by Rosie Harper
With that, he turned and walked away to a different destiny, and hopefully, a better one.
“How come we always seem to be meeting here, Mrs. Delacour?” Chance asked his wife as he spun her around the dance floor of the barn where Mary and Jed had had their wedding only two months before.
“Because you never take me anywhere nice,” she teased.
Lucy had nursed Chance’s arm back to health herself, allowing him to stay in her own home. It proved to be a great idea given the fact that his presence warmed her mother up to him, and in the matter of a few short weeks she had come to see Chance like a son.
Now she stood in the back of the barn, by the food, dabbing at her eyes as she watched her only daughter happily dance with her new husband. Lucy’s father moved up behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist.
“We did alright, don’t you think?”
“I just can’t believe that our little girl’s a married woman!”
“Well, we knew it would happen sooner or later, it just needed to come on her own terms.”
Lucy’s mother nodded, sighing deeply. “There is a bright side to this,” she said.
“There’s more than one bright side, I would argue.”
Lucy’s mother leaned her head against her husband’s chest. “No more classifieds all over the house.”
He laughed, grabbed his wife’s hand, and spun her around. “That is a bright side, but now let’s dance!”
The music played as Kyle Granger brought his wife Lilah out on the dance floor to dance near their daughter and son-in-law, and all four of them danced happily, completely sure in the knowledge that they would all live happily ever after.
THE END
BONUS BOOK 1
Left With A Cowboy
Mail Order Bride
By: Avril Adams
Left With A Cowboy
Chapter 1
I’m a young and fit rancher looking for a nice, young woman who is interested in sharing my life. Must love horses and be open to having children. If you are interested, please contact me. I am willing to pay for your safe passage to Virginia City. Looking forward to meeting you. - Harlan Cooper
Lilah Montgomery gripped the last letter that Harlan had sent to her as she looked out the window over the vast prairie that now she would call home. She knew that she must be out of her mind to do this, but what other choice did she have? She couldn’t stay back home in St. Louis, not after what had happened. Not after Michael had broken her heart.
It felt like only yesterday that she thought that she was going to spend the rest of her life with Michael. It had all seemed so simple, she thought that they were made for each other. Sure, they had never said it to each other before, but Lilah didn’t think it needed to be said, he need only look her in the eyes for him to know. There was absolutely no way that he could mistake their long strolls by the lake to be anything but romantic...right?
Wrong. Lilah had been devastated when he told her that he was going to propose to silly little Missy Sinclair. How could he prefer that ninny to her? It wasn’t fair, and Lilah was absolutely devastated.
She had settled into her new life, fully prepared to pine away forever, when her father had sat down beside her and given her some sage advice.
“Lilah,”he said in the same sombre tone she had heard him use for her entire life,“I know that your heart may be breakin’right now, but if you don’t get yourself out of this bed you’re going to end up breakin’mine.”
She had turned to look at him, her eyes red and raw from crying,“But I don’t know how I can live every day here knowing that he’s with her,”she said, sniffling.
“Then live somewhere else,”he said said very simply.
That’s when she got the idea to go to California to seek her fortune. Armed with whatever money her lovely parents could spare, she set out on the next train...only to realise that it was expensive to go to California, and even harder when you have no friends to help you. Lilah had been bunked down in some small town in Montana when she had opened the paper to look for work, and found the classifieds section instead.
She was never the kind of person who would do such a thing, although she had heard about one or two girls from St. Louis finding a husband that way. For some reason she never thought that she would need it, and yet she had sat there with a pounding heart reading over the classifieds...until she had found Harlan’s.
Not one to be brazen, she sent him a timid letter, and he had written back. After a week or so of this, she agreed to his terms. She was going to be his bride and help him on his farm in Virginia City, Montana.
Was she in love with him? No, not particularly. How could she be? She had never met him, she had no idea what he actually looked like, and he also had no idea what she looked like. There was, however, something incredibly comforting in knowing that none of this mattered.
Now she was in Montana, coming into the train station, with the understanding that one of the ranch’s workers was going to be picking her up to bring her on her last journey home. She was incredibly worried about this, what would this cowboy possibly think of her, this woman moving hundreds of miles away from her home in order to live with a man she had never met?
Perhaps it was normal in these parts. She sort of hoped it was.
Dark clouds gathered in the distance as Lilah stepped down onto the platform and waited for her luggage to be unloaded. Her eyes scanned the crowd of people who had gathered to pick up their loved ones, having a feeling of momentary panic at the thought that she had no idea what this man was going to look like. Instead she stood there, frozen, as the luggage was given to her.
