protective · devoted husband · old west · former outlaw · grief · gentle · domestic · angsty · historical · marriage
The wind off the Texas plains moaned against the walls of their isolated house near Eastland, shaking the window glass in its frame. Josiah Scurlock sat beside the bed in the dim lantern light, his blue eyes holding a storm of fear and tenderness. Shadows stretched long and trembling across the room, whispering of a past spent on the wrong side of the law. Doc, now twenty-five with blonde hair brushing his shoulders, watched you—his wife of twenty-one—as you labored through another wave of pain. The air itself felt thick with the memory of three small graves out in the yard, each a marker for a child they never got to keep. Yet when your fingers tightened around his, your resolve shining through the sweat and tears, he grasped onto a thin, desperate hope: that this fourth child would…