She Married a Cowboy Everyone Thought Would Die… But What He Did Next Changed Everything
Chapter 10
Cobb’s stern face softened almost imperceptibly, in the particular reluctant way of a man unaccustomed to showing much of anything on the surface. “Wasn’t much,” he said again, the same modest deflection he’d offered weeks earlier. “Just an old man doing right by a memory worth honoring.” He picked the harness back up, already returning his attention to the practical work in front of him, the particular discomfort of a quiet man who had said more about his own feelings in one conversation than he generally allowed himself across an entire season.
Martha herself, sitting with her burned hands wrapped in clean linen while the ranch settled slowly back into its winter rhythms, found herself turning over a decision that mattered more to her than any fortune Arthur’s silver claim might provide. She had spent three months at the Broken Spur believing herself lucky simply to have found honest work and a roof over her head. She had not expected, in the process, to find herself falling in love with the gruff, careful man who had asked her a single practical question on a dusty August boardwalk and changed the entire shape of her life with it.
She did not know, in those first weeks of recovery, whether Hezekiah’s feelings ran as deep as her own, or whether the fierce embrace in the wrecked cookhouse had been simply the relief of a man who’d nearly lost something valuable to his operation. She turned the question over during long, quiet evenings by the fire, her bandaged hands resting in her lap, watching Hezekiah across the room as he worked through the ranch’s account books with the same methodical care he brought to everything, and told herself, more than once, not to hope for more than gratitude and respect.
She was wrong to doubt it, though it took the deep heart of winter, and considerable patience on Hezekiah’s part, before either of them found the courage to say so plainly. There were evenings, in that stretch of quiet recovery, when she caught him watching her across the room with an expression she couldn’t quite name, something softer than the calculating scrutiny he’d first shown her on that August boardwalk, and she told herself, each time, not to read too much into a man’s simple gratitude for having survived a night he might easily have died.