They Tried to Auction a Mountain Man’s Seven-Year-Old Son Separately—Until the Town’s Most Rejected Woman Paid $200 for Them Both

Chapter 3

Clara shook her head. He’s fine right here. He knows warmth when he finds it.

She heard Nate’s breath catch. She didn’t look back.

The Brennan Ranch appeared around the final bend of the northern trail with the solid, unhurried assurance of something that has been there long enough to be certain of its own existence. Fenced pastures stretching across the valley. Barns and sheds standing sturdy and freshly painted. A white house with green shutters at the center, built square and deep with the quality of a man who expected to stay.

Nate stared from the wagon bed.

This is yours.

My father’s first. Mine now.

You run this whole operation alone?

I hire hands seasonally. But yes. My father taught me everything. A pause she hadn’t intended. He just never believed I could manage without a husband. Probably because I didn’t fit his idea of a frontier bride.

A short, bitter sound escaped her. She hadn’t meant to say that either.

Too large, too quiet. Too much.

Too much of what? Nate asked.

Of me.

She kept her eyes on the gate ahead. Behind her, she heard Nate make a small sound — not dismissal, something more like confusion, the sound of a man trying to understand a conclusion that doesn’t compute.

Before he could respond, his body made the decision for him. He gripped the wagon’s side with a sharp intake of breath, the control slipping for a moment.

You’re hurt worse than you admitted, Clara said.

I’ll manage.

You won’t have to. Come inside.

He opened his mouth. Then Daniel stirred awake in her arms, reaching for his father with a frightened sound, and Nate swallowed whatever prideful refusal he’d been building.

Clara lit every lamp in the kitchen and fetched the medical kit she kept in the back cabinet.

Nate sat on a chair with one hand flat on the table, maintaining his upright position through will. Daniel sat nearby with a tin cup of milk, watching everything with those too-old eyes.

May I? Clara gestured to his torn shirt.

A beat. Then he nodded.

She unbuttoned it carefully and kept her expression professional, which took effort. His chest and ribs were a history of what the bank’s men had done over three days — deep bruises spreading into each other, old welts from ropes or straps, half-healed gashes, the left rib cage swollen in the specific way of something cracked rather than merely bruised. His back, when she moved to examine it, was no better.

Daniel whispered, They hurt you, Papa.

I see that, darling, Clara said.

Nate tried the shrug that men try when they want to communicate indifference to pain and are not presently capable of the physical motion required. They said I was resisting arrest.

And were you?

Damn right I was. Flat. Entirely unapologetic. They tried to put Daniel on a separate wagon. I fought until they knocked me unconscious.

Clara cleaned a blood-crusted cut near his ribs with the antiseptic cloth and said: Then you did the only correct thing.

Nate went still.

She could feel it — the particular stillness of someone who has been called a great many things and has not been called that one before. She continued working without making anything of it, binding his ribs in the clean cloth strips, smoothing the edges down with hands that were gentler than they needed to be for the medical task.

When she stood, he was watching her with the expression of a man trying to solve a puzzle he doesn’t have all the pieces for.

You don’t know what you’ve bought, he said.

A father, a son, and a chance for them to stay together. She met his eyes steadily. That’s worth more than two hundred dollars.

Something slammed through him that was visible even to a stranger. His hand tightened on the table edge. He looked away.

I don’t know how to repay you, he said. His voice had come apart slightly at its edges.

You’ll work. You’ll heal. You’ll raise your boy. She turned to check on Daniel at the stove. That’s all I ask.