Thirty dollars a month was more than the territorial surveyor was paid. It was more than the sheriff earned. It was a fortune to a woman who had spent the last two months trying to figure out how to buy a fifteen-cent spool of thread.
"No," she said, shaking her head.
Nathan frowned, his dark brows drawing together. "Why the hell not?"
"Because it’s too much," she said, her voice rising again with suspicion. "You're offering me a charity wage, Nathan. You're trying to salve your conscience by dressing alms up as an honest contract. The whole town will see right through it."
"The town can go to the devil," Nathan growled. "I don't set my wages by what Silas Rourke's sister thinks over her knitting."
"I have to live in this valley!" she countered. "You can hide behind your fences and your Winchester rifles, Nathan, but my boys have to walk through Wind River. If I take thirty dollars a month from you, Silas will say you bought me outright."
Nathan took a slow, heavy breath. He looked down at his boots, then back up at her face. The hardness had returned to his jaw, but beneath it was an unmistakable current of frustration.
"Fifteen dollars, then," Nathan said through his teeth. "Fifteen dollars a month, the rations, and the wood. That's a fair wage for a head clerk in Cheyenne. Take it or leave it, Eleanor."
Eleanor stared at him. Fifteen dollars. It was still generous, but it was defensible. It was an amount an honest woman could point to in a court of law or a church vestibule.
"And the boys?" she asked, her voice narrowing. "I cannot leave Henry and Samuel alone in this cabin for ten hours a day. They will freeze, or the roof will collapse, or Samuel will wander into the creek."
"They come with you," Nathan answered instantly, as if he had already settled the matter in his mind long before he rode down the hill. "There's an empty bedroom behind the kitchen in the main house. It's got an iron bedstead and a Franklin stove. They can do their lessons there while you work. When they're done, they can help the hands feed the horses in the barn."
Eleanor felt the ground shifting beneath her feet.
Every objection she raised, every barrier she threw up out of pride, shame, and fear, he dismantled with a single, blunt stroke of common sense. He wasn't offering her a flirtation. He wasn't offering her a mistress's cottage. He was offering her an alliance—cold, practical, and heavily armored against the winter.
"Why are you doing this, Nathan?" she asked softly, the shotgun finally dipping until the barrels pointed harmlessly into the drift. "Really. Men like you don't take on widows and orphans out of civic duty."
Nathan stood silent for a long moment. The first pale light of the false dawn was beginning to smudge the eastern horizon with a faint, bruised violet.
"My father died in the north pasture," Nathan said, his voice flat, devoid of emotion, yet carrying a weight that made her chest tighten. "He was thrown from his horse during the freeze of '74. He lay in a coulee for two days with a broken back before we found him. When we brought him in, he was frozen so hard we couldn't take his coat off until the stove had been burning for six hours."
He looked at the small, square window of the sod cabin, where the faint outline of a child's head could now be seen pressed against the frost. Henry was awake.
"I know what the cold does to folks," Nathan said, turning back to her. "I've seen it kill stock, and I've seen it kill men. I won't sit by my fire on the hill and watch it take two little boys when I've got enough beef to feed half this territory."
He walked toward his gelding, caught the reins, and swung easily up into the saddle. The big horse snorted, stamping an iron shoe against the frozen dirt of the driveway.
Nathan looked down at her from the height of the saddle.
"The wood will be here by noon," he said, touching the brim of his hat with one gloved forefinger. "Be ready by eight o'clock tomorrow morning. I'll send the wagon for you and your boys."
"Nathan," she called out, her voice stopping him as he turned the horse's head toward the ridge.
He looked back over his shoulder.
Eleanor stood beside the heavy willow basket on her porch. Her face was pale, her shawl whipping in the rising morning wind, but her back was straight, her chin held high against the gray, frozen sky.
"Thank you," she said.
Nathan did not smile. He only held her gaze for three long seconds—an acknowledgment between two people who had both looked into the teeth of the winter and refused to be broken.
"Don't thank me yet, Mrs. Pierce," he said quietly. "My ledgers are a holy mess."
With a touch of his spurs, he sent the bay gelding loping across the white expanse,
The wagon arrived at precisely a quarter to eight.