Love Inspired Historical November 2015

by Linda Ford

  Sam pushed them into their saddles. When Nate reached for his horse, Sam said, “I’ll escort them. Why don’t you ride inside.”

  “I’m riding up top,” Sparky said. “Feel better being in the open.”

  Louise wondered if Nate would refuse Sam’s offer, but after a pause, he nodded. “Thanks.”

  In a moment they were all back inside. Missy and Miss Rolfe sat side by side. Louise and Nate sat facing them.

  Several times as they continued on their way, she felt his gaze on her, and when she turned to meet his look, he smiled—mostly with his eyes.

  Was he worried about her? Well, no more so than she was about him. He’d been shot defending her. She couldn’t say what it meant except it felt good. And right.

  She turned to stare out the window. Right? Everything about them was wrong.

  Pretend. Lies. And yet, for just a little while, she’d felt as if she mattered to someone. Enough for that person to do something to protect her.

  It was a new feeling and she liked it.

  Even though she knew it was only temporary.

  *

  Nate’s pulse still thundered in his ears. Almost as loud as it had when he’d seen the road agents approach. He’d expected Vic to be one of the men, and he knew he’d shoot the man before he’d allow him to take Missy and Louise. Trouble was, he didn’t wear a sidearm. His pistol was in his saddlebag, and by the time he could get it out, he knew the robbers would be upon them. He’d turned into the trees, keeping out of sight as he pulled out his gun. They had reached the stagecoach before he could stop them.

  It hadn’t been Vic and an accomplice, but men every bit as bad. When one of them yanked Missy out and then Louise, not even allowing her to get her feet under her, a feral growl had come from his throat and he’d sprung forward, acting out of sheer instinct.

  He would not let them hurt his wife.

  His wife.

  When had he started thinking of her in those terms? They were married, but she wasn’t his wife. She was his best friend’s wife carrying his best friend’s baby. He would see her to safety, then his obligation, his duty to the past, would be over and done with. As it should have been years ago.

  He’d tried for the past three years to put the past behind him. But it was impossible to dismiss a friendship such as he and Gordie had enjoyed, equally impossible to forget he owed the Porter family for opening their door to him. Taking care of Louise and the baby would be payback for their kindness.

  But getting Louise to Eden Valley Ranch in one piece was becoming more of a challenge than he’d anticipated. Not only had she confronted some bad men, he had seen the strain in her face and understood travel was very uncomfortable for her. He’d asked when the baby would be born and she’d assured him it wouldn’t be for a while.

  He could only hope she was right and they’d make it to the ranch before that event.

  They reached Fort Benton late in the afternoon. The dusty frontier town bustled with activity, and the aroma of several thousand oxen and mules assaulted them with every breath. Few of the bull trains would be ferrying freight north during the winter. Instead, the animals were corralled in town.

  The stage pulled up in front of the Overland Hotel. He sprang from the coach and helped the women down, making Louise wait until last so he could pull her to his side. He led them inside and registered Louise and Missy into a room. He would sleep in the stables or the empty warehouse he’d slept in on his way down.

  The proprietor handed them a key. “Dinner will be served in half an hour. Gives you time to wash up. I suggest you get there right off or the men will clean up every bite.”

  “Louise, I’ll take you upstairs to your room,” Nate said.

  She turned. “Nate, you look terrible. Go wash up. Maybe sit down before you fall down.” And with that, she turned and lumbered up the stairs, Missy right behind her.

  “I’ll be back in half an hour,” he called.

  “Fine.” Her voice drifted down the stairs.

  She couldn’t be feeling too bad if she could still be bossy, he realized. Hiding a pleased smile, he trotted out to his horse outside the jail where Sam had taken the robbers.

