Courting His Amish Wife

by Emma Miller

  “You don’t think he’ll change his mind?”

  “He will not. He thinks me soiled.” The word caught in Eve’s throat. “He’ll have me shunned if I don’t marry. But I’ve never even been out with a boy.”

  Levi returned to his pacing. “You’ve got a problem here.”

  “Ya, I do.” Eve gave a little laugh that reflected no humor. “And it’s already been a week. My father is threatening to tell our bishop tomorrow and have me shunned immediately. He’ll put me out then. I know he will.”

  “I can only think of one alternate solution here, Eve, and you may not like it, but—”

  “Anything,” she whispered, “because I’m afraid if I’m forced, I might choose to marry Jemuel rather than lose myself. Lose my life. And that’s what would happen if I went into the Englischer world. I know it.” She looked up to him. “What can I do?”

  Levi held her gaze and shrugged. “You can marry me.”

  Emma Miller lives quietly in her old farmhouse in rural Delaware. Fortunate enough to have been born into a family of strong faith, she grew up on a dairy farm, surrounded by loving parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Emma was educated in local schools and once taught in an Amish schoolhouse. When she’s not caring for her large family, reading and writing are her favorite pastimes.

  Books by Emma Miller

  Love Inspired

  The Amish Spinster’s Courtship

  The Christmas Courtship

  A Summer Amish Courtship

  An Amish Holiday Courtship

  Courting His Amish Wife

  The Amish Matchmaker

  A Match for Addy

  A Husband for Mari

  A Beau for Katie

  A Love for Leah

  A Groom for Ruby

  A Man for Honor

  Visit the Author Profile page

  at Harlequin.com for more titles.

  COURTING HIS AMISH WIFE

  Emma Miller

  And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.

  —Romans 8:28

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

  Dear Reader

  Excerpt from Her Path to Redemption by Patrice Lewis

  Prologue

  Through the trees, Eve spotted her father’s windmill and ran faster, ignoring the branches and underbrush that tore at her hair and scratched her arms and face. She took in great gulps of air, sobbing with relief as she sprinted the final distance. She had prayed to God over and over throughout the night. She had begged Him to see her home safely. Now the sun was breaking over the horizon, and she had made it the more than ten miles home in the dark.

  Bursting from the edge of the woods, she hitched up her dirty and torn dress, the hem wet from the dew, and climbed over the fence. In her father’s pasture, she hurried past the horses and sheep, her gaze fixed on the white farmhouse ahead. If she could just make it to the house, her father would be there. She would be safe at last, and he would know what to do.

  Trying to calm her pounding heart, Eve inhaled deeply. At last, her breath was coming more evenly. She wiped at her eyes with the torn sleeve of her favorite dress. She was safe. She was home. Her father would protect her.

  At the gate into the barnyard, she let herself through and slowed to a walk as she neared the back porch. Her father’s beagle trotted toward her, barking in greeting. Through the windows, she could see into the kitchen where a light glowed from an oil lamp that hung over the table. Her father and sisters and brothers would be there waiting for her. As she climbed the steps to the porch, her wet sneakers squeaked. Hours ago, she had crossed a low spot in the woods and soaked her canvas shoes.

  She had almost reached the door when it swung open.

  “Dat,” she cried, throwing herself at him, bursting into tears. “Oh, Dat.”

  “Dochter.” Her father grasped her by the shoulders, but instead of embracing her, he pushed her back. “Where have you been?” he demanded in Pennsylvania Deitsch. He looked her up and down, not in relief that she was safely home, but in anger. “Where is your prayer kapp?”

  Eve raised her hand to her hair to find it uncovered. “Oh,” she cried. “I must have... I must have lost it in the woods somewhere.” She brushed back her brown hair that had come loose from the neat bun at the nape of her neck to fall in hanks around her face. She pulled a twig from her hair. “Dat. Something terrible happened. I—”

  “Where have you been all night?” he boomed, becoming angrier with her by the second. “Who have you been with?” he shouted. “To sneak out of my house after I forbade you to go? I should beat you!”

  When she looked up at him, Eve realized she had made a terrible mistake. It had taken her hours to find her way home. She had walked and run all night, choosing the long way home because she had been afraid to follow any main roads for fear Jemuel would find her. She had climbed fences, been scratched by briars and been chased by a feral dog. At one point, she had been lost and worried she had walked too far, or in the wrong direction. But she hadn’t given up because she knew that if she could make it home safely, everything would be all right.

  But looking at her father’s stern face, at his long, thick gray beard and his angry eyes that stared at her from behind his wire-frame glasses, she realized she was wrong. She wasn’t safe. And perhaps she would never be so again because she knew what her father was going to say before the words came out of his mouth.

  He pointed an accusing finger. “You will marry that boy!” Amon Summy shouted, spittle flying from his mouth.

  Eve lowered her head, tears streaming down her cheeks as she prayed fervently to God again to help her.

  Chapter One

  Levi snapped off a leaf of fresh mint from Alma Stolzfus’s pot of herbs near her back door and popped it into his mouth. He was standing with a group of young women, all of marrying age, all looking for husbands. A fox in the henhouse—that’s what his grandmother would have called him. Because he was single, too.

