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do that now?” Johnston said.
    “Because she’s a woman,” Declan replied. “You can’t figure them out.”
    The young cowboy howled with laughter. Declan stood and watched Victoria walk away, her hips swaying inside the tight canvas overalls.
    ****
     
    Dark clouds rolled across the morning sky. The first autumn storm. Victoria finished dressing and stood by the window, watching the thunderheads roll in. Her own life seemed just as unsettled. She had been married for five days now—five days of restless unease that thrummed in her veins and prickled on her skin.
    Since their encounter at the stables she’d barely seen Declan. Her father drove him like a slave master. He drove all his men like a slave master. How come they were down to less than a dozen hands? And where had the maids gone? She kept asking her father, and he kept mumbling something about the difficulty of finding the right people to employ.
    She had attempted to occupy her mind with reading, and writing letters, and cleaning the neglected house, but Declan crowded out all other thoughts. Every waking moment, some unseen force drew her to the window to keep an eye on the stable yard. If she spotted him, she would find some pointless errand that took her to the barn, to the corrals, to the blacksmith’s forge, wherever Declan might be, so she could catch a glimpse of him. So far, she had taken care to avoid trouble by not stopping to talk to him.
    In the evenings, Declan ate alone in his room. By choice, her father claimed. As they dined together, facing each other across the big banquet table, her father kept sipping whiskey and staring morosely into the air—that is, when he wasn’t staring at her, the way a mother hen stares at a chick when there is a fox around the coop.
    An entire year of this atmosphere of tension and mistrust and dislike. An entire year of this ache of longing inside her. An entire year of this tearing mix of uncertainty and a crazy hope that something wonderful—something more wonderful than she’d even dared to dream of—might be there for the taking, if only she was brave enough to reach out for it.
    She couldn’t take a whole year of this tension.
    She couldn’t take a single more day of it.
    Victoria threw on a fringed buckskin jacket, grabbed a measuring tape from the bureau in the corner of her bedroom and clattered down the stairs. Declan needed new clothes. That would give her an excuse. Although it seemed crazy that a wife would need an excuse to talk to her own husband.
    She’d misjudged the weather. The late August heat had not abated, but a wall of scorching air hit her the moment she stepped out of the door. Sweat beaded on her skin, even before she’d walked across the yard to the barn where they stored firewood. The steady thuds of an axe against a log stump greeted her. The interior smelled of pine resin and sawdust.
    “Declan,” she called out from the door. She knew better than to startle a man wielding an axe. Or a gun. Or a hunting knife. Or even a corded leather whip.
    The thudding sounds ceased. “Over here,” a voice called out.
    Victoria entered the shadowed barn. Declan stood at the far end. Shirtless, hatless, he slammed the axe into the chopping block and reached for his shirt draped on a stack of wood. There was resignation in his gesture. As if he too had spent hours fighting the need inside him and knew the battle was already lost.
    She hurried up to him. “No,” she said. “Don’t put it on.”
    Declan froze, the shirt clutched in his hands. Victoria’s eyes fell on the dark bruises that mottled his chest. She swallowed. Reaching out, she curled her fingers over the pair of knotted fists that gripped the garment. Lightly but firmly, she pushed downward, until Declan lowered his arms out of the way.
    With a gentle touch, she probed at his injuries. Angry red welts spanned across his ribs, and a patchwork of blue and purple bruises covered the ridged muscles on his abdomen. There was