Follow A Wild Heart (romance,)

by Hutchinson, Bobby

  “Noah Ferguson.” Noah shook the extended hand. Any other day, he’d have welcomed this stranger to the Canadian West, taken time to get to know him, but today he was too distracted.

  "Nice meetin' ya, Ferguson. Waitin’ on my wife Sadie and the kids, comin’ out from the East,” Morris confided, then waited expectantly.

  When Noah didn’t respond, Morris shifted from one foot to the other and then gave up. "Well, no sign of the train, and it looks like we’re in fer a real blow, way that wind’s pickin’ up. Don’t know about you, but I’m about freezin’. Why not come along inside the station house with the rest of us? No tellin’ how late she’ll be.”

  "Thanks. I’ll be along presently.” Relieved to be left alone, Noah thumped his mittens together and stamped his booted feet, pulling his scarf up and his weathered Western hat further down, painfully aware of the cold on his newly shaven cheeks and chin.

  What the hell had possessed him to shave off his beard this morning? His rugged features might look better without all that wild black hair, but the beard might also have kept his chin from freezing, waiting for this damnable train.

  And after all, what did he care how he might appear to her? It wasn’t as if he had to court her; the marriage was over, the legal bond established between them. She had insisted on a proxy marriage before she left Toronto on the four-day train journey that was bringing her here to Medicine Hat. Against his better judgment—and the advice of the only lawyer in town—Noah had agreed.

  He’d wanted it all over and done with. He’d signed the papers and sent the money for the fare, and now that she was almost here, his gut was churning. He wished to God the train would get here so they could be done with this awful first meeting, he and Annie Tompkins.

  Annie Ferguson, he corrected himself. Annie Ferguson, his second wife. Tall, she'd described herself. Thirty-four, on the thin side, and plain, which suited him just fine. He’d been relieved to read her description of herself; after all, this was no love match, far from it.

  Instead, it was a practical solution for them both. She was a soldier's wife, widowed in the Rebellion of 1885, a farm woman trapped in the city, working in some dingy factory to support herself and her young daughter while longing for the country life she'd known as a child.

  And as for him, this marriage was a desperate measure.

  He thought of his cranky, bed-ridden father, being cared for at this moment by a kindly neighbor, then deliberately forced his thoughts back to his new wife.

  Redheaded, she’d said, which worried Noah some. Was it true, what they said about a redhead’s temper? There’d been no sign of it in the eight letters she’d sent during the past months, and Lord only knew he had no experience of women’s temper and no desire to learn.

  Molly had been the sweetest of women. In their three years of marriage, Noah was hard put to recall times when she’d even come close to losing her temper.

  Molly. Without warning, bitter rage at his loss welled up in him, rage so intense that his tall, well-muscled body trembled with the force of it, and he clenched his teeth and knotted his hands into fists inside the blue wool mittens his dead wife had knitted for him.

  There were holes worn through one thumb and two fingers. Noah had clumsily mended them.

  It had been two years now since Molly and his eighteen-month-old son, Jeremy, had died within hours of one another, victims of typhoid, and in recent months he'd begun to believe this smothering, impotent, choking fury was gone forever, that time had eased the agony of his loss. Instead, here it was back again, as powerful as ever, and now there was this gnawing guilt as well.

  I never wanted any woman but you, Molly. Still don’t, but I can’t do it alone anymore, not since Dad had the stroke. If you’d lived, Molly, I wouldn’t be in this damnable position, waiting to meet some stranger. I’ve had to invite her to share the house we built together, the bed we slept in. Damn it all, Molly, how could you do this to me?

  He struggled for, and as always, recovered his self-control. He reminded himself with harsh honesty that his new wife would share as well the work of the ranch, the care of his father, the constant, ill-tempered demands of a once sweet natured man who'd become a tyrant since his stroke.

  Noah swallowed hard and the last of the rage subsided, replaced with apprehension. He’d mentioned in his letters to Annie that his father wasn’t well, but he’d never really explained exactly what taking care of Zachary involved. Hell, if he had done so, no woman in her right mind would have agreed to come, would she?

