“Bellar Mayfield,” he said, “I reckon today was meant to break you. But I don’t see anything broken standing beside me.”
Her throat caught. “You’re either the kindest man I’ve met or the most foolish.”
He gave a quiet huff of laughter. “Can’t I be both?”
And Bellar laughed, truly, the sound startling her like a bird flapping out of a closed room.
The chapel smelled of wax and old wood. The preacher was round and sleepy-eyed, his hat two sizes too large, his voice moving through the vows with the brisk efficiency of a man blessing a stubborn horse. Boone’s boys stood close, one clutching a fistful of prairie daisies, the other chewing his thumb with suspicious eyes.
When the preacher asked Bellar if she took this man, she hesitated, one breath balanced between fear and the hunger to live. Boone didn’t rush her. He waited, eyes steady, giving her something she’d never been offered by anyone who wanted her: time.
“I do,” she said, not as surrender, but as choice.
The kiss that followed was brief, more promise than passion, but it sealed something neither of them had words for yet.
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