s name and reputation, you could have walked away, but you didn’t.”
“We’re friends, right?”
“I guess.” Her hip bumped the stove. “I’ve never thought about us that way.”
“I don’t know why we were thrown together. We may never know. I suspect my name was chosen because of my family’s wealth. If someone is going to abandon a child, why not choose a rich family? If I’m right, then this was a chance for a Blackwell to do right by you, for once. I saw how much you cared for Gracie. I had a chance to help, and I took that chance. My family has treated you poorly over the years, and I figured we owe you, one way or another.”
His words rang true, and she breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank you.”
He felt sorry for her. The realization was lowering, though not entirely unexpected.
“You don’t have to thank me. I knew what I was doing, Heather.” He tipped his hat. “I’d best get back to work. I’ll have supper with the boys.”
There was a hesitation in his voice, as though he considered the whole arrangement temporary. As though someone might come for Gracie at any moment. But he was wrong. Folks didn’t come back for girls. He’d discover the truth soon enough.
“Thank you,” she said. “For the milk.”
“If there’s anything else you need, let me know.”
He left, and the light in the room seemed to dim. He looked so tall, so strongly built, with a brilliant force of leashed energy running powerfully through him. When he left, he took that compelling energy with him.
Gracie reached above her head for a glass set near the edge of the table, and Heather rushed to her side, averting the disaster. “No. No.”
The child flopped onto her bottom, her lower lip thrust out in a pout. “Gra!”
“You’re not doing a very good job of convincing your new pa he made the right choice.”
“Gra!”
Yet she knew she’d made the right decision. Now all she had to do was convince Sterling he’d done the same. Duty was a poor substitution for affection, but at least that was a place to start.
* * *
The first thing Sterling noticed were the blue chintz curtains on the parlor windows. The second was that he’d rapidly become a stranger in his own home.
The blanket assessment wasn’t entirely fair, he amended. He’d become a stranger in exactly half of his home. The floor plan was comfortable without being ostentatious, and lent itself well to the separation. His ma had favored quality over quantity, and his father had provided her with a home that reflected her tastes. The front entry included an ornate carved banister and checkerboard tiled floor. The parlor sported wainscoting three-quarters of the way up the walls, topped by a picture ledge and peacock-strewn silk wallpaper.
Following his mother’s death, his father had ceased entertaining, and the dining room had been transformed into a study with books and ledgers piled on the center table, and a sitting area with overstuffed leather chairs arranged before the fireplace.
Near as Sterling could tell, Heather had not ventured up the main staircase since the brief tour he’d provided the day after their hasty marriage. Instead, she gained access to the second floor exclusively by the kitchen stairs.
The two crossover points were the kitchen and the second-story washroom. They were forced to share the spaces, which meant awkward encounters that he suspected neither of them relished. No matter how he tried, they never seemed to get past the superficial. Their conversations were polite, generic and brief—a fact he found oddly frustrating.
She’d vowed not to disrupt his life, and she was doing her best to honor that. If he found her solution vaguely annoying, he had no one to blame but himself for not encouraging her to be more a part of things.
He splashed water on his face, then stilled and listened for the sounds of Heather and Gracie in the kitchen. Pots and pans clattered, noises he hadn’t heard from that area in years. With only men on the ranch since his ma’s passing, they ate in the bunkhouse.
A band of emotion squeezed around his heart. Even a decade after her death, he was acutely aware of the loss of his ma.
His parents had met and married because the social structures had shifted following the war. His pa had married above his station, and his ma’s money had funded the fledging ranch. They were cordial to each other but never affectionate. Not that he’d paid much attention to that sort of thing as a child.
All in all he had no complaints about his upbringing. They’d had the nicest house in the territory, the largest barn and the best piece of land in Montana. His father had been a hard and unyielding man, but as the second son, Sterling had escaped the worst of his temper. Dillon, on the other hand, was being groomed for his place at the helm of the Blackwell family legacy, and there was no time for cosseting.
The scent of brewing coffee wafted from the kitchen, and Sterling wiped the last flecks of shaving lotion from his face.
Gracie perched on two Montgomery Ward catalogs with a towel secured around her middle and tied to the rungs of the chair. Her concentration intense, she pinched an edge of toast and aimed for her mouth. After a few misses, she managed to devour the bite.
The child was miniature perfection with tiny hands, long-lashed eyes and a perfect little button of a nose. Because of the separate spaces in the house, their interactions had been limited, but the child struck him as smart and amiable.
Heather turned from the stove and his heart did an odd little flip. Tendrils of damp hair clung to her forehead, and her cheeks were flushed from the heat. She wore a gingham dress in blue with a floral embroidered apron wrapped around her waist.
She’d made it clear the marriage arrangement was strictly for the child, and he’d accepted the terms. A part of him held back too, sensing their union was temporary. The circumstances surrounding Grace’s arrival haunted him. Last evening he’d stared at the Return of Birth, examining the handwriting for any clues to the origins.
The practical side of him wanted to solve the mystery and learn the truth. But another part of him feared that if he discovered the truth, he’d wind up hurting Heather. She’d convinced him the child was better off not knowing who had abandoned her, and he agreed. Mostly. There was an underlying tension in the house they both felt. He kept waiting for a change in the wind, a darkening of the clouds that portended another tornado.
“You look lovely this morning,” he said, hiding his discomfort behind a layer of amiable pleasantries.
“Would you like flapjacks?”
With an offhand smile in his direction, she wrapped a scorched flour sack around the handle of a pan on the stove, then lifted the skillet.
She hadn’t even acknowledged the compliment. Perhaps it was too early in the morning for charm.
“Please,” he said.
He took a seat across from Gracie. With brisk efficiency, Heather served him a plate of flapjacks and a side of bacon. Next she poured coffee, taking care to place the cup well out of Gracie’s reach. As a finishing touch, she added syrup and a jar of applesauce to the table.
He might as well have been a stranger dining in a café. He braced his wrists on the edge of the table. If they were going to spend the rest of their lives together, or even just the rest of the month, he wanted to at least feel like a member of the family and not a boarder in his own home. They might have been