Homespun Bride

too.” His voice was stronger. “I didn’t know a horse’s hooves could pack such a wallop. It’s one thing to read about being injured like that. Another entirely to experience it.”
    “I’m just thankful you are here to tell the tale.” Noelle smiled, knowing that comment would please her uncle. “You must be careful not to overtax yourself right now. Do you need me to call for the maid? We can get you lying down again.”
    “I’ve done enough of that. Sitting up like this is doing me good.”
    “All right, then. Henrietta would only take a nap if I promised on my very soul to sit with you every moment and not let you take up your cane and wobble down to the stables.”
    Robert’s chuckle was warm with love. “That wife of mine knows me too well.”
    “That wife of yours refused to leave your side night and day until she knew you were going to be all right.” That was love. The right kind of love. The rare kind of love. The kind she’d once dreamed of. She’d seen a glimpse of that dream today.
    Don’t think of Thad. She cut off her thoughts like a piece of thread.
    “I’m a very blessed man, and I know it.” Robert paused and the breath he took sounded strained. “I’ve always known how much, but never more than in the instant when I saw that mare’s rear hooves kicking out and I knew I couldn’t get away in time. I was in big trouble. That one minute stretched longer than my lifetime, or so it felt, and my last thought was what a fool I’d been, chasing dreams when all I truly wanted was to be with my wife and daughters.”
    Noelle’s heart cinched up tight. He sounded ashamed and regretful. She knew something about those experiences. “Do you mean as the practical bank president who had unerring good sense?”
    “That’s the man.” Robert’s voice sounded glad and sad at the same time. He fell silent as the fire in the grate roared and crackled.
    Tiny pings against the window glass announced that it was snowing again. Henrietta’s words drifted through Noelle’s mind. The greatest gift is to be loved as I have been loved. As I love.
    It was a while before he broke the silence between them. “There’s nothing wrong with dreams and trying to make them come true, Noelle. I might not know what I’m doing when it comes to horses, and I always might make a better banker than a horseman, but at least I got to try. I would be wise to go back to the bank, I suppose.”
    “Didn’t you just say that you decided that it was foolish to chase dreams?”
    “That I did. But I just went about it the wrong way. That’s all. I wouldn’t listen, and that wouldn’t be the first time.” Robert fell silent. “Thad is the young man your father wrote us about, isn’t he? The one you meant to elope with.”
    “I didn’t know Father had contacted you.”
    “He and Henrietta kept in close touch. Letters every week without fail.”
    “I remember.” There was the lump again, back in the middle of her throat, blocking off every word and every feeling. Noelle groped for the hard-backed chair she knew was nearby and once she’d found it, she collapsed into it. “My father would never have approved of Thad.”
    “He is not a wealthy man.”
    “No. And my father thought wealth was important.” She thought of Thad working hard to send wages home. “I suppose Henrietta remembers, too?”
    “I don’t think she’s realized that Thad was the man your father disapproved of so strongly. I can still remember the letter he sent us after he’d found out that a poor immigrant’s son was beauing his only daughter.”
    Noelle froze. “Found out? You mean after I told him.”
    “I only know that Robert was ready to send a posse after him to drive him from the county.” Robert sounded sad.
    “Drive him from the county?” That made no sense at all. Father didn’t know about Thad until that night when she’d been sobbing in her room, jilted. Unless her father had lied to her.
    No, not Papa, she thought. But the Thad she’d known had never been a traveler or a wandering spirit, but a steadfast, stay-put brand of man.
    He hadn’t been chasing dreams, she realized. He’d lost his dreams as surely as she’d lost hers.
    “I don’t think you should give up wanting a horse ranch.” She was surprised how resolute her words were. The lump in her throat had vanished. “You should simply hire someone very good to learn from.”
    “You wouldn’t happen to have someone in mind?”
    Was she that