  Nate took the animal to the stable and brushed it down, ignoring the sting in his injured arm. Only after he fed and watered his mount did he wash himself and find a shirt without blood soaking the sleeve. He looked at the wound. It was only a graze, not worth taking note of even. Hardly hurt at all. Nevertheless, he tied a clean neckerchief around it so it wouldn’t ooze blood onto his shirtsleeve. He donned his clean shirt and hurried back to the hotel, knowing the half hour had come and gone.

  The proprietor looked up when he entered the lobby. “The ladies are in the dining room.” He waved in the general direction of the double doors that stood open. “The dark-haired one told me to say they couldn’t wait. They were hungry.”

  “Thanks.” At noon, Louise had barely nibbled the lunch they’d brought, so hearing she was hungry raised his spirits considerably. Chuckling, he stepped into the room and glanced around, finding her seated with Missy and Miss Rolfe. Sam and Sparky had joined a table full of men. He returned Sam’s friendly wave but ignored the invitation to join them.

  He would eat with his wife.

  “You’re looking better,” she said when he took a seat across from her.

  “So are you.”

  She squinted at him. “I wasn’t shot.”

  “Nope.” But she’d endured a rough ride for more hours than he cared to contemplate.

  A man wearing a soiled apron set a plate of food before him and he dug in. The three ladies had already cleaned their plates. “Food’s good,” he murmured after a bit.

  Missy chuckled. Miss Rolfe watched, wide-eyed. Louise rested her chin on elbow-supported hands and grinned.

  “What?” He looked around the table. What were they all staring at?

  Louise answered. “We were wondering when you’d come up for air.”

  He cleaned his plate with a slice of bread and sat back with a sigh. “A man gets hungry, you know. Besides, this might be the last decent meal we see until we reach Fort Macleod.”

  At the way her eyes widened and her mouth pulled into a worried frown, he wished he’d kept that bit of information to himself.

  Seeing he was finished, the ladies pushed back from the table. He sprang to his feet to assist Louise.

  “Thank you,” she said, but her eyes filled with warning.

  “What? I’m only being polite.”

  “I see.”

  But she obviously didn’t. Was she so determined to remind him this arrangement was only temporary?

  “I’m going to my room,” Miss Rolfe said.

  Missy glanced around, saw nothing to hold her interest. “I have a book to read. Are you coming, Louise?”

  Louise sighed. “I feel the need to move about.”

  “Would you like to see Fort Benton?” Nate asked. It was dusky out, but there would be lots of activity yet.

  She brightened. “Why, yes, I would. Give me a minute to get my coat.” There was a time she would have flown up the stairs, but not now. She held the handrail and labored to the top. In minutes, she reappeared and as carefully made her way down to his side.

  He wisely kept any comment to himself and pulled her arm through his. Outside, he led her across the street to the waterfront. “The stern-wheeler brings freight and goods and people up the Missouri to here, then wagons go in every direction like spokes in a wheel.”

  “It’s busy.” She watched men hurrying to and fro. One carried a box on his shoulders, another pushed a handcart loaded high enough to block the man’s view, causing the pedestrians approaching him to dart out of the way.

  “Why do some of the men have red sashes about their waists?”

  He was pleased he could explain. “They’re French Canadians. They use the sashes around their coats. I hear they’re useful for a number of other things, too, like a saddle blanket, rope or towel.
”

  “It’s nice to see the color.”

  As they walked, he kept close to the river and away from the many saloons, though tinny music reached them. “It’s getting cold. Do you want to go back?”

  “In a minute.” They were in front of a hardware store with lantern light falling from the window to a bench on the sidewalk. “Let’s sit for a spell.”

  She waited until they were both comfortably seated to speak again. “I’ve never gotten a chance to thank you for agreeing to marry me for as long as it takes to get to Eden Valley Ranch.”

  He thought to tell her that her continual reminders, whether subtle or obvious, as this one was, weren’t necessary. He hadn’t forgotten the temporary state of their marriage and was quite sure she’d never let him. “Gordie was my best friend. His parents opened their home to me when I felt alone.” More like abandoned, he amended silently. Pa had died and Ma had had to work long hours. Nate had hated being alone at their new house.

