By
Olivia Gaines
Davonshire House Publishing
PO Box 9716
Augusta, GA 30916
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s vivid imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely a coincidence.
© 2016 Olivia Gaines, Cheryl Aaron Corbin
Line Editor: Tessy Lynn
Cover: koougraphics
Olivia Gaines Make Up and Photograph by Latasla Gardner Photography
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means whatsoever. For information address, Davonshire House Publishing, PO Box 9716, Augusta, GA 30916.
ISBN-13:978-1530281138
ISBN-10: 153028113X
ASIN:
Printed in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 10 9 8
Also by Olivia Gaines
The Slice of Life Series
The Perfect Man
Friends with Benefits
A Letter to My Mother
The Basement of Mr. McGee
A New Mommy for Christmas
The Slivers of Love Series
The Cost to Play
Thursday in Savannah
Girl's Weekend
Beneath the Well of Dawn
Santa’s Big Helper
The Davonshire Series
Courting Guinevere
Loving Words
Vanity's Pleasure
The Blakemore Files
Being Mrs. Blakemore
Shopping with Mrs. Blakemore
Dancing with Mr. Blakemore
Cruising with the Blakemores
Dinner with the Blakemores
Loving the Czar
The Value of a Man Series
My Mail Order Wife
A Weekend with the Cromwell’s
Other Novellas
North to Alaska
The Brute & The Blogger
A Better Night in Vegas ( Betas Do It Better Anthology)
Trapped in the Company (The Company Anthology)
Other Novels
A Menu for Loving
Turning the Page
An Untitled Love
Wyoming Nights
DEDICATION
Because we must believe in the power of love.
Table of Contents
1. A Twist in the Fairy Tale...
2. Lexicons and Legends...
2. Lattes and Linzers...
4. Love and Learning...
5. Lunch and Landaus...
6. Lakes and Leglessness...
7. Lepidity and Legerity...
8. Lexigrams and Litanies...
9. Legends and Lakes...
10. Late Night and Lasses...
11. Lamentations and Lines...
12. Leas and Laborers...
13. Lassoes and Lollipops...
14. Line Dances and Loving...
15. Lingam and Lotus...
16. Lessons Learned...
17. Lizards and Leprechaun...
18. Loving and Longing...
19. LaGuardia and Lientery...
20. Leveller and Last Ditch...
21. Lucres and Luminaries...
22. Left handed and Lengths...
23. Loan Sharks and Lessons Learned...
24. Legends and Longbows...
25. A Twisted Up Fairy Tale...
Epilogue...
1. A Twist in the Fairy Tale...
What am I doing here?
Pecola Peters found herself standing in a dingy courtroom before a judge in the middle of nowhere Montana getting married to a burly rancher with kind eyes and thick black hair because of two ugly women. Hideous would be a correct term for how the two women looked in appearance but not in temperament, yet they had gotten married – to two good men. Good looking men of means. For a decent looking woman like Pecola with a horrible dating history combined with two men physically running away from her, such an imbalance in the fairy tale is what pushed her to this ending. Today she was getting hitched.
In Montana.
In the middle of nowhere.
To a burly rancher with kind eyes.
And thick black hair.
A man, who his friends and family called Billy Joe.
“Do you, Pecola Peters, take William Joseph Johnson to be your lawfully wedded husband, keeping only unto him and forsaking all others, as long as you both shall live?” The judge was speaking to her with his thin lips and weathered face. A face so taut it looked as if he’d spent the better part of the night sucking on something tart and unpleasant that snuck up on him in the middle of the morning for a surprise visit.
“I do,” Pecola said with a shaking voice. She looked around the drab little courtroom to ensure no one else had answered for her. The benches were as weathered as the audience who came to witness the ceremony. Again she searched the room with its peeling wallpaper and pictures of old white judges that hung on the walls like ghosts of lynchings past.
Nope. It was me. I am agreeing to this; I am actually marrying this man.
Judge Martin posed the same question to Billy Joe, who seemed right sure of himself as well as the current circumstance. Those kind eyes looked at her and softened her up again. “I do,” he said with pride.
Pride is what got me here. Pride and eavesdropping on those two ugly heifers who encouraged me to make a move and find some happiness. You won’t regret it, they said. You will find love, they said.
Instead, she found herself in Montana in the middle of nowhere, getting married to a man with thick black hair and gentle eyes who looked at her like a pork chop to a fat lady the day after fasting. He was good looking, though, and he owned a ranch. He had cattle and a good sized ranch house. More than anything William Joseph Johnson wanted to marry her. Billy Joe wasn’t running in the opposite direction from the word commitment; instead, he was hurrying her to the altar.
“You may kiss the bride,” the judge said. Billy Joe took a happy step forward in cowboy boots that had seen better days, a shirt with a hole in it, and fingertips laced with callouses and these same digits grazed her cheeks. The kiss was soft, horribly gentle with no false promises of what was to come. What kept her rooted to the spot was that when he kissed her, he closed his eyes. She knew because hers were wide open.
Watching.
