Happily Ever After in the West

by Debra Cowan

  “I’m not. I’ll never be sorry and I’ll always come after you.”

  She searched his eyes. “I couldn’t bear it if you resented me for that, but I also couldn’t blame you.”

  “We’re in this together, Zoe. If I did some damage to myself, we’ll deal with it.” She nodded.

  He started to speak, then stopped, looking uncertain.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I understand that you were afraid. Is that the only reason you felt you couldn’t confide in me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I need to know that you trust me. To hear you say you know that I’ll never again do to you what I did before.”

  “I do know that.” She clasped his face in her hands, her gaze soft. “I do.”

  “I’m glad I finally know everything.”

  “You don’t.” She bit back a smile. “Not yet.”

  He stilled, wariness clouding his eyes. “You mean there’s more?”

  “Yes.” Unable to hide her joy any longer, she gripped the front of his shirt. “I love you. That’s everything you need to know.”

  His eyes darkened.

  “I wanted to tell you last night, but it seemed wrong to say it when I was keeping this from you.” Why didn’t he say something? “And…I didn’t know if you’d believe me. I thought you might wonder if I was saying it to keep you from pressing me for answers.”

  “Zoe…”

  “You believe me, don’t you? I know I hurt you, Quentin,” she whispered. “When I told you to stay away from me, it was for your safety.”

  “I know.

  “Can you forgive me?”

  “Sweetheart—”

  “I remember how much it hurt when you pushed me away seven years ago.” Her stomach in knots, she pressed on. “It would be understandable if you couldn’t forgive me. If you changed your mind about wanting to stay married.”

  “Hey.” He gave her a little shake. “You aren’t getting rid of me. I never thought I’d get another chance with you. I’m not walking away.” He grinned. “And I could if I wanted.”

  She couldn’t stop the tears then. “I was so afraid I’d ruined everything between us.”

  “You make my life better, Zoe. For years, I’ve regretted shutting you out. I don’t want to live with more regret.”

  She slid her arms around his neck and carefully pressed against him. “Neither do I. I want us and Zeke to be a family.”

  “We are,” Quentin said simply.

  After losing her parents then Quentin, Zoe had never dared hope that her family would consist of more than herself and her brother. But now she had Quentin.

  No, she corrected. They had each other.

  She pressed kisses to his jaw, up to the corner of his mouth.

  His hands tightened on her waist. “No more secrets.”

  “No more secrets,” she said softly.

  “No more protecting me.”

  “All right.”

  “We’re together. That’s how we handle things.”

  “Yes.”

  After a long kiss, he said, “Let’s go home.”

  Home. Together.

  THE MAVERICK AND MISS PRIM

  Lynna Banning

  Dear Reader,

  I am fascinated by “odd couples,” two people who seem entirely unalike, who get to know each other and then bond irrevocably. This speaks to my lifelong belief that (1) appearances matter less than soul-deep connections between people and that (2) if the core of a person is known, respected and then loved, it matters not how outwardly “different” they are.

  I am drawn to the Smoke River, Oregon, setting for two reasons. First, because my mother was raised on a ranch in that area and, second, because a small town in the Old West holds hundreds of stories, intriguing characters and potential plots. This story is part of my series of works set in Smoke River. I love writing them, getting to know my characters and working hard on their happily-ever-afters.

  Lynna Banning

  For David Woolston

  Prologue

  “Eleanora Stevenson, I can’t believe you said that!” The youngest of the three women gathered around Ellie’s kitchen table fixed her large brown eyes on Ellie and slowly shook her head.

  “I most certainly did say that,” Ellie said, her voice calm. “You both have prospects. I, on the other hand, do not.”

  Darla Weatherby pursed her lips. “But—”

  “But every woman wants to get married!” Lucy Nichols protested. Her perfect oval face, framed by an artfully arranged mass of blond corkscrew curls, paled in disbelief. “My Henry and I will be married in June.”

  Ellie smiled politely at her friends and lifted her grandmother’s bone-china teapot. “You are fortunate, Lucy. You have Henry. And Darla has Mr. Bledsoe. I, however, have a schoolroom full of other women’s children. More tea?”

