His mouth opened. Nothing came out. Norah's smile flickered just for a moment. In that fraction of a second, Silas saw something beneath her confidence. A wound old and familiar.
The kind that came from a lifetime of being looked at the way people were looking at her now. I He started then stopped. What could he say? You're not what I expected. You lied to me.
How could his words, already so inadequate, bridge the chasm that had opened between imagination and reality? Before he could finish the thought, Norah turned to the porter, who was struggling with her luggage. Two enormous trunks that looked like they'd been built to transport furniture. The man was red-faced, sweating, trying to get leverage under the first trunk without much success. "I'll get those," Norah said simply.
She bent, grasped the iron handles of both trunks, both of them, each one probably weighing 100 lb, and lifted them as easily as Silas might lift a pair of saddle bags. The porter's mouth fell open. The crowd's snickering stopped dead. Norah looked back at Silas, trunks hanging from her hands like children's toys. "Where's the wagon?"
He pointed wordlessly. She nodded and started walking, her stride long and purposeful, boots raising small clouds of dust with each step. People parted before her the way they'd part before a freight wagon or a force of nature. Not out of respect necessarily, but out of pure instinct for self-preservation. Silas stood frozen for three full seconds before his legs remembered how to move.
He hurried after her, acutely aware of every eye following them, every whispered comment burning into his back. Behind him, he heard laughter building like thunder, not the good-natured kind, but the cruel sort that fed on other people's humiliation. At the wagon, Norah heaved both trunks into the bed with a single smooth motion that would have taken two strong men considerable effort. Then she turned to face him again, and this time her smile was gone. In its place was something harder, more guarded.
"I know what you're thinking," she said quietly. "I look nothing like what you imagined. I'm too big, too strong, too much everything. You want to call this off right now and send me back on the next train." Silas opened his mouth to protest, though whether to confirm or deny her assessment, he honestly didn't know.
She held up one large hand. "Let me finish. I'm not what you ordered. That's true, but you're not what I ordered either. Her eyes traveled over him, taking in his small frame, his worn suit, the way he barely came up to her shoulder.
There was no cruelty in her assessment, just honest appraisal. We both did our best to make ourselves sound like something we're not, I suppose. Question is, what do we do now? It was a fair question. They stood there in the June sunlight, two strangers bound by letters full of half-truths and a legal agreement that had seemed simple from a distance, but now loomed impossibly complex.