  The difference was, he wasn’t here to gobble up any of these girls. He wasn’t even looking for a girl to offer a ride home this evening after the singing. He intended to ask Mari, Alma Stolzfus’s niece, to let him take her home, though right now, he wasn’t even sure she would say yes. They were a bit on-again, off-again. One week she was bold enough to ask him to drive her home from one of the Saturday night singings, and the next she barely spoke to him.

  Levi had the idea that she was more interested in JJ Yoder than him. The problem was that JJ was the quiet, reflective type. He was too shy to ask a girl to ride home with him, which was the typical way young men and women got to spend time alone together in pursuit of the right spouse. JJ certainly wasn’t asking any girl out for an ice-cream cone or inviting her to his family’s home on a visiting Sunday. It was Levi’s theory that Mari was going out with him occasionally only to make JJ jealous enough to ask her out himself, which was okay with Levi. He liked Mari, but more as a friend. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t have accepted a kiss if she offered, but that was about as unlikely as her aunt Alma giving him one.

  “What about you, Lev
i?” Trudy Yoder, JJ’s sister, cut her eyes at him. She was one of the prettiest girls standing there, and she knew it. “You going to the barn raising at Mary Aaron’s grandfather’s tomorrow?”

  He suspected Trudy was openly flirting with him, the way she was swinging her hips ever so slightly, smiling and batting her feathery eyelashes.

  His hunch was confirmed when her sister harrumphed and slipped her arm through Trudy’s. “Come, Schweschder. We’d best see if Alma needs any help getting the lemonade and snacks on the table.”

  Trudy resisted her sister’s tug on her arm. “So are you going?” she asked Levi.

  “Ya, I’m going to the barn raising,” he answered lazily. It had been a warm day, even for the end of May, and it was supposed to be sunny, warm and clear the following day, perfect conditions for a barn raising. The work crews would show up at dawn and work until sunset. It would be a long day, but Levi enjoyed barn raisings. He liked knowing he had helped a family, and the food served, often three full meals, was always exceptional.

  “You are?” Trudy was grinning again. “And is there a kind of cookie you especially like, Levi? My mam and I are baking twelve dozen for the midday meal.” The apples of her cheeks were as rosy as the dress she was wearing. Like the other girls, she had kicked off her shoes for the volleyball game they’d just played, boys against girls, and hadn’t put them back on. She was cute and sweet, and he wondered if Mari didn’t want to ride home with him if he ought to ask Trudy.

  “We’re making cookies, too. Peanut butter with peanut butter chips,” Mary With-A-Y said. That was what they called her because she was also Mary Stolzfus, a cousin of Mari’s, only she spelled her name differently. “I made some a few weeks back and took them to the Fishers’ for visiting Sunday. I bet Levi ate a hundred of my cookies.”

  The Fishers, relations to the Fishers back home, were the folks Levi lived with. Though his home was in Hickory Grove in central Delaware, he was a buggy maker’s apprentice to Jeb Fisher there in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Because Jeb and his wife had never been blessed with children, they opened their home to young men interested in learning to build buggies. Right now, Levi was sharing a room with Jehu Yutzy from Ohio.

  “He ate a hundred of your cookies!” One of the other girls, whose name he didn’t remember, laughed. “I bet Levi would eat two hundred of my chocolate-chocolate chip cookies. You like chocolate-chocolate chip, don’t you, Levi?” She gazed up at him with big, green eyes.

  Levi chewed thoughtfully on the mint leaf in his mouth, enjoying the sweet, cool flavor. “The truth is, I love all cookies,” he said diplomatically. And that was a fact. He did love to eat. “You’re all such good cooks around here, how could a man choose?”

  The girls giggled in response and began to call out the kind of cookies they could make for Levi.

  “Levi.” Someone whispered in his ear from behind, and he turned, surprised because he hadn’t seen her approach. It was Mari.

  He smiled at her. “There you are. I was wondering where you had—”

  “Sht,” she shushed, speaking so softly that only he could hear her. “I need your help. It’s important.”

  He looked into her eyes and immediately saw that something was wrong. Very wrong. He glanced at the circle of young women who looked like Englisher-dyed Easter eggs in their pastel-colored dresses of blue and pink and green. They hadn’t seemed to notice Mari and were talking among themselves about the ingredients in their recipes.

  He returned his gaze to Mari. “You need me now?”

  “Right now.”

  By the tone of her voice, he guessed he wouldn’t be getting a kiss. He studied her worried face, trying to figure out what was going on.

  “So, are you coming or not?” Mari asked. She looked him up and down and then walked away.

  Levi pushed his straw hat down farther on his head, nodded to the girls and followed Mari.

  * * *

  Eve sat on a bale of straw in the Stolzfuses’ barn, her knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them. She stared at the toes of her water-stained, black canvas sneakers. “What am I going to do? What am I going to do?” she whispered. The phrase had become a chant over the last week. A prayer.

