Annie: A Bride For The Farmhand - A Clean Historical Western Romance (Stewart House Brides Book 3)

by Charity Phillips

  “I thought you were dead,” Polly said breathlessly. “I thought—”

  Her tears overtook her again, and Rose left the room quietly, leaving Jeremiah to hold Polly to his chest. His mind was whirling with panic and relief, but he was mostly just happy to be holding her again—and, most of all, happy to find that she hadn’t packed up and left. He could hear voices outside now, and wondered if Rose was telling people he was alive.

  He waited for her to stop crying and guided her to the sofa, wiping her tears away with a handkerchief. “Polly, I’m okay. Are you okay?”

  She sniffed and nodded, brushing a few stray brown curls away from her forehead. “I’m okay now.”

  Jeremiah hesitated before speaking. “Polly, I’m so sorry about yesterday. I had no right to push you. Take as much time as you need. I’m just happy you’re in my life. Having you here is enough for me. We can even keep sleeping in separate bedrooms, and—”

  “Jeremiah,” Polly cut in, “I’m ready.”

  His heart stopped, and he almost didn’t dare to believe her words. “Really? But…what changed?”

  Polly smiled, and it warmed his heart like a gentle flame. “I did, Jeremiah. You changed me. And…your brother did, too.”

  Jeremiah let out a startled laugh. “What? How? Found a nun’s habit in his room?”

  Polly blushed. “No, but there’s something else I didn’t tell you about why I don’t approve of the miners’ lifestyle.”

  Fear flooded Jeremiah’s body. “What is it?”

  Polly took in a deep breath. “It’s the mines. So many women are widowed by those damn mines. I already love you, Jeremiah; what happens if we get married and I lose you? You already have a hold on my heart. You’d rip it out of me if you left.” She started to cry again, and Jeremiah felt his heart start to split apart.

  But she wasn’t finished. “And that brings me back to your brother. I talked to Rose and she had me talk to some other women who knew your brother, and even though they all agreed he was—promiscuous,” she said, blushing more deeply, “they always loved having him in their life. He really was a sweet, gentle, hardworking man—like you. He just had fun in a way that not everyone approved of. But he was loved.” Polly took his hands and smiled. “He was so loved, and everyone agreed they were better for it. Rose told me that even though she lost her man, she still got something great to out of their relationship—her baby.”

  Jeremiah’s heartbeat quickened. “Are you thinking about babies?”

  Polly laughed. “No, not yet, at least. But you can offer me something now. Something I’ve known I can get from you for a long time, but something I’ve been paralyzed with fear to let myself want.”

  Jeremiah held his breath.

  “Jeremiah Smith, will you…pose for a painting for me?”

  There was silence, and then he burst into laughter.

  “What’s so funny?” Polly asked, her lips curving at the corners.

  “I’m not a model, Polly.”

  She smiled. “No, but won’t you do it for your bride?”

  He pulled her into his arms and started to cover her face with kisses, and he didn’t stop until she giggled and squirmed free.

  “So…you’re ready?”

  Polly nodded and slipped her hands into his, squeezing his palms as she gazed into his eyes. “I’m ready, Jeremiah. Are you ready?”

  “Of course,” he answered. Jeremiah pulled her to him again and kissed her gently, savoring the softness of her lips as she wrapped her arms around his broad shoulders. As he looked into her deep brown eyes, he could hardly believe his luck.

  “I’m glad you’re ready, because I have some designs for a dress I’d like to show you—and your suit, if you’ll allow me,” she said sheepishly.

  Jeremiah smiled, then laughed aloud as a thought occurred to him, and Polly looked at him curiously.

  “What’s so funny about wearing my designs?”

  “Nothing,” he swore. “But I just realized—I’ve been a miner for five years, and only now have I finally struck gold.”

  Polly paused, then burst into loud, body-shaking laughter. When she finally calmed down, she reached up on tiptoe to kiss him again.

  “I love you, Jeremiah Smith. Never change.”

  His heart swelled in his chest until it felt like hot air balloon. “I love you, too, Pollyanna Clark.”