  “To me, as well.”

  “Do you remember—”

  She spoke at the same time. “Do you think—”

  They both stopped.

  He lifted his hand to indicate he would stop. “You go ahead.”

  “No, you go first.”

  “Very well. Do you remember when they took us to the circus in town?”

  She made a sound, half laugh, half sigh. “It was exciting. The elephants, the clowns, the tightrope walker. What did you like best?”

  “The cowboys riding and roping.”

  “Is that when you decided you wanted to be a cowboy?”

  He shook his head. “Before my pa died, we lived on a ranch of sorts. It was small. But we had cows and horses and other animals. We had a mare due to foal and Pa had said the foal was to be mine. But he died of pneumonia and Ma sold everything, including the mare and my unborn foal.” He drew in a deep breath. “Why am I telling you this? It’s the past.”

  She squeezed his hand. “I never knew that. You never said.”

  “Because there is no point in regretting what is gone. A man needs to look ahead not back.”

  “I’m sorry. But aren’t you soon going to get what you lost back then?”

  He turned to her, his eyebrows raised in question.

  “Your own ranch. Surely you’ll have foals now.”

  He nodded. Was he unknowingly trying to replace what he’d lost?

  “Mr. Porter gave us each a nickel at the circus,” she reminded him.

  He readily let his thoughts return to those happy times. “I bought cotton candy with mine.”

  “You shared it with me. Remember?”

  He turned to her, met her eyes, felt drawn into their shared memories. “I’d forgotten.” Their look went on and on, searching, remembering, perhaps regretting all they’d lost.

  “What were you going to say?” he asked her.

  She turned from him to study her hands in her lap. “Do you think God is angry with us?” she whispered. “For making vows we have no intention of keeping?”

  “I wondered the same thing, then I recalled something Bertie said to us.”

  “Bertie? Who is that?”

  “Bertie and Cookie run the cookhouse at the Eden Valley Ranch. There isn’t a church nearby yet, though the building is almost finished in Edendale. In the meantime, we’ve had Sunday services in the cookhouse. Bertie always gives a little talk rather than a sermon. What he says makes a lot of sense.”

  “And he said something that made it okay to lie to God?” Her voice revealed a healthy dose of skepticism.

  “No, but perhaps God understands we didn’t have a choice. I remember Bertie saying, ‘He knows our frame, He remembers we are dust.’ Sometimes maybe we just have to do what seems best and pray God will change things if that isn’t right.”

  “But to vow?”

  He wished he could find words to comfort her, but his conscience stung as much as hers.

  “I would expect God to turn His back on us,” he said, “but I don’t think He has.”

  She grabbed his hand and pulled his attention to her. “When that man pulled me from the stagecoach, I could have been badly hurt. The baby—” She shuddered and couldn’t continue.

  He wrapped an arm around her shoulders hoping she felt his strength but not an echo of the fear that had shot through him with more force than the bullet that had torn through his arm.

  “God helped me land in a way that didn’t hurt either of us,” she managed to say.

  He nodded, unable to speak past the tightness in his throat. If something had happened to her or the baby, or Missy…

  She gave him a curious look. “Don’t you agree?”

  He swallowed hard and forced the words from his throat. “Thank You, God,” he said, looking upward, then he turned to her. “You’re okay. You are, aren’t you? You’re not just pretending?”

  “I’m fine. And you know the first thought that ran through my head was the same. I thanked God, too.”

  Her look went on and on, touching chords deep within his heart, awakening memories of shared times, filling him with a desire for something he couldn’t put a name to.

  But it felt strangely like the moment he had stood in the barn with his pa watching the mare eat, being promised the new foal. A feeling of joy and promise.

  Someone walked past then and greeted them, a stranger bidding them a good evening, but the interruption jerked him from his fanciful thoughts.

  There had been no fulfillment of the promise back then, either.