  Where am I going to go? she wondered. Where will I live? How will I make money to eat?

  A speckled black-and-white Dominique chicken scratched in the wood shavings at Eve’s feet and clucked contently. She watched the chicken, thinking how curious it was that life around her went on without acknowledging that her life, as she knew it, was over. Of course, no one but her father and her cousin Mari knew what had happened.

  And Jemuel. He knew.

  Eve took a deep, shuddering breath. It was warm inside the enormous dairy barn and smelled comfortingly of fresh hay, straw and well-cared-for animals. A black cat leaped up onto the bale of straw and rubbed against her. Eve stroked its back, and it purred, watching the chicken.

  The chicken paid no attention to the cat and wandered off, still searching for a stray morsel of corn or grain on the swept concrete floor. The cat seemed to know that things wouldn’t end well if it pounced on the chicken. Alma Stolzfus wouldn’t have a cat on the property that harmed any animals but a rat or a mouse.

  Eve glanced up at the closed barn doors. The larger of the two, meant to lead farm stock or equipment through, had a wide crack at the top that needed caulking. The late afternoon sun poured through the opening, and she watched the movement of dust motes. The way they were illuminated in the beams of sunlight, they seemed to twinkle, reminding her of the stars in the heavens.

  Was her life truly over? Her dat had said it was if she didn’t do as he ordered. But how could it be over? She was only twenty-two. She had too many dreams to have reached the end so soon. She had imagined having a handsome husband, her own home, a house full of children. She had imagined being happy.

  Would she ever find happiness now? Or at least contentment?

  Eve pressed her lips together, fighting tears that brimmed in her eyes. There had to be an answer to her dilemma. There had to be.

  Mari had said she could help. Mari was a cousin she didn’t often see because Eve’s father had had a disagreement with Mari’s father, his cousin, many years ago. And Eve and Mari didn’t belong to the same church district, so the only time they saw each other was at young people’s social events. There were plenty of chaperoned frolics for young men and women of marrying age in the county, but Eve didn’t get to go often because of her responsibilities at home.

  As the eldest of six children and because their mother had died years ago, it fell to Eve to do the cooking and cleaning and other household chores in her father’s home. Her sister Annie, at nineteen, was a great help, but the burden of being in charge was still firmly balanced on Eve’s shoulders. With meals to cook, the house to clean, laundry to do and clothes to be sewn for her growing brothers and sisters, she didn’t get out often. That was at least partially how she’d ended up in this situation to begin with. She didn’t get to spend much time with other young women or men, and she had never been on a date. Not only had she never been on a date, but a young man had never even expressed any interest in her before. That was why, when Jemuel had paid attention to her at her father’s booth at the farmers market, she’d so quickly become enamored with him.

  The sound of a door opening startled Eve, and she half rose from the bale of straw she was sitting on. The standard-sized door beside the larger sliding one swung open.

  “Eve, it’s Mari,” her cousin called as she entered the barn. “I brought someone with me. Someone who can maybe help.”

  “Ne,” Eve said miserably, now having second thoughts about having come to the Stolzfus farm. Her father would be so angry with her if he found out she’d told someone what happened with Jemuel. The only reason he had let her come to the singing was because he had assumed she would be meeting Jemuel there to disc
uss their impending wedding nuptials. An assumption she hadn’t corrected. She’d neither seen nor heard from Jemuel since she’d run from him, and she hoped she would never lay eyes on him again.

  “I don’t want anyone to know,” Eve murmured. Then she saw him: Levi Miller. Though she didn’t know him, she knew of him. Mostly because every woman in the county, ages 2 to 102, thought he was as handsome as a man could be. They had once been introduced at a girls-against-boys softball game, but it had been a year ago and she doubted he remembered her. She wasn’t the kind of girl a boy remembered.

  “I don’t know if you’ve met Levi, but—”

  “Ne,” Eve interrupted Mari, mortified that Levi was whom she had brought. A boy? What was her cousin thinking? Did Mari really think she was going to talk to a boy about what Jemuel had done, what he had tried to do? She twisted her fingers in the skirt fabric of her threadbare green dress. “This isn’t a good idea. My father would be so angry if he found out I had told anyone. Even you,” she told Mari pointedly.

  “Sounds to me like he’s already pretty angry.” Mari turned to wave Levi, who stood in the doorway backlit by sunlight, inside. “Come in and close the door,” she told him. “We don’t want Trudy to know we’re here. Otherwise she’ll be giving her opinion.”

  Levi closed the door behind him. “I won’t let anyone in. Not anyone you don’t want here.” He was speaking to Eve.

  Eve waited for her eyes to adjust so she could see him and her cousin better. She imagined their eyes were adjusting, too, after coming into the barn from the bright afternoon sunshine. Which was a good thing because it gave her a moment to gather her wits. When Mari had said she might know someone who could help, Eve had assumed she meant her aunt Alma or maybe one of the other women there chaperoning the frolic. Eve would never have agreed to let Mari bring Levi Miller. What could Mari possibly be thinking to believe Eve would tell this young man anything about what had happened to her? Why would Mari think he would care?