“You think you’ve protected her, don’t you?” Tobias sneered, his lips curling back from his teeth. “Living out here like animals in the brush. You don’t know the half of it, Holmstrom. You don’t even know who she was before she got on that coach.”
Einar’s eyes narrowed slightly, the only sign that the barb had landed. “I know who she is now.”
“Do you?” Tobias laughed, a sharp, ugly sound that startled the bay gelding down in the yard. “Ask her about her brother in Jefferson City. Ask her why the sheriff down there has a warrant with a reward attached to her likeness for a fire that burned down half the district court.”
The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the steady drip of melting sleet from the cedar shingles overhead. Anna did not flinch. Her shoulders remained square, her hands resting quietly against her apron, though the color had drained entirely from her lips.
Einar turned his head slowly to look down at her, his expression unreadable, searching her face for the truth of the accusation. Anna met his gaze without blinking, her eyes bright with a sudden, fierce defiance that dared him to judge her.
“Is that right?” Einar asked softly, not taking his eyes off her.
“It’s a lie,” Anna said, her voice steady and clear. “The fire started in the records office because the county wouldn’t pay to fix the flues. My brother was three miles away hauling timber when the roof went in, but the magistrate needed someone to blame for the lost land deeds, and my family name was convenient.”
Tobias smiled triumphantly, thinking he had finally driven a wedge between the woman and her mountain protector. “Convenient? The sheriff had witnesses who saw her leaving the alley ten minutes before the timbers collapsed. That’s why she answered a mail-order marriage advertisement in a paper three states away. She was running from a rope.”
“And you knew that?” Einar asked, shifting his gaze back to Tobias.
“I heard whispers in Saint Louis before she ever arrived,” Tobias admitted, puffing out his chest. “I didn’t care about the fire at first. A man can overlook a little trouble if the woman is useful. But when she stepped off that coach looking like a pauper and didn’t even have a trunk to her name, I realized the risk wasn’t worth the trouble. That’s why I walked away.”
Einar stood up straight, his massive frame blocking the doorway entirely. “You walked away because you were a coward who couldn’t handle a woman with a past, and you used her misfortune as an excuse to save your own skin.”
“I walked away because she was damaged goods!” Tobias roared, drawing back his fist as if to strike the big man across the face.
The movement was too fast, too clumsy. Einar didn’t even bother to swing his fist. He simply stepped inside Tobias’s reach, grabbed the expensive beaver coat by the lapels with both hands, and hoisted the smaller man off his feet as if he weighed no more than a bundle of dry lath.
Tobias gasped, his heels kicking uselessly against the rough wooden planks of the porch, his face turning purple as the heavy wool collar bit into his throat.
“You’ve said quite enough, McKenna,” Einar said, his voice dropping into a register that vibrated through the floorboards. “You brought your noise up my mountain, you brought your lies to my doorstep, and you insulted a woman under my roof. Now you’re going to get back on your horse and ride back down to that town, and if you ever come up these switchbacks again, I won’t bother stopping to talk.”
With a sudden, violent heave, Einar hurled Tobias off the porch. The smaller man flew through the air and landed hard in a muddy snowbank beside the woodpile, scattering chips and slush in all directions. His expensive hat rolled into the ditch, filling immediately with brown water.
The hired boy down by the rails scrambled to pull his horse’s head around, terrified, waiting for the big man to come after them with an axe. But Einar simply stood on the edge of the porch, his hands resting on his belt, watching them with the cold indifference of a winter storm.
Tobias scrambled to his feet, coughing and clawing mud off the front of his fine coat, his face twisted in a mask of impotent rage. He pointed a shaking finger up at the doorway.
“This isn’t over, Holmstrom!” Tobias screamed, his voice cracking with humiliation. “I’ll bring the marshal back here with a federal warrant! She’s an escaped fugitive, and you’re harboring a criminal!”
“Bring whoever you like,” Einar called down, his voice carrying easily over the wind. “Just make sure they know how to climb.”
Tobias mounted his horse with a clumsy, awkward heave, yanked the reins hard to the left, and spurred the animal down the trail toward the lower timberline, the hired boy scrambling desperately to keep pace behind him.
The sound of their hoofbeats faded slowly into the roar of the wind through the pines, leaving the ridge as quiet as it had been before they arrived.
Anna stood motionless in the doorway, her hands still clasped in her apron, her gaze fixed on the empty trail below. The revelation was out in the open now, hanging in the cold mountain air between them like smoke from a damp fire. She waited for the door to close, for the big man to turn around and tell her that he couldn’t afford to harbor someone with a federal warrant and a burning courthouse attached to her name.
Einar walked back inside the cabin, the heavy door groaning on its iron hinges as he pushed it shut against the rising gale. He didn’t look at her right away. He walked over to the wood stove, picked up the iron poker, and jabbed it into the glowing embers until a shower of red sparks danced up the pipe.
“The roof’s still leaking in the corner,” Einar said quietly, his back to her.
Anna blinked, her chest tightening with a confusion that felt sharper than any accusation. “What?”
Einar turned around, leaning his hip against the edge of the heavy oak table, his weather-beaten face showing the faint trace of something that might have been a smile if he had practiced it more often.
“The pot you put under the drip on your first night here,” he said, looking over at the corner above the east window where a tin bucket now sat catching the steady plink of melting ice. “It’s still there. You never mentioned it, and neither did I.”
Anna swallowed hard, her fingers tightening around the fabric of her apron. “I didn’t think it was my place to complain about a roof that wasn’t mine.”
“It’s everyone’s roof while the snow’s falling,” Einar replied, walking slowly toward her until he stood just a few feet away, tall and solid and smelling of woodsmoke and pine resin. “And as for that business in Jefferson City… the records office burned down three years ago, you say?”
“That’s what I said,” Anna whispered.
“Good thing,” Einar said, reaching out to pick up her carpetbag from the corner where it had sat since the very first day she walked through the door. “Because the county courthouse down in Pine Creek burned to the ground last winter during a bad chimney fire, and half the land titles and marriage registries went up in smoke with it.”
Anna stared at him, her breath catching in her throat as the pieces of the puzzle began to shift and settle into a pattern she had never expected to see.
“The town clerk lost every record from the last twenty years,” Einar continued, his voice dropping lower, steady as the mountain roots beneath the floor. “Nobody knows who came from where, or what papers were signed before the ink dried. As far as the valley is concerned, there are no warrants, no pasts, and no contracts left standing.”
He set the bag down beside the bench and looked down at her with those calm, unhurried eyes that had first crossed a dusty street to stand between her and a man who didn’t know the value of what was in front of him.
“So if you’re done standing in the doorway,” Einar said, reaching out to take her hand in his rough, scarred palm, “there’s flour in the larder, and I could use some help baking before the real storm sets in.”
Anna looked down at his hand, then up at his face, and for the first time since she stepped off that three-day coach three years ago, the heavy weight in her chest finally dissolved into the quiet, unshakeable peace of a home that had been waiting for her all along.