Authors: Nathan Adams
ROMANCE: Mail Order Bride: A Sheriff's Bride (A Clean Christian Inspirational Historical Western Romance) (New Adult Short Stories)
Copyright 2016 by Nathan Adams All rights reserved.
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Chapter One
Beatrice Winthrop pulled up her skirts and raced with more speed than propriety out of the drawing room and down the corridor, where three centuries of family looked down at her in disapproval. Hennings, the butler barely just missed colliding with the girl known in Boston as “the Heiress” but known to him, and to the household staff, as Miss Trice. He stepped back so that she could continue without impediment to her destination; he and the servants kept her secret, so when Mrs. Winthrop emerged from the drawing room, frowning and exasperated, their expressions gave away nothing.
“Hennings, did you see Miss Trice? She simply bolted from the room just before we were due to go calling. Really, I don’t know—did you see her? Which way did she go?” Mrs. Winthrop pulled on her gloves. “The carriage is waiting for us. She’s going to have to face society eventually, it might as well be now. There’s nothing to be gained from hiding. She must learn to curb her impulsive ways; they only get her into trouble, and tongues are already wagging.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, I’m not sure where---“
Hennings was safe in the lie, knowing that Mrs. Colby never let the servants finish a sentence.
Mrs. Winthrop sighed; it was a trial to have a marriageable daughter who seemed incapable of comprehending the basic rules which governed society. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll let people know that she’s going to make her debut in London.” She adjusted her hat so that it rested at a more imposing angle on her head. “Why should we bother about a Cabot or a Lodge when she can have a duke or an earl?”
Mrs. Winthrop didn’t expect an answer; she was rehearsing the story that she would present to Boston’s most exclusive and aristocratic bluebloods so that Beatrice’s reputation could not only be salvaged, but refurbished. Beatrice was such a pretty girl; it would be very easy for her to capture a title. Her beautiful, honey-blonde hair and dark-lashed blue eyes would of course be sufficient attraction, but even more than her looks, the Winthrop fortune would close the deal. England was full of penniless pedigrees eager for American money to bolster the family coffers in exchange for a title. Letitia might leave Boston with a compromised reputation and a few raised eyebrows, but when her engagement to one of England’s oldest families, perhaps even royalty, was announced, those knowing glances would change to envious ones.
Carlotta Colby Winthrop had been born into Boston society and she knew it well, from its most closely guarded secrets to its most flagrant scandals. Her daughter, Beatrice Colby Winthrop, the heiress to the Winthrop empire, was not going to surrender her chances for a brilliant marriage because she had, through her own foolishness rather than any real misbehavior, managed to skirt the rigid boundaries of propriety. It would do Beatrice no good to run away from social calls. When she was on board an ocean liner and crossing the Atlantic, there would be nowhere to run.
After the carriage had departed with the mistress of Winthrop Hall inside, Hennings left the house. He walked down the majestic, tree-lined pathway to the orchard, where the fruit trees were returning to verdant life after a bleak winter. A Winthrop bride some generations before had had a fondness for fresh fruit and her enamored husband, besotted with her, had had fruit trees planted on the manor grounds so that their offspring and their future heirs would all be able to indulge their whims. Not all of the Winthrops had confined their appetites merely to fresh fruit, however, but whatever their private vices, nothing had ever soiled the family fortune, which continued to grow and increase effortlessly from generation to generation, as if to be born a Winthrop indicated a family trait for the acquisition of wealth.
Hennings continued to walk down the pathway, past the stables and the carriage house, pondering the unpredictability of life. The Winthrop fortune was enormous, but the number of people who could inherit the wealth was paltry. Winthrop progeny were in limited supply and now, Miss Trice was the only heir to what was rumored to be the grandest inheritance in Boston. If Mr. Simon had lived, of course, the inheritance would have gone to him and Miss Trice would merely have had a very substantial dowry to bring to a suitable Boston gentleman. But Mr. Simon, always adventurous, had set off for the West and had met his death there.
“Miss Trice,” he called from below the spreading branches of the massive oak tree, just beginning to show the effects of spring in the leafy splendor which it would wear throughout the season ahead. “Why don’t you come down now? No one is at home.”
It was understood that by no one, he meant that Mrs. Winthrop had left in her carriage and Mr. Winthrop was at his club.
A heart-shaped face with breathtaking blue eyes peered down at him from behind a curtain of early May leaves. “Did you hear, Hennings? Did you hear what Mama has planned for me?” “Yes, Miss Trice. Why don’t you come down now and we’ll get Mrs. Kirby to make you some lunch.”