  The three young women sipped in silence. Lucy wore yellow calico with white lace at the cuffs, diminutive Darla had dressed in pink muslin flounces and Ellie was in in sky-blue. They looked like spring flowers clustered about the round oak table.

  “Did you leave a sweetheart back in Boston?” Darla ventured in her soft drawl.

  Lucy’s brown eyes widened. “Or find a new one out here in Oregon?”

  Ellie sighed. “No, and no. No man has ever courted me.” She studied the plate of molasses cookies Darla had brought.

  “But that’s perfectly awful!” Lucy burst out.

  Darla munched one of her own cookies. “Why hasn’t some man courted you?”

  “Well…” Ellie paused. Lucy and Darla were her two closest friends in Smoke River; they deserved honesty.

  “Perhaps because I am so tall? My mother always said no man wants to look up to his wife.”

  “But the three of us have done everything together for the last six months! Lucy and I will be married in June, so…” Darla hesitated, her slim fingers smoothing a pink ruffle “…we want you to join us!”

  Ellie had to laugh. “I very much doubt the three of us will spend your wedding nights together. Let’s face it, ladies. I am twenty-six years old, an old-maid schoolteacher without a prayer of finding a man who suits me. Even a short one.”

  Darla looked pained, but Lucy giggled. Then the three women joined hands around the table. “It won’t matter,” Darla offered. “We’ll always be friends.”

  Once again Ellie studied the cookie plate. The three of them had shared their secrets, even their wedding plans. But she could never, never admit, even to her few friends, how lonely she was deep inside.

  Chapter One

  “Miss Stevenson,” the girl whispered. “May I be excused?”

  Ellie straightened and absently patted the child’s blond head. “In a second, Manette.”

  The girl tugged hard at Ellie’s blue calico skirt. “Now,” she whispered. “Right now. Please.”

  Ellie surveyed the classroom where her four other students bent over their slates, experimenting with the spelling of the word elephant. All was quiet, for the moment anyway. She leaned down to Manette.

  “Very well, you may be excused for five minutes.” The girl was out the door in a flash of starched white pinafore and in the next second her blond curls bounced past the window on the way to the privy.

  Ellie sighed under her breath. She liked her students—four girls, including Manette Nicolet, and a sullen boy of seven. All lived on farms near the small town of Smoke River.

  Manette slipped back into the small schoolroom with a fist full of pale purple flowers; she thrust them at Ellie and scampered back to her desk.

  “Lilacs!” Ellie buried her nose in the fragrant blooms. “Oh, how lovely.” Inexplicably her eyes filled with tears. The scent brought a familiar soul-deep longing that reminded her how alone she felt.

  She swallowed hard. “Thank you, Manette.”

  “De rien,” the perky child quipped.

  “Aw, why don’tcha speak English like the rest of us!” The dark-
haired MacAllister boy leaned forward and jerked Manette’s pinafore ruffle. “Frenchie,” he taunted.

  Manette doubled up her small fist, turned sideways and whacked him on the shoulder. The other three girls—the Ness twins and Mrs. Rose’s granddaughter, Sarah—cheered.

  “Please,” Ellie shouted. “Please,” she continued in a normal voice. “Do not fight.”

  Teddy MacAllister’s brown eyes blazed. “She hit me!”

  Under her high-necked blouse of blue muslin, Ellie’s heartbeat sped up. She did not allow her students to pick on one another.

  She had resolved she would be a good teacher. She had attended Mason Teachers’ College and she had excelled. But just this morning she had read over her planned spelling lesson with a stifled groan and understood why her students sometimes fidgeted.

  She had spent all of her twenty-six years in Boston. She’d stepped off the train in Smoke River excited about being a schoolteacher; only a small part of her dreaded the prospect of being “the old-maid schoolteacher.”

  She glanced down at her planned lesson on addition and subtraction. “If Teddy has five chickens and three rabbits, how many pets can he give to Noralee for her birthday?”

