"Then let's call it what it is." His voice was steady, direct none of the softness that usually colored a man's courting. I'm offering you a marriage, not romance, not some fairy tale you had before and lost. A partnership. You'd have my name, my protection, a home nobody can take from you again.
In return, my children get a mother, and this ranch gets someone who knows how to hold a family together when it's falling apart at the seams. Eleanor's breath caught. Every practical instinct in her told her this was madness, that marrying a stranger a week after burying her husband was the kind of decision that would scandalize every person she'd ever known. But every person she'd ever known had already abandoned her. And standing in this house with its cracked shutters and its grieving children, and this steady, solemn man offering her not pity, but partnership, Eleanor understood she was being offered something she hadn't dared hope for since the stagecoach pulled away and left her alone in the snow.
A place to belong. "You need a home," Nathaniel said quietly, echoing the words he'd spoken to her outside the church that first bitter afternoon. And my children need a mother. I reckon that makes us exactly what the other one's looking for, even if neither of us planned on finding it this way. Eleanor looked past him out the window to where Clara was lifting Henry up to pet the muzzle of an old gray mare.
Both children laughing in a way she hadn't seen since her arrival. "If I say yes," she said slowly. It won't be some fairy tale like you said. I won't pretend to love you. Not when I don't even know you.
But I won't be your servant either, Mr. Carter. I'll have a voice in this household. I'll be treated as your wife in every sense that matters. And if your children reject me, I won't force myself on them.
I'll earn my place or I won't stay. "Fair enough." And I want your word, she continued. Something fierce rising in her now. The first fire she'd felt since Boston.
That whatever happens between us, you'll never make me feel the way his family made me feel. Like I was disposable. Like my worth began and ended with what I could give someone else. Nathaniel crossed the room and for the first time since they had met, took both her hands in his, his grip warm and certain despite the winter chill still clinging to his coat. Eleanor Whitmore.
He said, "You've got my word. Whatever else I fail at in this life, I won't fail at that." Outside, the wind had finally quieted the storm that had chased her out of Boston and into this strange new life, finally spent, leaving behind a stillness that felt for the first time in weeks less like emptiness and more like the hush before something new began. They were married 4 days later in front of a preacher who raised his eyebrows but asked no questions and a handful of towns folk who had plenty of questions but no shortage of opinions either. Married a week after she stepped off the stagecoach.