“I’m not hungry, truly I’m not. I can’t even think of eating now. I don’t want to go to England to marry some snob of a lord who only wants me for my family’s money. I’d rather marry a poor man who just wants a wife who can be his helpmate. I’d rather scrub floors than be the wife of a man who didn’t care a bit for me. Why should I go to England to marry a man who’ll take the Winthrop money no matter whom it belongs to? Why should I” “Miss Trice, this isn’t something to be discussed now,” he urged. Miss Trice’s fondness for climbing trees and spending the afternoon ensconced in branches with a book rendered the household staff terrified that she would fall and hurt herself. But they did not divulge her secret hiding place to her parents; Mrs. Winthrop would have been scandalized at the thought that her daughter’s wardrobe was wasted on unappreciative nature when such garments was designed to be admired and coveted by Boston belles; Mr. Winthrop would have been offended that his daughter was so oblivious to the cost of hand-stitched beading and French fabrics and Maison Worth frocks that she would wear one to climb a tree. “Please come down.”
A dainty foot, devoid of shoe, appeared. Hennings sighed. He doubted that there was another girl in Boston who so readily doffed her exquisitely crafted footwear with as much alacrity as Beatrice Winthrop. He watched as the girl deftly lowered herself branch by branch and then, hanging from the lowest limb, dropped to the ground. Hennings removed her shoes from a niche in the lower branches where she’d placed them before her climb.
“I can’t go to England, Hennings, I simply can’t.” She inserted her feet into her shoes. She and Hennings began to walk back toward the manor. “I won’t go.”
Hennings couldn’t see a way to avoid England. When Mrs. Winthrop made up her mind, even Mr. Winthrop bent to her will. Only young Mr. Simon had been able to thwart her, and look where that had gotten him. Dead in the far-off West, in the state of Texas, where Apaches and gunslingers and barbarians of every ilk seemed to thrive. Mr. Simon had been much like his sister; not in looks, he favored his father’s dark hair and eyes, but in spirit. Mr. Simon had been bound and determined to see more of the world, he’d told his mother, than Beacon Hill.
It had been a year since they’d gotten the news of his death. The Winthrops weren’t ones to show their emotions, but since their son’s death, Hennings had noticed that Mr. Winthrop spent more of his time at his club and less at Winthrop Hall; Mrs. Winthrop had concentrated her energies on Beatrice’s marriage prospects. Which had been progressing very well, in Mrs. Winthrop’s estimation, until Beatrice had spent the night with her childhood friend, Buckminster Ellery. The night in question had passed in the Ellery barn while a mare was giving birth, but in Boston’s eyes, the young people had transgressed. Young Ellery was sent off to his great-uncle’s estate in New York for the summer. Beatrice, no longer spotless in reputation but as rich as ever, was to be rerouted to a grand marital destiny in a country separated from Boston scandal by three thousand miles of ocean.
Hennings let Miss Trice go on talking. Poor girl, she didn’t realize that for a young heiress born to one of Boston’s most illustrious families, marriage was the only option. By defying convention, however innocently, Beatrice Winthrop was headed for a London season and marriage.
Had Simon Winthrop been alive and present at the scene, he would have been able to alert Hennings that his sister, his very pretty sister with the porcelain doll features, honey-blonde hair and deep blue eyes fringed with thick black lashes, was plotting something. Brother and sister had always been sensitive to one another’s schemes.
Beatrice was thinking of the last letter she had received from Simon. “It’s like nowhere else, Trice. There’s no tradition shackling me here. No one cares about who my great-grandparents were or who my tailor is. There’s nothing like that. It’s being built in my lifetime, and the last page hasn’t been written yet. I hope that someday you’ll be able to come here and see it for yourself. Liberty Bell Texas. There are cowboys and saloons girls—never tell Mama, she’d swoon at how freely the women here conduct themselves—and shopkeepers and schoolteachers. There’s everyone you can think of, and no one has an ancestry, because it doesn’t matter what went before. All that matters is now, and the freedom to be what you want to be.”
Liberty Bell, Texas. Unknown to Hennings or her parents, Beatrice had already made her decision. She would marry, but not to an Englishman in a country where tradition was even more rigid than in Boston. No, she would seek her husband in Texas, where her brother, before his death, had known freedom for the first time in his life.
Chapter Two
The stabbing continued, relentless and precise, the point of the dagger repeatedly driving itself into his open palm. He couldn’t see his attacker and his enemy revealed nothing. But there was no question about it; someone meant him harm.