Families arrived and embraced fellow passengers with happy cries of joy, little children ran around for a bit, and Lilah watched. The clouds grew closer, and she was convinced that she could hear a little rumble of thunder in the different. How long would it take to get to the ranch? Would they be unable to outrun the storm? Luckily she had changed into a simple pair of pants and a blouse in her car before she had gotten to the platform; she had a long life ahead of her working on a ranch, she couldn’t afford to be prissy by insisting that she wear dresses all the time. Plus, she loved to wear trousers when given the chance, it felt so much better than to be buried under yards of cotton and lace, and it felt cooler too. No one seemed to pay her any mind either, she wondered if this part of the west saw many women in trousers. She liked the idea of that.
The crowd began to thin out, and Lilah began to grow nervous...at least until she finally saw him.
It had to be him, he stood there looking around with a serious look on his face, and for a moment her heart stuttered a nervous beat as she saw his face. He was incredibly handsome, with brown hair bleached by the western sun. He held a cowboy hat in his hands. He seemed broad and strong, but of course he would be.
Please let this be Harlan, she thought wildly as she walked over to him. Or Harlan’s identical twin brother.
He looked up in surprise upon seeing her, and gave and unsure bow to his head.
“Lilah Montgomery?”he asked, a slight southern drawl colouring his voice. She nodded.
“And you are…?”Her heart soared with a nervous expectation. Would life be this easy? He smiled at her.
“The name’s Kyle Granger, ma’am, I’m here to escort you to the ranch.”
Her heart fell at this, even though she knew that it was a long shot. Harlan had said that he wasn’t going to be able to make it to pick her up due to it being calving season, but she had hoped nonetheless.
“Nice to meet you,”she said. His eyes flickered down to her trunk and he nodded.
“Let me take that for you,”he said obligingly, brushing his fingers against hers as he took the handle of her trunk.“I have a cart you can ride in with your trunk.”
“I know how to ride,”she replied almost a little too hastily, as though she was afraid that he wouldn’t believe her. He smiled at her.
“I should hope so, ma’am, but som
eone needs to keep the horse going.”
He looked up at the darkening sky and frowned.
“Storm’s coming,”Lilah said helpfully.
“Yes, we better get a move on so we don’t get caught in it. It’s about a day’s ride out, we should be there by sunset... but the plains get muddier than you’ve ever seen if it rains.”
She didn’t say anything back to him as she followed him off of the platform and over to the hitching post, where two gloomy looking horses awaited. He loaded the trunk onto a little cart stationed nearby, then turned to hitch one of the horses, a chestnut mare, to the cart.
“You know how to drive a cart?”
She nodded, trying very hard to ignore the ripple of muscles under his shirt, the twinkling of his blue eyes as he placed his hat back on his head. It was early in the morning, still crisp, and yet she felt hot all over. Hopefully he wasn’t a very talkative man, maybe getting to know him would end up being her undoing.
He smiled at her.“Good.”
She climbed into the cart and mounted the horse, a powerful looking black stallion, and a thrill went through her as he cried“giddy-up!”and took off. With a“yah!”herself, she bid the horse to trot behind him.
This was going to be a very long and very tempting day, she could tell.
Chapter 2
Damn that Harlan, Kyle thought bitterly. Why did he have to order the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in order to be his bride?
When he first saw Lilah approach, he was hoping that she had the wrong guy. She was utterly beautiful, wearing a loose fitting blouse and riding trousers. Her hair was a long chestnut brown, woven into a braid that flopped over her shoulder. Her eyes were the colour of grass. He didn’t want to stop looking at her.
But this was the boss’s bride to be, and wouldn’t he be pleased to see how beautiful she was? It was almost torture, Kyle had decided. What led a girl like that to answer an ad in the classifieds like that anyway? What was she running from?
On some level, Kyle knew that he shouldn’t be feeling this way, it was more than just respect for Harlan...what about Ellie? Would it be betraying her memory to want a woman such as this, or after all these years would she be happy for him? Did any of it matter now given the fact that she was gone? The sheer fact that he was having these sort of thoughts and feelings made him hesitate.
Lilah was silent for the first leg of their journey, and he took some measure of comfort in that. It was fine if she didn’t want to talk to him, mostly because he didn’t know if he wanted to talk to her. Right now she was this beautiful thing that could never belong to him, if they forged some kind of connection what if he gave himself away?
Instead he snuck glances at her, watching the wind blow through her hair, watching her bite her lip softly as she looked up at the great storm brewing. Luckily the storm was slow, although he didn’t like those flashes of lightning in the distance.
Were she anyone but Harlan Cooper’s future bride, he would have loved the opportunity of a storm, huddling close to her for warmth, hoping that her skin felt as soft as it looked. Instead he merely hoped that the weather would be able to hold off for just a little while longer.
Although he also had to admit...a small part of him hoped that the storm would come anyway.
#
Once they left town and hit the open plains, Lilah was fascinated by the wide open spaces, the mountains in the distance. She thought that Oklahoma felt huge, larger than St. Louis at least. Missouri had been big, but none of it held a candle to the sheer size of Montana. She felt free here, although she knew that technically she wasn’t. She was riding off to be the wife of a complete stranger. She only hoped that he was kind.
