Page 2 of The Rancher Who Swore Off Love
“Gracie—”
“The vermin areliterallyeating me in my sleep.”
His arm tightened. For a stretch, he just held on, resting his chin on the top of her head—easy enough, given that she barely cleared his shoulder even standing straight—and the rhythm of his breathing worked against her like a current she could float on if she let herself.
Jonah always ran warm. Even in January, in the drafty wreck of the house their parents had left them, he radiated heat like a stove. When she’d been small enough and young enough and scared enough at night, she used to crawl into his bed and press her cold feet against his shins, and he’d grumble but never once kick her out.
She rubbed her sleeve across her face.
“I got somethin’ for you.” Jonah shifted beside her, reaching into the pocket of his trousers. Paper crinkled. “Been carryin’ it around a few days now, waitin’ on the right moment, and I reckon a rat chewin’ on your hair at the crack o’ dawn more than qualifies.”
He unfolded a scrap of newsprint and held it out. The ink had smudged at the edges from riding around in his pocket, but the words stood clear enough in the growing light from the window. An advertisement. Small, tucked into a column alongside notices for patent medicines and farm equipment, the kind of thing a person would skim right past unless they knew to look.
Seeking a dependable woman of good character for a marriage of convenience. Room, board, and steady income provided in exchange for housekeeping on a working cattle ranch. Pitkin, Colorado. Inquire by letter to L. Foster, Pitkin Post Office.
Grace read it twice. Three times. The words rearranged themselves in her head like furniture in a new room, and she kept bumping into them.
“A mail-order bride ad.”
“Amarriage-of-conveniencead,” Jonah tapped the paper with one long finger. “There’s a difference, and it’s right there in black and white. He ain’t lookin’ for love and daisies, Gracie. Man needs someone to cook, clean, and keep house. That’s a job. A job with a roof that don’t leak and a pantry that the rats ain’t laid claim to.”
She stared at the newsprint.Pitkin, Colorado.She’d never been farther west than the end of the dock. Jonah sometimestook her to watch the ships come in as they carried people who looked just as tired and hopeful as her parents must’ve looked stepping off their own vessel all those years ago.
Colorado. She might as well have readthe moon.“You want me to marry some stranger.”
“What I want is for you to stop livin’ like this.” He gestured around the room. “Take a real good look at this place, Grace.”
She did.
She already knew every inch of every miserable detail, the way a person knew the map of their own skin, but Jonah’s voice carried urgency that made her see it fresh. The plaster crumbled off the walls in patches. The floorboards were so warped they’d started pulling apart at the seams, leaving gaps wide enough to lose a spoon through. The ceiling sagged in the corner where the leak had softened the beams, and one good storm—one really good soaking rain—would bring the whole thing down on top of wherever she slept.
“Pitkin’s got mountains,” Jonah offered, like mountains solved anything. “Clean air. Wide open country. No docks stinkin’ up the place, no fish guts.”
“No brother, either.”
His mouth twitched. He rubbed the back of his neck the way he always did when he worked through a problem he wouldn’t share.
“I’ll follow you out there.”
“Jonah—”
“Give me a few months to square things up here. When I’ve only got my own mouth to feed, I can save faster. I’ll be out before winter.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know it sure as I’m sittin’ here.”
He ducked his head to catch her eyes, and the teasing had drained out of him now. Just Jonah underneath, her brother, the boy who’d learned to cook proper stew at fourteen because someone had to, and mended her shoes with twine when the cobbler cost too much. “You deserve a damn sight better’n this, Gracie. You know that, don’t you?”
The advertisement curled at the edges between her fingers.
Room, board, and steady income.
She thought of her mother’s hands kneading dough on the scarred table that used to sit in the front room, before they’d had to burn it for firewood two winters back. The confidence of those hands. Ma had built a home out of almost nothing, and she’d done it singing, filling the cracks between the walls with melodies Grace still hummed when she hung the washing.
And here sat Grace. Twenty-one years old, five foot three and some change of sun-browned, freckle-dusted stubbornness, crying over a rat.
“All right,” she gulped. “All right. Let’s write the letter.”