Gerrit Reilley groaned and tried to free from captivity, but when he turned his head, he felt the thunderous revolt of a firing line pound against his forehead. He couldn’t open his eyes. He tried to stand but his legs were fettered. He wasn’t much use to himself if he didn’t get out of this. He forced one eye open. The Texas sun that poured in through the window made him regret his act. He closed his eyes quickly but not before he caught a glimpse of his assailant.
“Damn you, Lady Jane, what are you doing?” Lady Jane, one of his best laying chickens, had found her way into his bedroom. Not a hard task when his chickens seemed to spend more time in his living quarters than they did in their coop. Lady Jane, her feathered head cocked to one side, steadfastly continued to peck at the palm of his hand.
“All right, all right, I’ll feed you.” He forced himself up on his elbows, and saw that what he thought were fetters holding his legs capture were actually tangled sheets, wrapped so intricately around his lower body that he’d been held hostage by cloth. “Damn fool,” he muttered. Untangling a coil of cloth was no easy matter for a man who’d drunk so much whisky the night before that his head protested at being vertical when clearly the horizontal state was the only one suited to its condition. Why the hell had he been drinking so much anyway?
Now he remembered. Cole’s birthday. They’d been celebrating his new deputy’s birthday. Twenty-one, he said, saluting the age of majority with a bottle and that merry, devil-may-care grin that exploded from behind his black beard whenever he was amused by something, as he usually was. Hell of a man, was young Cole. With promise of becoming a hell of a good lawman, too, once he learned to gauge a situation by character rather than his Colt. But Gerrit remembered how it felt to be young, and fast with a gun, and cocky. He was 30 now, and could still outdraw his deputies, but he’d reached an age when he felt it was better to talk his way out of a fracas than shoot his way out. Cole would learn that, eventually.
Reilley groaned and having freed his legs, swung them around and placed his feet on the floor. He noticed wit surprise that he was naked. How the hell had he taken off his clothes, the state he’d been in when he got home last night—make that this morning—from the Lucky Liberty Saloon? He didn’t often get a snootful on that level, but when he did, he generally went to bed in the same clothes he’d worn when he dressed in the morning.
Trying to move his head as little as possible, Reilley looked for his clothes. He wasn’t much for tidying, and his clothes were always at hand, hanging on the hooks on the wall across from his bed. But there was nothing there, except—
Reilley squinted, then opened his eyes wide, then squinted again. Instead of shirts and trousers, each hook bore a lady’s undergarment; lacy, frilly bits of silk and satin that didn’t belong to anyone in the Baptist Ladies Missionary Society that he’d place a winning bet on. Reilley cursed again and, grabbing the bedpost, pulled himself up. Pulling six feet of a body from drunken slumber into upright posture was no easy matter but he made it, and if the Lord’s name was taken in vain more times than a preacher would approve of, well, God would rather have the sheriff of Liberty Bell, Texas, standing on his feet than held captive in a drunk’s bed.
Reilley rubbed his chin. He needed a shave. A bath wouldn’t hurt, either. Reilley weighed the odds. It was going on Sunday morning sermon time; if he ventured out to the pump, he might just get lucky enough not to be seen by any of the faithful flock who would be inside listening to Preacher Tucker talk about Saturday night sins. On the other hand, if he were seen outside in his birthday suit by any of the townspeople who were late to services, he’d have a hard time living it down.
Reilley pulled the sheet off the bed and pulled it around his body. He doubted than any of the Romans he’d learned about in schoolbooks had ever worn their togas this way, but those Romans, from what he’d heard, were a scandalous bunch, which made his shenanigans a little less shameful.
He made his way to the front yard, Lady Jane following him, pecking at his bare toes as he walked. Behind her came Stonewall, the mongrel who’d been hanging around the sheriff’s office three years ago, hungry and skinny, until Reilley bowed to the inevitable and took the mutt home with him so that he’d get some meat on those bones. Stonewall was loyal and protective; whoever had come into the house and taken his clothes was someone that the dog knew and trusted.
Perched on the porch railing, Jezebel the black cat groomed her fur with fastidious attention and stared at him with disdainful green eyes.
“Don’t look at me like that, you harlot,” he told her. “Go feed those kittens of yours.”
She jumped down from the railing and went back into the house through the open window, her tail flailing the air behind her as she returned to her latest litter of felines. Reilley groaned, remembering that he’d need to ask around to find out if anyone in town wanted a kitten. They’d soon be ready to leave their mother’s nursing. And then she’d just find some other tom cat and end up in the same fix.
