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But what mattered now was the children.

And that was why Clay McKettrick decided to spend his second night as a married man in the spare room behind the jailhouse. If he’d gone back to Dara Rose’s place, he wasn’t at all sure he could have resisted her.

He needed her.

He loved her.

And that was precisely why he couldn’t go home to that little house, with its tiny rooms and its thin walls.

Clay McKettrick knew his limits.

And, where Dara Rose was concerned, he’d reached them.

DARA ROSE LISTENED for Clay’s footstep on the back porch as she peeled potatoes to fry up for supper with some of the salt pork he’d bought at the store. When the meal was over and the dishes had been washed and put away and he still wasn’t back, she declared that it was time to decorate the Christmas tree.

“We’d rather wait for Mr. McKettrick,” Edrina said, looking glum.

“Where did he go?” Harriet asked.

Dara Rose sighed. She’d been a fool to go against her own better judgment and marry Clay McKettrick. Men couldn’t be depended upon to stick around. They lied and cheated and got themselves thrown from horses and killed, they died in the arms of prostitutes above some saloon or, like Mr. O’Reilly, they simply decided they’d rather be elsewhere and took to their heels.

Devil take the hindmost.

“To the livery stable, I think,” Dara Rose finally replied.

“He left a long time ago,” Edrina reasoned. “It’s getting dark outside.”

Harriet’s lower lip wobbled. “Maybe he’s not coming back,” she said.

Dara Rose pretended not to hear. “I’ll fetch the Christmas box from the cedar chest,” she told the children, marching into the front room. “And then we’ll see what we can do with this tree.”

The girls didn’t speak, so she turned her head to look at them.

They stood side by side, arms folded, expressions recalcitrant.

“That wouldn’t be right,” Edrina said staunchly. “Mr. McKettrick cut that tree down himself. We wouldn’t even have it if it weren’t for him.”

Harriet nodded in grim agreement.

Dara Rose thought fast. “Wouldn’t it be a nice surprise, though, if he came home to find it all sparkling and merry?”

Edrina, self-appointed spokeswoman for her little sister as well as for herself, stood her ground. “We’d rather wait,” she reiterated.

Dara Rose shook her head, proceeded into the bedroom to give the children a chance to change their minds and lifted the lid of the cedar chest at the foot of the bed. She kept the few simple ornaments they owned, most of them homemade, tucked away there, inside an old boot box of Parnell’s.

There was a shining paper chain, made of salvaged foils of all sorts.

There were stars, cut from tin, with the sharp edges hammered down to a child-safe smoothness, and ribbons, and Parnell’s broken pocket watch.

And there were two tiny angels, sewn up from scraps of calico and embroidered with Edrina’s and Harriet’s names, their wings improvised out of layers of old newspapers, cut out and pasted together.

Dara Rose had always treasured these humble decorations, as had the girls, but now, in the dim light of the rising moon, falling softly through the window, they looked humble indeed. Nearly pitiful, in fact.

She swallowed, straightened her spine, and returned to the front room with the dog-eared carton, only to find Edrina and Harriet busy with the one Clay had spoken of earlier.

There’s some stuff for the Christmas tree in the box I left on the settee, he’d said.

The children looked wonder-struck as they lifted one glistening item after another out of the box—a porcelain angel, with feathers for wings and a golden halo fashioned of thin wire; shimmering baubles of blown glass, in bright shades of red and blue and gold and silver; a package of glittering tinsel that flashed in the lamplight like a tiny waterfall.

Dara Rose spoke in a normal tone, but it was a struggle. “Shall we decorate the tree after all, then?” she asked.

But Edrina and Harriet shook their heads.

Slowly, carefully, they put all the exquisite ornaments Clay had purchased back into the box from the mercantile.

“We’ll wait,” Edrina said.