  She smiled at him demurely. “I think it’s time you started calling me Mrs. Smith, don’t you?”

  THE END

  A Mail Order Bride For Isaac

  Story Description

  Sutter Creek, California – 1852

  Isaac Walters is used to working his fingers to the bone, but he’s never had to work for much else. He inherits his business after his father’s retirement, and also manages to acquire his charming Sutter Creek home when his sister marries an oil tycoon on the East Coast. But when he nearly loses everything he has in a single act of carelessness, he’s finally pushed to consider how lucky he’s been.

  Tired of depending on the kindness of fate, Isaac decides to get serious about one thing at a time, starting with marriage; after all, what could be so difficult about forging a new way of life?

  The streets were emptying by the time Isaac exited the Knight Foundry, and he was glad for the moment of solitude. The setting sun shone on the river, turning the meandering trail of water into a silvery snake that curled through the whole of Sutter Creek. Some days he took a paddle boat and let the waves speed him toward Boone’s General store, if he didn’t feel like braving the chaos of Ida’s; today he was heading straight home, however, and the walk would do him some good. He’d have just enough time to wash and set the table before Caroline’s train pulled into the station. I can’t believe it’s already been six months since the fire. Time flies, I guess.

  Half a year ago, Isaac had nearly run out his own clock. After a long night of gin and card games in his living room, he’d settled onto his overstuffed sofa to enjoy a pipe overflowing with the most pungent tobacco he could find, his vision even more wobbly than his hands. Isaac had enough time to light a match before the spirits overtook him and dragged him down into a deep sleep; when he woke up, his friend Jeremiah was pulling him from his burning living room as six men beat the flames back with hoses. He was in the hospital for three days from the smoke inhalation, and after all his friends all came by to comfort him with a steady stream of vague, supportive sentences, Isaac realized something: he was the only person left in his little circle of friends who didn’t have a wife to stand behind him. If Jeremiah hadn’t forgotten his favorite hat, Isaac would have been dead—because even Jeremiah had been hurrying home to his wife when he decided to double back for his cap.

  Thomas Shepherd, his best employee, was the first one to state the obvious.

  “Now’s the time to marry, ‘Zac,” he intoned as he pulled the thick leather gloves from his hands. His voice was soft and high pitched, but the seven-foot man was far too imposing to ever be ridiculed for it. “More brides than fish these days. And you’ve got a house. And a business. Lass will like that.”

  “Yeah, but she won’t like me,” Isaac grumbled.

  Thomas raised his eyebrows in surprise. “What do you mean? You’re not violent. You can read. You even clean yourself up every day. You think these ladies are waiting for the King of England?”

  Thomas had a point. Many of these women were ones who were trying to flee mistakes of their own, and they could hardly afford to be picky. Thomas was married, but you would hardly ever know it from talking to him; Isaac found out a year after hiring him, and a year later he found out the marriage had been one of convenience. Mrs. Shepherd was a pretty woman, but she almost never showed the man any affection, and Thomas said on more than one occasion that she seemed to be planning an escape—he found a suitcase in their basement, and a roll of coins wrapped in stockings stashed next to a wad of crisp looking bills. Isaac listened to his employee tell him this with a horrified expression; he
couldn’t bear it if someone who agreed to marry him behaved with such open indifference toward him. He wanted a friend, at the very least, and was alarmed that his massive employee was so unfazed by this discovery. Thomas wasn’t bothered by it, because, as he put it, there were more brides to be had—and he firmly believed Isaac would see it his way.

  Ida, the black woman who worked Ida’s Supplies, was similarly skeptical of him.

  “Do you really want a marriage, though?” She asked him, smiling wryly as she planted one hand on her hip. “Being married means you gotta prioritize different things. Plan stuff out. You’re more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of guy, like my husband.”

  “But don’t you and Douglass get along okay?”