  Like him, Annie and her young daughter would just have to make the best of this situation. He brushed one hand across his eyes, clearing away the snowflakes that blinded him, and squinted down the track.

  Far off down the rails a single headlamp flickered in the driving snowstorm, and over the sound of the wind he could hear the eerie wail of the steam whistle and the sound of an approaching engine. The train was coming.

  At last, the waiting was done.

  * * *

  With a screech of brakes and a cloud of steam, the engine groaned to a halt. Outside the passenger car, it was snowing heavily, but through the frosted window Annie could see a small knot of people on the platform, all-staring expectantly up at the train.

  An old man with a white beard was shoveling frantically to clear a path from the platform to the small wooden station.

  “Med—i—c—ine Ha-a-a-t," the conductor called in his singsong fashion, making his way down the crowded aisle to open the door.

  After four endless days riding across empty wilderness, at last they’d arrived. Heart thumping so hard she was certain it would fly out of her chest, Annie tried to adjust the flamboyant hat Elinora had given her as a parting gift, but it wouldn't stay put.

  Bets reached out and straightened it, and Annie gave her a grateful smile and a wink, trying to pretend a bravado she was far from feeling. With trembling hands she gathered their bundles together, wrapped Bets’s wool shawl tighter around her, and followed the other departing passengers to the door.

  Tilting her chin high, Annie lifted her skirts and stepped down into snow on legs that had turned to jelly.

  Lordie, it was freezing. She paused and caught her breath as the cold air seared her lungs. Once the first shock was over, however, the icy air felt clean and invigorating after the stuffy train compartment, but it started Bets to coughing again.

  Annie twisted her sister’s scarf up and over her chin and mouth, and then, feeling sick with nerves, she squinted into the snow and tried to pick out which of the men waiting a short distance away might be Noah Ferguson.

  Thirty-six years old, he'd written. Tall, dark-haired.

  Her eyes skittered past a short, round figure with a cable knit hat pulled down to his eyelids, lingered on a thin, red-faced man with a handlebar moustache and a brimmed cap, and then settled on the giant standing like a statue a little distance from the others, brimmed hat hiding his face, hands thrust deep into the pockets of a huge furry coat. Annie looked, and looked again.

  Some sixth sense told her that this was her husband.

  His gaze touched her face and flicked past her, to the passenger car where a very fat woman with several children was now being helped down the step. “Sadie,” bellowed the man in the knitted hat, racing over and throwing his arms around her.

  There were no other passengers getting off. The conductor was closing the door.

  The man in the heavy coat looked at Annie again, puzzlement in his frown, and Annie swallowed hard and said a silent, fervent prayer as he moved towards her.

  Lordie, he was big. She was tall for a woman, but he towered over her. There was a ruggedness and raw strength about him unfamiliar to Annie, accustomed as she was to city men.

  She drew herself up and squared her shoulders, praying that she didn’t look as terrified as she felt. She attempted a smile and knew it was a dismal failure.

  “How do you do?” Her voice was barely audible.

  His face w
as all angles and planes, a stern, strong, handsome face, clean shaven and unsmiling.

  "I’m looking for Miss Annie Tompkins. Rather, Mrs. Annie Ferguson,” he corrected. His voice was a deep baritone.

  "That's me," she managed to say. She tried again to smile, but her lips felt paralyzed. "I’m Annie, and this is my—this is Bets."

  Bets, her wide, feverish blue gaze intent on Noah’s face, made a small curtsy and then edged fearfully behind her sister, doing her best to stifle her coughing and not succeeding.

  Annie cleared her throat; desperately trying to remember the dignified little speech she’d been preparing every anxious moment since she’d left Toronto. Not one word came to her.

  "Hello, Noah Ferguson," she finally managed to stammer. "Pleased to meet you, I’m sure," she choked out, painfully aware that she sounded both weak-minded and simpering.

