“I’m so sorry,” he said. “It sounds terrible.”
“It was.” Again, her tone was almost dull. She didn’t appear sad, as if her first husband’s passing hadn’t affected her at all. It was curious, and yet it fit with her actions since he’d met her. She’d taken to his advances without hesitation, even teasing him back in her shy manner. She never mentioned Ned, except in passing, and then without emotion.
“You didn’t love him, did you?” he asked. It was a bold question, yet one he felt he needed an answer to.
She looked up at him, her eyes reflecting the pale sky. “What sort of a question is that? Ned was my husband.”
He said nothing, instead holding her gaze until her lips parted and her eyes looked down. “I did not. It’s a terrible thing, I know. I prayed for forgiveness over my own feelings so many times, and at some point after he passed, it came.” She looked up at him then, the green of her irises defiant. “I refuse to feel guilty for being allowed a second chance.”
Her determination sent a bolt of lightning through him. This unassuming woman knew exactly what she wanted. And he liked that. “I didn’t mean it that way. I’m sorry you were unhappy. How did you come to marry him?”
“Faith,” she said with a shrug. “My sister was madly in love with Ned’s brother, Aaron, and he with her. The Thorntons didn’t have much back in Mississippi. Just a little scratch of land their father could barely make a living from. The brothers planned to come here, to a place where Aaron and Ned could start afresh, make their own lives. Faith and I have always been close, and she was always the brave one. I couldn’t bear the thought of living at home without her. She suggested I might marry Ned, considering he had no prospects and would need a wife to keep up the house on the farm he planned to build here. I barely knew him. He’d always kept to himself when we were children. Ned proposed, I accepted, and here I am.” She paused, looking back at Jack. “He married only for the practicality of it.”
“What do you mean? Was he cruel?” An anger Jack had never felt before sat low in his gut. If the man had ever hurt Celia—
“Oh, no. He never hurt me. He was . . . distant. I felt alone even when I wasn’t. It wasn’t how I’d hoped a marriage would be.”
“I see. And you’re right.” Jack stretched out his fingers again, then took her hand and squeezed it, hoping the horse wouldn’t choose that moment to dart off. “That isn’t how a marriage should be.”
She ducked her head and smiled at him. “Thank you.”
He took his hand back, only because he feared falling off the horse, and they rode in silence for a few minutes as the bluffs grew larger in the distance.
“Jack?” she said, her voice small in the vast expanse of prairie around them. “Why did you leave New York? I know what you said in your letter, but why did you really leave?”
He gulped as he considered her question. He wanted to tell her the truth. But what might she think of him then?
Chapter Twelve
Celia eyed Jack as he looked off into the distance. His mind seemed to have instantly gone back to New York when she posed the question, and she wished she could take it back. Perhaps she’d been right when she told Faith about her fears that questions would drive Jack away.
Still . . . she did want to know the answer. And she supposed his reaction would tell her how much he was—or was not—like Ned.
As the seconds ticked by and the only sounds were the horses’ hooves crunching through the dead grass and birdsong from off in the distance, she prayed he was nothing like her first husband.
“I wanted something new,” he said carefully.
Celia clamped her mouth shut, hoping he would go on. She knew that already—he’d put it in his letter.
“I told you I was a man of business in New York,” he continued, his eyes on Chimney Rock far off in the distance. “I . . . dabbled in various investments. A meatpacking plant. A company that would manufacture medical