  Ida chuckled and shook her head, warm brown eyes sparkling with amusement. “Took us a while to get there, and we were…a little different. Wasn’t no arrangement, but no courtship either, cause of the stigma. East Coasters ain’t quiet about wanting people to stay with their own kind. Hell, we had to move to California just to be left alone by his family. We’re molded together by circumstance and shared experience, and that works for us. But, if you have a choice, you don’t want your love to be born in a crucible.”

  “So, what are you saying?”

  “Just be careful.” She grinned. “I know that don’t come easy to you men folk sometimes.”

  He’d laughed then, but Isaac took her words to heart. He really was a careless man—that fact had nearly gotten him killed, and it had gotten him in more trouble than he liked to admit. But if Isaac was careless, he was also passionate, and it was something that often brought out the best in him and other people. Passion and loyalty had earned him his group of friends, his house—even the Foundry that had been passed to him by a father figure who had no son of his own. His house was almost completely filled with gifted furniture and clothing, and nearly every meal he ate was cooked by someone else. Most of the town could recall one favor or another he’d done for him, and they would all swear that he’d do them earnestly and without thinking; he’d written to Caroline that he was considerate and warm hearted, but the truth was that his heart was a furnace that burned so fiercely that there were times when the fire just went out for lack of fuel. Isaac told himself that this was why he was getting married—he needed a second shovel to make sure he didn’t simmer down to nothing.

  Isaac lived on a street where the houses were spaced further apart than on the main roads; this wasn’t an intended luxury, but a result of building the first couple hundred of houses closer together than they ought to have done. The older houses were always the biggest—besides the three mansions on top of Sutter and Ivy Hills—but the south side of town had wider, more verdant lawns, lush and fertile and perfect for small patches of fruit, vegetable and flower growing. Isaac pulled two tomatoes from a vine to lay atop the casserole Mrs. Johnson from next door would be bringing over; it was the only culinary quirk he really possessed, a vestige of his fervent love for the seedy fruit left over from childhood. His mother joked they’d sprout in his body and he’d never stop growing whenever she saw him eating them whole as a snack, and Isaac secretly believed his mother was right until he turned twenty. Now he just liked to slice tomatoes to liven up the casseroles and sandwiches everyone made him, but he always thought of his mother when he did it.

  He had grown abnormally fast; Isaac was half a foot taller than his six-foot tall mother by the time he was fourteen. When he turned sixteen, he’d grown into his lanky body until he resembled an Earthly version of some fearsome Greek deity—rippling muscles wrapped around a long, sturdy frame, olive toned skin, sandy blonde hair, a square jaw to match his shoulders, and vivid blue eyes the exact color of the ocean hugging the coast of California.

  The first woman to tell him he could have anyone he wanted was also the daughter of the man who would become his mentor. Lila Evans— with her snow-white skin, long red curls, and cherubic cheeks—was the prettiest girl in school, and also the richest. Unbelievably, she began to pay special attention to him for some reason, and she was all he ever thought about from that moment on. She seemed important and desirable in a way he didn’t quite understand, so he’d agreed to walk home with her one day, because her house was down the road from his. She smelled like grass and pine needles, and she insisted he kiss her to prove he wasn’t a chicken, and then he could be her boyfriend. He’d been thirteen years old, and Isaac was working himself up to plant a kiss on her rosy cheek behind a huge red barn on her property, his heart beating so fast he could barely feel it; then her father had strode around the corner and lifted him away from Lila with both hands, carrying him into the barn through the back door, where’d he’d been watching them both silently.

  “You want to lay hands on my daughter? On my precious girl?” Willis Evans towered over him like giant, even though he was only five and a half feet tall. Isaac was sitting on the ground, looking around the barn with frantic eyes, noticing it was filled with scary looking equipment and a boiling hot stove. Willis pointed to a table where he’d been working iron into horse shoes.

  “Prove to me you’re worth a damn. Prove your hands ain’t already useless, or I’ll break them both.”