  He didn’t respond. Instead, his coal-dark eyes slowly took in her hat, her face, then her figure. He looked her up and down. Annie refused to flinch under his gaze. She clenched her teeth as he stepped around her to stare at Bets before he once again turned his attention to Annie.

  "You’re considerably younger than you led me to believe, madam. How old are you, exactly?” He was scowling down at her, and a shiver ran down her spine that had nothing to do with the snow swirling around them.

  Here it was then, the first consequence of all her lying. There was nothing to be done except confront it head on.

  "I’m twenty-two.” Annie tilted her chin as high as she could and met his coal-dark eyes, but after a long moment under his steady gaze, her bravado crumbled.

  "Well, almost twenty-two. I’ll be twenty-one this June.” At the thunderous look on his face, she hurriedly added, "I know you wanted someone older, Mr. Ferguson. I was afraid if I told the truth, you wouldn't have me. Us. But I assure you, I feel a lot older inside than my years. If that’s any help.”

  He actually snorted in disgust. He looked from her to Bets and back again. “Twenty years old. And with a fourteen-year-old daughter? That’s quite an accomplishment, madam.” His voice dripped with sarcasm.

  If it weren’t so cold, Annie would have sworn this was hell.

  “She’s—Bets is my little sister, not my daughter,” she confessed miserably. "I—I’ve never been married. I thought you might not—I thought—”

  He stared at her until she gulped and was silent. "You thought I was fair game, and you told me only what you figured I wanted to hear. I take it most of what you've told me about yourself is nothing but a pack of lies. Is that so, madam?”

  His voice was quiet, but lethal.

  Annie desperately wanted to contradict him, but couldn’t. The fact was, a great deal of what she’d told him was a pack of lies. There was no denying it.

  “Some,” she admitted miserably. “The part about growing up on a farm wasn’t exactly honest. But the part about me and Bets being hard workers, that’s the god-honest truth,” she burst out. "We worked from dawn to dusk in Lazenby’s cotton mill, anybody could tell you we were among the best. Just give us a chance, and we’ll prove it to you, Mr. Ferguson, I promise we will.”

  "If I’d wanted farmhands, I’d have hired men.” He looked as though he was about to explode, and Annie steeled herself.

  Bets had been choking back her coughing, but now it took hold of her with a vengeance and she doubled over, her face purple.

  Annie drew the smaller girl close against her side and felt Bets’s whole body trembling. The wind had picked up and the snow was swirling around them.

  Annie had been too distraught to even feel the cold, but now it suddenly thrust icy fingers past the inadequate barrier of her clothing, and she was miserably aware that the soles on her boots were worn through in places, letting the snow in.

  "My sister’s sick, Mr. Ferguson. She caught the grippe on the train, and we’re both freezing cold. Please, couldn’t we talk this over at some later time?"

  Annie knew the moment had come when he could—probably would—turn his back on them and simply walk away. She knew he’d be well within his rights to do that very thing, leaving them to fend for themselves in a snowstorm in the middle of the wild Canadian west.

  Desperation gripped her. If he left them, what in God’s name would she do? She had little money left; she knew no one in this barren, savage place. All she’d ever done was work in the cotton mill, and she was pretty certain there were no mills within a thousand miles of here.

  She was terrified. She trembled with fear, and her stomach churned. She clutched Bets’s arm so tightly that the girl cried out.

  Ferguson’s eyes held hers for what seemed an eternity, and with her last vestige of courage, Annie stared straight back, willing him—begging him, entreating him—to give her a chance.

  Continue Reading A Lantern In The Window

  Excerpt: Double Jeopardy

  Bobby Hutchinson

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Okay, Charles, let’s take these dressings off and you’ll feel a whole lot better.”

  Reconstructive surgeon Ben Halsey gently began to unwind the yards of gauze he’d used to protect his handiwork. Two days before, he’d performed aesthetic surgery on sixty-two-year-old Charles Bedford, both blepharoplasty to remove the pouches under his eyes, and rhytidectomy, a full face-lift to eliminate the wrinkles and sagging skin on his face and neck. The procedures had taken just over five hours in the OR, and Ben knew the results would be all that Charles had hoped for, but at the moment his patient’s bruised and swollen face looked anything but handsome.