Uncertain.
A thin woman in a threadbare flowered dress began to play the wedding march as Billy Joe placed her right arm into his left one and drug her suitcase behind them out to a pick-up truck with a Rocking J on the door panel. He hefted the suitcase up and over the side of the vehicle into the truck bed and it landed with a thud. The same thud landed in her chest as he opened the door and all but shoved her inside. Her heart drummed heavily when he looked over at her with his tender eyes and smiled.
“I ain’t never been with a black girl before,” he told her as he put the truck into drive. He peeled away from the sidewalk, spraying bits of dirt and gravel onto the witnesses who attended the wedding. One lady looked at her with sympathy as the truck rolled away. Mary Megan, the woman who was both her bridesmaid and maid of honor, waved at her with a tear-soaked hanky.
Three men, who were missing teeth, gave a whoop from the sidewalk, yelling behind the vehicle, “Don’t wear her out too much, Billy Joe. There’s a dance on Saturday night! You want her to be able to walk!”
Billy Joe’s cellular rang as he held the steering wheel with one hand while wrangling with his pocket to find the phone. “Yep?” he said into the line.
The veh
icle slowed as he came to a four way stop. A frown covered his face as he hit the turn signal and made a right and then another right and one more, bringing them back to the courthouse. The same three men were still on the sidewalk when the old truck pulled back up to the curb. Evidently he had forgotten to pay them all for attending a wedding that was only missing her angry daddy holding a shotgun.
Each man was given $10 and the judge $25. Margaret Mae wanted nothing more than to be invited to dinner once Pecola “got all settled in.” The men, on the other hand, were having quite the time making fun of her new husband.
“He been out yonder so long, I am sure one or two of them sheep probably are looking mighty sexy to him!” the man with the extra-large front tooth chimed in. He reminded Pecola of the cartoon baby with just the one big sweet tooth dangling over his bottom lip. It didn’t aid his standing in her eyes when he slurped up drool that was dangling from the tooth.
The second man said, “Yeah, I’m sure he has a name for those two sheep. He probably calls them Friday and Saturday so he don’t get’em confused which one he is choosing for the weekend!”
The third man didn’t get to say anything because Pecola reached down and took off her shoe, throwing it with all her might out of the window and busting him in the mouth with it as the truck rolled away for the second time.
Billy Joe looked at her again with those same kind eyes and smiled extra big. “Just don’t get mad when I don’t go back and get your shoe,” he told her.
Her eyes went to the side mirror and saw the third man using her shoe in a most unnatural manner. “I don’t want it...ever...don’t bother...he can keep it!”
The truck, which was probably older than she was, trundled along the roadways with smooth precision as her new husband glanced over at her. He seemed to be having a great deal of trouble keeping his eyes on the road and off her boobs.
“You ain’t a virgin, are you?” he asked her.
Pecola choked on her own spit. “What? I...what sort of question is that?”
“A good one. I want to know if you ain’t been with a man...because I ain’t never been with one of those either,” he said with a grin.
She could not help scowling as she responded tartly, “With a man or a virgin?”
“You are funny. A virgin,” he said. He thought about it for a minute. “I ain’t ever been with no man either. And don’t plan to,” he said with an extra nod of his head. He acted as if the nod was a punctuation on the sentence.
Suddenly the stupid white dress she was wearing became too tight, her breathing became shallow, and she woke up on a couch in what appeared to be a farm house with no air conditioning. The tender eyes were watching her as he pressed a cool cloth to her forehead. Pecola struggled to sit up as she took a mental inventory to make sure her panties were still on and her dress wasn’t up over her belly. Billy Joe lent her a hand. In his other hand, he held a cold glass of lemonade that he put to her lips.
“Drink. The cool and sugar will help balance you out. You ain’t ate nothing all day, have you?” He asked.
She shook her head no.
“Mary Megan and the gals from the lady’s auxiliary fixed us up some food. By the looks of it, we have enough to last us all week. I guess them hearing you were from New York, they were figuring you couldn’t cook,” he told her.
“What did they make?” She asked, her stomach rumbling loudly.
“Fried chicken, fried pork chops, fried potatoes, some baked squash casserole, and biscuits so light and fluffy you would swear they were made by an angel,” he told her.
Deep fried anything wasn’t her cup of tea, but she was hungry enough to eat a bear. “I could eat something,” she told him.
Gently, he pulled her up by the hand and into the kitchen. My kitchen. A bright bold kitchen with yellow walls, ridiculously white appliances, a farmhouse sink, and lots of bins full of root veggies. There was something welcoming and special about the kitchen that called to her. For the first time on that Tuesday morning, she smiled.
Billy Joe was enjoying seeing her lips in a position other than a frown or a scowl as he handed her a small saucer holding a chicken drumstick and a biscuit.
“Is this all I get?”
“For right now; I mean, I don’t want you to eat too much and then I jostle you all up and you get sick on me,” he said matter-of-factly.
The chicken came to a stop in midair. “What do you mean jostle me up?”