  “Eight!” five-year-old Manette squealed. “But Noralee doesn’t want chickens, just rabbits. And what about Edith? Isn’t it her birthday, too?”

  “You are quite correct, Manette. Now, if Teddy splits his pets between the twins, how many would each of them receive?”

  “Four!” shouted Noralee. “But I don’t want any chickens, just rabbits.”

  Soon the students were laughing and competing to answer her ridiculous questions. “Suppose the five of you are a herd of elephants in darkest Africa, and one of you refuses to take a bath in the river. How many clean elephants will there be?”

  Suddenly she wondered if farm children knew about elephants. Mercy me! She remembered her own schooling: her teachers had praised her; her mother had found her wanting for as long as she could remember. Straighten up. What a dreadful hat! Smile, daughter. You look as if you’d lost your best friend. Mama’s constant criticism had left a festering wound on her soul.

  Ellie sucked in a long, slow breath. The children gazed at her, eyes shining, their expressions rapt. Their teacher might lack experience, but, like her students, she could learn.

  “Now, children, how many letters of the alphabet are there in rhinoceros?”

  Matt lay flat on his stomach in the shallow gully, his eyes narrowed against the sun’s harsh glare. He studied the ridge, his loaded Winchester at his side. A buzzard began circling overhead, its wings black against the shimmering cobalt sky. Hell and damn, the scavenger thought he was dead already.

  Had Royce seen him?

  He’d tracked his quarry all the way from the Texas border, and if Matt died in this godforsaken corner of Oregon it would all have been wasted—the watching, the days on horseback tracking through endless miles of coyote bush and scrub pine—all of it wasted.

  He clamped his jaw tight. He felt every single one of his thirty-one years, probably because he’d spent the past four of them busting his spine on the back of a horse. His sole purpose in life had been revenge, to find Royce and kill him.

  He’d promised Pa before he’d died.

  And Matt Johnson kept his promises. Sometimes he wondered what it would be like to settle down in one place and live a real life. Sometimes he wondered if he’d recognize a “real life” if it bit him in the—

  A shadow moved on the ridge above and Matt held his breath. Come on out, you bastard. Show yourself. He brought the rifle barrel up to the edge of the gully, sighted down it, then edged it a hair to the right. His mouth was so dry he couldn’t spit, but he couldn’t risk moving to snag his canteen.

  His horse waited a mile back, sheltered in a copse of sun-bleached cottonwoods the color of gunmetal. He was pinned down here, unable to get back to the gelding until either the shadowy figure behind the rangy mesquite scrambled on over the top of the ridge or Matt shot him. One or the other, mister. I’ll wait here and you choose.

  He smelled smoke. Campfire? Drift from town? On the ridge the sunlight glinted off something and the shadowy figure slipped from behind the mesquite. Matt squeezed the trigger and the bullet whined into the brush at his quarry’s feet. The bulky figure clambered up over the top of the ridge and disappeared.

  Damn. Matt unkinked his long body, crawled out of the gully and snaked on his belly to the shelter of the nearest bush. He hunkered down and watched the ridge. Nothing moved, but after a while a ghost of gray dust puffed into the sky. Horse, most likely.

  He’d lost him. Again. Fellow was more slippery than a mountain trout.

  Cautiously, Matt stood up and sniffed the air. Gunsmoke. Dust. His own sweat. And from the west, near Smoke River, came the rich scent of frying meat. Indian camp, maybe.

  He cracked the barrel, blew out the chamber and slipped another bullet in place. Then he hefted the rifle and headed back across the sage-dotted plain for his horse.

  Ellie had just started the daily lesson from McGuffey’s Second Reader when the sound of hoofbeats and a jouncing wagon stopped six-year-old Noralee in midsentence. Ellie flew to the window.

  Two horses, one pulling a wagon and the other, a familiar strawberry roan, carrying a man. She recognized Rooney Cloudman, Manette’s half-Comanche grandfather. He dismounted and headed straight for the schoolhouse.

  The door slammed open. “Sorry to bust in, Miz Stevenson, but we got trouble.”

