Free Rocky Mountain Widow (Historical) by Jillian Hart Page A

now…
    It was gone. She was empty, hollow. Her mind had been playing tricks on her. Letting her hold on to what had been long gone. What should have been a terrible wave of grief seemed to be at a distance, too. She’d learned sometimes the greatest of pain was that way. A sudden shock that kept a person from feeling the initial blast of agony.
    But eventually the shock would break away and then there would be no escape.
    The sounds came again. The door, she realized. Someone was approaching the door. It wasn’t Ham; he wasn’t here anymore. The funeral, the ride home, all of it had been real. Her mind kept trying to reject what was only fact. The shock faded away and the grief came in a hot, strangled wave. She was suddenly alive, the darkness was gone and tears rolled up from her soul.
    Alive, she opened her eyes to stare at the stone wall hearth in the cabin. At Ham’s six-point elk head hanging above the mantel. His collections of knives and revolvers and his tin of tobacco. The fire roared in colors of orange, yellow and red. Flames writhed and twisted in on themselves, and she thought hell would have fires like that.
    She shivered, although she was not cold, but her heart was freezing, as if buried six feet under snow. Wetness rolled down her face, warm rivulets that trailed over her cheeks and ran along her jaw and along her neck to drip onto the pillow. Someone had brought one from the bedroom—the pillow slip had her favorite pattern she’d embroidered. A spray of honeysuckle, their trumpetlike flowers delicate, their vines curlicued, framing the mated pair of hummingbirds.
    The two birds had seemed so happy together, that was why she’d chosen the pattern when she’d made the pillow slips for her hope chest, naive girl that she’d been. She rubbed the tip of her finger along the hue of tawny thread she’d used to stitch the outline of the female bird’s chest. The design was easier to concentrate on than the man whose boots knelled in slow, steady steps closer.
    Joshua Gable. She didn’t need to rip her gaze away from the embroidered design to know it was him. She could feel his presence as if it were the radiant heat from the fire.
    The image of how he’d come to her rescue that first night, protecting her from Ham’s drunken violence, telegraphed into her mind. The image of him towering above her at the funeral, genuine concern etched into his strong face, swept into her mind’s eye. Followed by the feel of his iron-solid arms around her, carrying her through the blizzard.
    Maybe it was this almost dreamlike place she was in, maybe that was why she could sense a strange connection to him. Why her very being seemed to turn toward him, like a sunflower to the dawn.
    He stood over her now, and she could feel the shape of him, thrown like a shadow on her skin where his body blocked the stifling heat from the fire. She’d never felt such a thing before. Surely never with Ham, even before they’d married when she’d thought herself so much in love with him.
    Maybe it was simply because she felt so alone. Isolated and drifting and he was a man made of granite, anchored and unyielding. Seemingly good and decent and strong, when she was used to being around Ham, who was not one of those things.
    And she admired the good qualities in a man, for they had once seemed rare. And now that she knew the truth about men, they were even rarer still. Or maybe it was because he’d helped her when no one else had or would. When her neighbors and acquaintances and family all looked the other way over the years, ignoring the bruises marking her face or the way she shielded her sore ribs or forearm or leg. She’d craved help when there was none.
    When others, including her own aunt, would see her situation and turn away. It ain’t no one’s concern, she could hear her aunt’s voice in her head, the one time Claire had outright asked for help