“Our wedding nuptials! I want to get to that part right away.” Again, he did the head nod for punctuation.
She started to look around the room. Nope. No one is here to rescue me. And there was that look on his face once more. The uncanny hopes of the fat lady meeting her long lost pork chop look.
“Don’t I get some sort of romance before you jostle me up, Billy?” she said with some attitude in her voice.
“Whaddya need with romance? We are married.”
She was feeling more like herself with each passing moment, “Not for long if you keep it going at this rate.”
He held up his hands in surrender. “I think we have some wine around here somewhere,” he told her. What he had was a bottle of Beaujolais that had more dust on it that some of the senators in congress. When he opened it up, Pecola could smell the vinegar from across the room. She stood there watching him as she gnawed on the chicken leg. It was some of the best fried chicken she had ever eaten. At this point, she as feeling like the fat lady and reached over to grab one of the pork chops. Her husband was not done yet; the man was truly going to try his best to make his new bride comfortable. He found a bottle of what looked like corn liquor that he held up as if he had uncovered the mother lode. Disappointment rained on his face when she shook her head no. Pecola wanted to at least be awake when the jostling began. The search for a romantic enhancer continued as he found a record also covered in a layer dust. His hands held the round disk as he leaned forward to blow off a coating or three of the dusty film before putting it on the record player. It was only a matter of seconds before Patsy Cline came through the speaker.
“Aww, hell no! You are trying to seduce me and make me feel comfortable with our upcoming jostling with a bottle of fermented vinegar and Patsy Cline?” Pecola began to look for her purse. One shoe on and a white dress, she would get out that front door and start walking.
“Pecola, whaddya want me to do? I want to make love to you! It’s our wedding loving time! I am at a loss here,” he said sadly.
It was the tender eyes that made her pause. She exhaled lightly and picked up a biscuit, biting into the discus and plopping down in a chair. “This is the best damned biscuit I have ever eaten,” she told him as she took another bite. She needed to explain herself a bit more to her confused husband. “I am refusing to believe, based on everything you have said to me today that you are the same man I have been writing.”
“I have every letter in the other room,” he said staring at her, waiting for an opportunity to change her mind then get her into that bedroom.
She shook her head no, “You have used the word ain’t several times. There is no way you have a master’s degree in comparative literature using the word ain’t!”
“I live on a ranch! And by the by, I don’t have any sheep, but you saw the caliber of people I was talking to on that sidewalk. Compound words confuse them,” he told her. He inhaled deeply and carefully phrased his words, “Are we not going to consummate this marriage?”
“Is that all you can think about?” she asked in disbelief.
“Right now, yeah!” he said as he stood up. He ran his fingers through that thick black hair. “I really don’t want to talk right now. I want to be in our bedroom making you my wife!”
She shook her head no. “Those same fancy words you used to seduce me in those letters to get me out here better start rolling off your lips or you ain’t getting nothing from me but some attitude and my other shoe in your face!”
“Is that a New York thing, throwing you
r shoe at people?”
Billy Joe took a seat in the chair next to her. He lowered his eyes as he thought about what he could say or do. It had not occurred to him that his wife would require being wooed. It had not occurred to him either that she would see him and not desire to be intimate with him right away. A great number of things never occurred to Billy Joe Johnson, but one thing that did occur to him immediately was that he liked her more in person than he did on paper. He could even see himself loving her as she brought his sons and daughters into this world. Moreover, he could see himself enjoying a life with her. If this is what it takes to keep her, I will do my best.
He took to one knee before her and held her hand. In French, he began to quote his favorite 14th-century poet, Louise Labé, with a piece about him kissing her into submission.
Las, te plains-tu? ça, que ce mal j’apaise,
En t’en donnant dix autres doucereux
Ainsi mêlant nos baisers tant heureux
Jouissons-nous l’un de l’autre à notre aise.
Her head cocked to the left and he deftly recited the words. It was working. He spoke French like a native. She watched his eyes when she asked, “You want to soothe my pain with ten kisses which are the sweetest so that we may enjoy each in bliss?”
A cocky grin showed up on his face giving her a glimpse at what had to be the prettiest set of teeth she had ever seen on a man. Then there were those eyes, gray eyes which sparkled when he said, “Loosely translated, that ain’t half bad.”
“How many other languages do you speak?” she asked as he removed the one shoe that was still on her foot.
He stayed in the zone as a professor, “Four if you count country grammar and English. I also speak Italian and Spanish,” he told her as his hand touched her calf.
Her leg warmed under his touch. She asked in amazement, “Really?”
“I can sing a little as well in a pinch,” he told her as he leaned forward, reaching behind to the back of her dress, tugging at the zipper.
“In a pinch?” she said as she stared into the nurturing eyes.
He leaned forward as he kissed her softly. He pulled away, humming something she didn’t know but figured was a country song. A soft tenor came from his mouth as he crooned the words to something she had never heard. Those damned eyes of his held her transfixed like a baboon waiting for the banana to drop from the hole in the wall of the research lab.
Montana (Modern Mail Order Bride Book 2) Page 1