  Ellie’s heart stuttered. “What kind of trouble, Mr. Cloudman?”

  “Indian trouble. The town’s under attack! Maybe just hungry renegades, but ya never know. You gotta get these kids out of here. Parents want you to drive ’em to Gillette Springs, where they’ll be safe.”

  “But…but that’s forty miles away!”

  “’Zactly. Now…” He turned to the bug-eyed children. “Get yer things.”

  “Wait!” Ellie yelled. “Who’s going to drive—”

  Rooney was shooing students toward the door like a mother hen. “You are.”

  “I—I don’t know how to drive a wagon. Can’t you drive it?”

  “Nope. I’m the only one in Smoke River can speak any Indian lingo at all. These young ’uns are your responsibility.”

  “I—I can’t—”

  “Don’t ever say that around me, Missy. Out here, you gotta learn fast. Now, get yer shawl and come on.”

  The children trooped after the solidly built man and he lifted them into the wagon bed. Just as she reached the door, Ellie checked. “My lilacs!”

  She spun back toward her desk, snatched Manette’s bouquet out of the pail of water on her desk and clutched it to her chest. Water from the stems dripped down the front of her blouse but she didn’t care. The scent of lilacs made her dream of wonderful, impossible things.

  Outside in the school yard, Ellie climbed up onto the splintery wagon seat and Rooney slapped the reins into her hands. “Flap ’em when you want to go, pull on ’em to stop.”

  “Do I say ‘stop’ or ‘whoa’ or something?” Her voice shook. She was petrified, not only of the horse but of driving a wagon full of children whose parents expected her to keep them safe.

  “I loaded some supplies and blankets in the back,” Rooney barked. “Now, git!” He slapped the rump of the dapple-gray mare and the wagon jerked forward.

  “Turn right at the crossroads,” he yelled.

  Turn right? How did one turn a horse left or right? Tentatively she swung the reins to the right. The horse veered and the wagon circled the schoolhouse before she finally twitched the lines in the other direction and set the horse on a straight path.

  “The road’s that way,” Rooney shouted, pointing away from the town.

  The crossroads? How far were the crossroads? She’d walked the half mile into town a hundred times and scarcely noticed the crossroads.

  The horse slowed, then picked up speed, and Ellie twisted her neck to ch
eck her wagonload of students. All sat gripping the edge, Manette and the MacAllister boy on one side, facing the twins, and Sarah Rose clutching the other side. Five sets of eyes stared back at her, all wide with apprehension. Oh, my Lord, their parents would be worried sick!

  She flapped the reins. She was worried sick. What was she going to do with a wagonload of children in the wilds of Oregon?

  Chapter Two

  Matt trotted the gelding into the grove of cottonwoods. From here he could see both the mountain ridge and the road, but he was wrung out after spending a broiling day in a dry gulch. His body needed water or whiskey or both. And some rest. He wasn’t as young as he used to be. He’d pick up Royce’s tracks in the morning.

  The early-evening air smelled faintly of smoke, cut by the sharp fragrance of pine needles. He dismounted and knelt where the lazy stream he’d been following widened into a shallow pool. Pushing back his Stetson, he splashed water over his face and halfway down the neck of his unlaced shirt.

  The sound of a horse and wagon on the road outside the grove brought his head up. Mighty rattle-boned contraption; sounded as if it needed a good tightening all around. He waited for it to pass, but it didn’t.

  Heavens, it was headed straight for him! He jolted to his feet just as a dapple-gray mare crashed into the circle of trees. A wagon jounced behind the animal and a young woman cowered on the bench screaming, “Stop! Stop! Whoa!”

  The wagon kept coming. Matt jumped to one side, grabbed the harness and managed to pull the animal to a halt. He smoothed his hand down the gray’s nose to calm it, then twisted to look up at the driver.

  “What the devil do you think you’re doing?”

  The young woman’s face went from the color of chalk to raspberry pink. “Oh, thank you! Thank you! I didn’t know how to make it stop!”

  Matt stalked toward her, fists clenched. “Then what in hell are you doing driving a wagon?”