  The last piece of gauze fell away, and Charles’s flattened and blood-matted cap of silver hair appeared. Ben liked his patient’s attitude. When he’d asked Charles during the preliminary visits why he wanted the surgery, the man had grinned wryly and said that obviously it wasn’t just because he wanted to look younger; if that was the case, he’d have dyed his hair long ago. No, he wanted to feel more youthful, he’d explained; there was a difference. But appearance was important, too. He was a businessman, an executive at a large insurance company. Looking his best might help him make vice president before he retired.

  Until a few years ago, Ben had done this type of surgery predominantly on women. In the past several years, he’d had an increasing number of men requesting cosmetic procedures, so now the numbers of men and women were almost equal. It was an interesting comment on society’s changing attitudes.

  “You’re gonna look at least ten years younger when this swelling goes down,” he assured Charles.

  “That’ll be about ten years older than you, then,” his patient joked. “Why is it you doctors look so young?”

  “Because we are young.” Ben laughed, not bothering to tell his patient he was actually even younger than Charles had guessed. He knew that certain mornings he appeared much older than his thirty-six years; Charles must have based his assessment of Ben’s age on one of those bad days, guessing him at forty-two. Yet the nights preceding those mornings were delectable. Sex might not make him look younger, Ben mused, but it certainly contributed to a youthful attitude.

  “Aaaggghhh.” Charles grimaced and his hands clenched.

  “Sorry, sorry, just one more and we’re done here.” Ben was now deftly extricating the last of the small, thin tubes he’d placed behind each ear to allow the blood collecting under the skin to drain.

  “These sutures are looking good.” He’d closed the incisions along the natural skin lines and creases so they’d be all but invisible. He tipped his patient’s chin up gently to check the two-inch incision that had facilitated the liposuction device to remove the accumulation of fat from the neck. Ben had also tightened the muscles and connective tissue in the area, pulling the loose skin up and back, tailoring it to the face, suturing it in front of and behind the ears and snipping off the excess.

  “I want you to wear this supportive bandage at night and as much as possible during the day for the next ten days. The swelling and skin discoloration will subsi
de within a week or two. You may have some numbness in your face for a while, but that’ll disappear. Healing is a gradual process, with final results not fully realized for three to six weeks.”

  Charles nodded. Ben had covered all this before the surgery. “I’m so damned itchy. I can’t wait to have a shower and shampoo.”

  “I don’t know, I sort of like the punk look,'” Ben joked. He enjoyed making his patients smile. “For a few months I want you to stay out of the sun, and after that use a sunscreen with a high protective factor when you go sailing.”

  Charles had confided that he had a forty-two-foot sailboat.

  “Sunscreen won't be an issue unless Vancouver’s weather changes drastically,” Charles re- marked. It had been raining steadily all through the first half of June.

  There was a discreet tap at the door, and Ben’s office nurse, Dana Dolgoff, stuck her head in. “Emergency over at St. Joe’s, Doctor. They want you there stat.”

  “Okay, Dana. We’re done here. Come back in two days and we’ll see about those sutures, Charles. Dana, I’ll call and tell you whether we need to cancel this afternoon’s appointments.”

  “Right, Doctor.” Dana nodded with a dubious expression on her friendly face. She didn’t believe him. She knew he’d get so involved he’d forget. She’d been with him since he’d opened his private practice three years before, and she understood him as well as any female.

  “I will call this time. Honest. I’m working on responsibility this week,” he teased her as he grabbed his pager and his navy raincoat and loped out the door, down the stairs of the professional building and out into the heavy rain.

  Having an office situated right across the street from St. Joseph’s Medical Center was well worth the exorbitant rent the space cost him. It meant that he could be in Emergency within six minutes of a call. Face-lifts and nose jobs were great because they paid the bills, but the unexpected challenges, the high drama in St. Joe’s Emergency, were what Ben lived for.