His Mail-Order Bride. Tatiana March

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       Chapter Four

      Thomas sat on the porch steps and watched the twilight thicken over the valley. A chorus of frogs croaked in the muddy pond near his irrigation station. In the creek, a beaver splashed its tail. A hawk soared overhead. The scent of blossoms from the pomegranate orchard by the lake floated on the breeze.

      Sundown was his favorite part of the day. The chores were done. Horses were safe in their stalls, the milk cow in its pen and chickens in their coop. It was the time to relax, time to allow his aching muscles a moment of rest. Time to look forward to supper, and then to sitting down by the fire to work on a piece of furniture, or to read a book by lamplight.

      Ever since he’d finished building the house in his second year on the farm, Thomas had sat on the porch steps in the evenings. And every night, he’d wondered what it might feel like, to have someone inside waiting for him.

      All his life, he’d longed for that.

      To enter a room and feel welcome.

      Would he achieve it now? Would his wife smile at him, her face bright with pleasure as he stepped across the threshold? Or would it forever be his fate to live with the silent hostility that had ruined his childhood and youth, until he could no longer take it and had chosen to leave his Michigan home.

      There was a risk in marrying an unknown woman.

      It was a risk he’d felt compelled to take.

      For not trying at all would have been cowardice.

      Thomas pushed up to his feet, slapped the dust from his knees. He should have changed into work clothes instead of taking care of the animals in his Sunday suit.

      One corner of his mouth tugged up in a wry smile. Didn’t matter. He’d not wear the suit again until someone died. His smile deepened. Or perhaps for the christening of his child. Their child. For, according to the law, any child born to his wedded wife would be his, even if another man might have planted the seed.

      “Charlotte.” He tasted her name on his tongue.

      “My wife,” he whispered into the silence, enjoying the sound of it.

      He raked one more satisfied glance over his valley, now shrouded in deep shadows, and then he walked up the porch steps into the house.

      The parlor was empty, the lamps unlit. Thomas turned toward the bedroom. The doors were closed. He didn’t know what to make of it. He understood it was common for women to fear their wedding night. It made sense. Most women had little idea what to expect, and it was human nature to fear the unknown, but that should not be the case with Charlotte. The proof of her experience was growing in her belly.

      With hesitant steps, Thomas set off across the floor. Before he reached the bedroom door to the left of the fireplace, the door on the right side opened. His wife stood in the opening. The last glimmer of daylight from the window behind her silhouetted her, rendering her thin white nightgown transparent.

      Thomas felt his mouth go dry. His heart hammered in the confines of his ribs. He wanted to rush up to her, rake his hands down the dark curls that cascaded past her shoulders. He wanted to frame her face between his palms, tilt it up toward him and kiss her until his body hummed with joy.

      She moved.

      A step toward him.

      Not away from him.

      And then she laughed—a tingling, feminine laughter that crawled up his spine and fanned the needs he had just spent an hour trying to bank down.

      “Why do you have two doors to the bedroom?” she asked. “I can see us going round and round, looking for each other, one of us going in through one door while the other one is coming out through the other door.”

      Thomas had trouble speaking. He had to clear his throat before the words came. “It is so that the bedroom can be divided into two later, creating a separate bedroom for the children. That’s why I put in a window on both sides, rather than one big window at the end.”

      She spun around to survey the bedroom. The transparent nightgown gave him a view of her back, different, but just as fascinating.

      “I see,” she said. “What a clever idea.”

      Thomas smiled. Tomorrow, he would show her his irrigation station, and some other inventions he’d made to ease the burden of farm chores. She might be surprised to discover that despite his lack of formal education he possessed as much knowledge of mechanics as a trained engineer.

      “I’m hungry,” he told her. “Will you eat supper with me?”

      She whirled back around to face him and edged closer. Either she lacked modesty, or she had no idea how much the flimsy nightgown revealed. Thomas would have bet his life on the latter. When she was only two steps away, she clasped her hands together in front of her in a manner that was becoming familiar to him.