"Let me show you inside." She followed him up the porch steps, Cole and Tucker trailing behind with her trunk. The moment Jake opened the door, Eleanor understood what he had meant about the house being in rough shape. The interior was clean enough, but completely devoid of any warmth or personality.
Bare wooden floors, simple furniture, everything functional but harsh. No rugs, no curtains, no pictures on the walls. It looked exactly like what it was, a place where three bachelors ate and slept between long days of brutal work. "This is the main room," Jake said, his voice echoing slightly in the empty space.
"Kitchen is through there. We have four bedrooms upstairs. You will have your own room, of course. We respect propriety." Eleanor felt a confusing mix of relief and disappointment at those words.
She was here to marry this man, was she not? But apparently that was not happening immediately. As if reading her confusion, Cole spoke up. His voice was gentler than Jake's, though equally deep.
"We thought you might want some time to get settled before we make any formal arrangements. No need to rush into anything." Tucker added, his first words since they had met. "You can decide if this life suits you. If we suit you."
Their consideration should have made her feel better. Instead, it made everything more uncertain. She had traveled 2,000 miles expecting to marry a rancher named Jake Hollister. Now she stood in a house with three identical men, none of them pushing her toward the altar, all of them watching her with an intensity that made her skin flush hot and her breath come short.
What exactly was she supposed to do now? Jake carried her trunk upstairs while Eleanor followed, acutely aware of Cole and Tucker remaining below, their presence filling the house even from a distance. The stairs creaked under their feet. At the top, a narrow hallway led to several doors.
Jake opened the first one. "This will be your room." It was simple, but larger than any space she had ever called her own. A bed with a plain quilt, a dresser, a small table with a washbasin and pitcher.
A single window looked out over the front of the ranch toward the distant hills. Jake set her trunk at the foot of the bed. "I know it is not much." She shook her head quickly. "It is more than enough. Thank you."
He stood there for a moment, his hat still in his hands. Then he said, "I should explain something about my brothers and me." Eleanor waited, her heart pounding. "We are close. Closer than most siblings."
"Our whole lives people could not tell us apart. Even our own mother sometimes mixed us up. We learned early to depend on each other, to work as a unit. When our parents died, it just made that bond stronger." He paused, seeming to struggle for words.
"When I put that advertisement in the paper, I did it for all of us. We all agreed the ranch needed a woman, someone to make this place a home instead of just a work camp. But I was the one who wrote the letters. I was the one who made the offer."
His blue eyes met hers directly. "If you agree to marry me, you marry me, not them. But they will be here. They are my family." Eleanor's mind spun.
She managed to nod. "I understand." "Do you?" Jake stepped closer. She could smell the sage scent of him again, see the faint lines around his eyes from squinting into the sun.
"Because I need you to know what you are agreeing to. This is not an easy life. The work is hard. The winters are brutal. There are weeks where we barely see town."