Moving gingerly, he made his way down the three porch steps and walked carefully over to the pump. Bending down, he moved the handle until water cascaded over his hair and chest, dampening the
sheet that covered his body. He let the water soak him. It was purifying after a night of drinking and carousing and who knew what else. His head still hurt like hell, but he was starting to feel like a man again. He bent his head down again for another dousing.
“Well, well, well, what do I see, but Sheriff Reilley, dressed for all the world like a debauched Caesar,” drawled a familiar voice, mocking and sultry and, although she’d been up as late as he had the night before, sounding as alert as if she’d slept the slumber of the just. Which she most assuredly had not.
Reilley shot up from his bent position, banging his head on the pump. When the sheet began to slide from his body, he hastily grabbed the cloth and secured it around him. “Damn it, Josephine, what are you about so early in the morning?
“It’s not early, Sheriff, except to drunken layabouts. I thought you might need these.” She tossed saddlebags—his saddlebags, he noticed—from the wagon. She was dressed in style; he’d say that for her. Josephine never appeared in public with a hair out of place or a garment out of fashion. She said that as the town’s resident scarlet letter woman, she had a reputation to uphold.
“Where’d you find these?” he demanded.
“Oh, let’s see . . . found your britches on the hitching post outside the general store. That red plaid shirt you like to wear to the dances was dressing up the school bell. Those –“
“Never mind,” he mumbled. Josephine would have no qualms at listing every item of his wardrobe, no matter how private, and telling him where she had found it. He ought to be grateful to her for fetching his duds and bringing them to him, but he knew he’d pay for the prank that had been played on him. Josephine knew too much about men to be reticent. To the town of Liberty Bell, he was the sheriff, but his relationship with the woman who ran the girls at the Liberty Bell Saloon went well beyond his profession or hers. “Thank you,” he said.
“Don’t say it if you don’t mean it,” she advised.
“I mean it.”
“Those young bucks of yours had a good time last night. You’re too old for that kind of rowdy living, Sheriff.”
“I know it.”
“So what are you going to do about it? Going to turn respectable now?”
Maybe it was her voice, amused and taunting. Maybe it was the fact that Luther the goat emerged from the house onto the porch after butting the door open with his head, and Reilley knew that he looked a fool in front of Josephine for having a goat in the house. He didn’t let Luther into the house, but somehow, Luther always seemed to find his way in. Maybe it was the fact that he was 30 years old and he couldn’t hold his liquor any more the way he had when he was young.
“I’m going to get married.” The words surprised him; he didn’t know where they’d come from. Judging from the shocked look on Josephine’s face, he’d shocked her too.
“Married? Why Sheriff, what brings this on?”
“Reckon it’s time.”
“Past time. You’re not getting any younger.”
“Neither are you,” he retorted and wished he hadn’t. For a second, the knowing, mocking expression vanished and he saw something fragile and vulnerable exposed in her pretty face. “Josephine, I’m sorry—“
“For what? For saying the truth? I am getting older. I suppose the day is coming when young cowboys with money and manhood bursting in their pockets won’t be coming up to my room. You find yourself a bride, Sheriff. Find her fast before time passes.”
“Josephine—“
But she had pulled the reins and wheeled the wagon around; Calypso, her horse, trotting away at a fast pace.
He cursed again. He hadn’t meant to insult Josephine. For all that she was what she was, she knew him better than anyone else in town. They’d shared a lot; and there were secrets between them that no one would ever know. If he did marry, his wife and Josephine wouldn’t be meeting up. It wouldn’t suit.
Marriage. He knew all the girls in town and had no hankering for any of them. Maybe because he knew them. Liberty Bell was a prosperous town but he knew every man, woman and child who lived within its boundaries. There were woman out East thought, who’d be willing to come West to marry. The War that had been fought twenty years ago had robbed some of those towns of a generation of young men who would have been bridegrooms. There might be a woman, maybe not the youngest or the prettiest, but honest and hardworking who might be willing to head West for a chance to marry and have a family and live free. He was no prize, he thought, but Josephine always said that he wasn’t half bad looking for a lawman. Some women, she said, her heavy-lidded eyes half closed as they shared a bottle that was closer to being empty than it had been a couple of hours before, liked that panther-lean look and green eyes and Indian-straight black hair. He didn’t know exactly if that was praise or not, but he wouldn’t lie to a woman. He’d own up to what he was: 30 years old and tough as leather from a life spent out of doors, with a past that he wasn’t proud of but that had given him skills that he’d turned to a living when he became sheriff. He owned his home, his own horse and saddle; he had money in the bank, and he had livestock: a milk cow, a goat, two pigs, chickens, a dog, a cat.
Ruefully, Geritt Reilley grinned. Maybe she’d like a kitten.