  But he had a future. He had only to get back in time to meet the owner of the land he wanted to buy. Why did he let himself see how empty the cabin would be without Louise and the baby?

  Chapter Six

  Louise was tired. Too tired to move. Besides, it was nice to sit on a bench that didn’t rock and bounce.

  She and Nate had talked about things. Especially the marriage vows they’d made with no intention of keeping. Did God understand? It comforted her to think Nate thought so.

  She felt the baby move and rubbed her belly. Earlier today, when she’d landed safely on the ground outside the coach, her trust in God had built. She could have been seriously hurt. The baby might have been killed. But He had protected them.

  The door to the store behind them opened and closed, and a man stood beside them. A French Canadian according to his red sash.

  She smiled at the way he stood, legs wide, arms akimbo, as if he ruled the world.

  He turned, saw them there and indicated the spot next to Nate.

  Nate moved over to make room.

  “She is a wonderful night for love,” the red-sashed man said.

  Amused, Louise nudged Nate in the ribs.

  “I miss my lady.” The man gave a long-drawn-out sigh. “But I has things to do to keep me mind and hands busy while I am away.” He opened a leather sack and pulled out a piece of wood with the rough shape of a bear.

  “You’re a carver,” Nate said.

  “It passes me time. You like to see more?” He didn’t wait for either of them to answer, which was fine. Louise was eager to see his work.

  He pulled out a moose with intricately carved antlers. Then he pulled out a cat sitting on its haunches with a benign expression. “Le chat.” He held it toward Louise. “You like?”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “Is yours.” He pushed it closer to her.

  She pulled back. “I didn’t mean for you to give it to me.”

  “Is yours for bébé.”

  “For baby.” She took it. “Thank you. It’s beautiful.”

  He put away his things and got up.

  “Wait,” she called. “We don’t even know your name.”

  “I am Pierre.” He said it with so much pride she couldn’t help chuckling. “I pray for your bébé every day now.” He touched his forehead with his fingertips and marched away.

  “He said he’ll pray.” She knew her words were filled with surprise. “I feel like God sent
him to answer the questions we voiced a moment ago. Or am I grasping for straws to convince myself that what we’ve done is okay?”

  “Maybe sometimes God sends people and events to show us His presence, and we dismiss them as ordinary.”

  She rubbed her fingers along the textured fur of the wooden cat. “That was a little out of the ordinary.” She handed him the carving. “Look at the fine handiwork. He should sell his things.”

  “Perhaps he does. Or maybe he does it for his pleasure alone. Who knows?”

  Who knows? Didn’t that describe her feelings about God? Who knows if unusual things were indications of His interest in her or if they were random? On the other hand, who was she to dismiss such things as ordinary?

  She rested her hands on her tummy again.

  She always did her best to trust God. It wasn’t as if she could count on anyone else.

  If she could truly believe God cared for her, she would not fear the future.

  Nate shifted his weight and stiffened when his arm bumped hers, reminding her of his injury.

  “How’s your arm?”

  “Louise, Louise, Louise. When will you believe it’s barely worth a moment’s notice?”

  “I’ll believe it when I see your arm without blood and raw flesh. When you can bump it without flinching. Did you at least clean it and cover it?”

  “Yes, to both.” He took her hand and squeezed it. “I am okay. I will see you safely to the ranch.”

  And then what? She knew the answer. The marriage would be annulled and he would move on. She would have her baby and as soon as she was able, she would find a position to support herself. A nanny, perhaps, or a housekeeper? She tried not to worry about what she’d do. It was a problem she’d deal with after she succeeded in getting to the ranch and had safely delivered this child.

  She took in a long, satisfying breath. She would not fear the future. God was with her. Yet she couldn’t quite stop worry from wrapping around her thoughts.

  “By the way,” she said. “You’re a hero.”

  “Me?” He stared at her. “I’m no hero.”

  “You rescued me, putting your own life at risk.”