  Frightened teenage Isaac would have done anything he’d been told to do at that moment; luckily, he was only being instructed to beat at a hot piece of metal until it was ready to be plunged into freezing water. Then he hung up the horse shoe to dry with Willis, and did another under his guidance from scratch. Isaac found the work thrilling and calming at the same time; it engaged him in a way nothing else ever had. In class, he often couldn’t sit still long enough to focus, but working with metal and heat was so mesmerizing he could even ignore the ache in his legs and feet from standing so long. When they finished, it was two hours later, and Lila was in the house, eating dinner with her mother. Isaac was surprised to find that Willis was pleased by his work, but not shocked by his strength and attention; about a year later, he found out that Willis had asked Lila to bring him by. It occurred to him that he’d been used, and this made him so furious he briefly pondered attacking Willis at work—but it also occurred to him that he’d been scouted, and because of that, he was being groomed to be a man of real importance, and not a con man like his own father had been. By that time, Lila had lost interest in Isaac, but he didn’t mind; Willis eventually moved up from horseshoes and started his own Foundry, and working there turned out to be more fun than spending time with a snooty girl who never liked getting her dresses dirty.

  Despite his undeniable good looks, Isaac had never managed to find anyone he felt remotely serious about; then, when Willis had given him the Foundry, it had been ten dizzying years of adjusting to the change that unexpected but incredible gift had brought. Willis’ death had been harder on him than it had even been on Lila, so the first year after the funeral was spent drifting between seclusion and self-destruction while Lila moved her father’s things from his house. Now he was thirty-three, and he had a house full of the relics of his past—but not much else to show for his hard work. Even Lila was married, and her own house was slowly filling up with children.

  Isaac washed quickly, anxiously eying the time as he worried over what to wear. He’d never dressed for anyone before; as he pulled on a crisp white shirt and thick, ebony colored dress pants, Isaac thought he looked a little like a gorilla in fancy dress. He combed his hair back from his face and ran a razor over his jaw, thankful that he only had a small burning mark below his collarbone to remind him of the blaze. His pipe had slipped behind the couch when his head tipped back, but some of the flames had started up the sofa when Jeremiah burst in the door. Thank God for that man, he thought fiercely. Then a flurry of sound floated toward him from the front of the house, and he remembered the casserole.

  “Mrs. Johnson, thank you so much for—”

  The words dropped out of his mind as he emerged into his living room and saw a woman standing next to two brown trunks and a pristine-looking duffel bag. Sh
e was already facing him when he stopped before her, but he saw her eyes widen in shock as he appeared, and he was struck by how warm and alive they were—like milk chocolate slowly melting in a pot, with spots of gold like fresh butter waiting to be blended in. Her face was slim and somewhat pointed, and her auburn hair fell to her neck in a series of complicated ringlets that heightened the rest of her beauty, but made her plain grey dress look dull in comparison. The waist of her dress was pulled tightly around her, but her shapely figure only highlighted the wear in the fabric. One hand fluttered to her throat, and her sharp cheekbones darkened with pinkish tint at the same moment that he realized he was staring. Isaac dropped his eyes, and when he pulled them up again, the woman’s gaze was below his—and it occurred to him that she was scandalized not by his staring, but by the bareness of his body.

  Isaac pulled his shirt closed over his torso and backed away. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’ll—”

  “Wait,” the woman said, her color returning to normal. “Wait, it’s me who should apologize—the door was open, but I should have knocked, or called out at least.”

  Isaac froze. Oh, he thought. “Caroline Greene?” he said questioningly.

  The woman nodded. “Yes. Who else?”

  Isaac straightened his back as he finished buttoning his shirt. “My neighbor is bringing me something,” he said, fighting embarrassment. “I thought you were her at first, then I just thought you were sent by someone else who wanted to give me something.”

  Carline stepped forward, her gaze sweeping over the Spartan living rooms and the table settings as she moved toward him. “The rest of your things?”

  Isaac laughed, but his heart was racing painfully in his chest. “Uh supper, actually. I only just got home from work.”

  Caroline stopped and met his eyes again, and she seem to shrink into herself and become a softer version of the woman who was speaking before. “I’m sorry, of course you did. You run a foundry; you must be an awfully busy man.”