Then it occurred to her, and she turned to Kyle, who up until that point had been riding his stallion silently.
“Can you tell me about him?”she asked quietly. He turned to look at her, his expression unreadable.
“What do you want to know?”
Lilah was momentarily at a loss. What could she ask about? His kindness? What he looked like?
“Why did he do this?”she heard herself asking.“Why did he have to find a wife this way?”
Kyle glanced at her, his expression still unreadable, and shrugged a little.
“He’s a busy man, a nice man, but busy…lonely. He didn’t want to waste his life not being able to find someone, but also didn’t really know how to go about courting.”
It sounded sweet to her, the idea of a man so shy, but also lonely, that would reach out to her like this. Maybe she could grow to love him after all, maybe this wouldn’t be the mistake she feared that it would become.
And yet as thunder rumbled in the distance, she could not help but feel something in the pit of her stomach, something that felt like a warning, she tried her best to squash the feelings rising up inside of her, but suddenly she hoped that that storm would come, so she would have a little more time.
And if that time was spent with Kyle, all the better.
Suddenly she felt a jolt, and a crack resounded through the air. The cart lurched, and she almost tipped out of it as it listed to the side. Kyle stopped the stallion and dismounted immediately, calming the nervous mare before she got too upset. Lilah looked over the edge of the cart to see the jagged spokes of the wheel cracked and broken. She looked back up at Kyle, who didn’t seem nervous.
“It’s okay,”he told her.“We have another one just in case, here, let the horses graze while I work on this.”
He unhitched the mare from the cart and allowed her to wander away a bit, grazing peacefully beside the stallion. Lilah hopped down and stood beside him.
She could feel the heat of him through his thin button down shirt, and it made her head swim. He placed his hand on her lower back to move her a little away from the wheel so he could work, and she hoped that he hadn’t heard her breath hitch at his touch. She hoped that he wouldn’t notice that she wanted to stay as close to him as possible. It didn’t seem to bother him, but what did she know? He hefted the spare wheel off the back of the cart and knelt to remove the broken wheel.
As he worked, Lilah turned to the horizon, noticing that the dark clouds were nearly over them now. It was growing darker by the minute and she could tell that Kyle noticed that too. Once the wheel was finished, he wiped the sweat from his brow and looked up at the clouds Lilah was seeing.
“The only thing we can do now is hope that it doesn’t rain very hard,”he said,“But I know there’s an empty cabin about ten miles ahead that we can bunk down in if the weather gets too bad, once we stop there, we can can assess.”
Lilah nodded, feeling the first drop of rain darken her blouse.
“We should get going,”she said as she walked over to to the horses. The mare was a gentle soul, not nearly as gloomy looking as she originally thought. Lilah passed her fingers through the silky hair of the mare’s mane, and smiled. She could get used to spending so much time with horses. Perhaps her entire life.
They were off again, but they knew that they wouldn’t be able to make it all the way to the ranch as originally hoped, when the rain started falling. It was gentle at first, but the crack of thunder spooked the horses, and Lilah had to make soothing noises to calm the mare lest she start to run. The rain grew heavier, and Lilah grew more nervous until she saw the dark outline of the abandoned cabin on the road ahead. Relief hit her quickly, until another feeling of nervousness took its place.
She was going to be alone with Kyle overnight, most likely.
The thought of this brought a chill down her spine.
He helped her down off of the cart, unhitching the mare to let her take shelter under an extended piece of wood with the stallion. The rain began pouring in earnest as they escaped into the cabin.
It was a bare affair, yet cozy, perfectly set up for situations like this with a small bed boasting a threadbare quilt. There was a small camp stove as well, and Kyle gently placed a knapsack down on the wooden floor.
Lila
h kept her back to the wall as the rain made strange, cacophonous noises on the roof. Kyle removed some dried jerky, an apple or two, and handed one to Lilah who up until that point had not even been aware that she was hungry.
She ate the apple and jerky gratefully while Kyle did the same, eyeing her appraisingly which made her want to ask just what he was staring at.
“So why did you do it?”he asked her after what seemed like hours. This caught Lilah by surprise, unsure of how to really respond to it.
“Why does anyone answer those things?”she asked flippantly. He gave a graceful shrug, and Lilah could not help but follow the movements of his muscles beneath his shirt again.
“I don’t know,”he admitted,“I’ve never thought to do it.”
“Successful in your own right?”she asked sarcastically, he laughed a little and shook his head.
“And you aren’t?”
“I’m not,”she replied too quickly,“I’m...not.”
His face looked gentle in the dim light.“I have a hard time believing that.”
She studied his face in the dark, wondering if it would be worth it to tell him anything. After a moment or two, she decided that maybe it would be worth it after all.
“There was a boy back home, and oh I loved him…”She could feel her eyes growing misty and blinked the potential tears away, it wouldn’t be seemly to cry so easily in front of this virtual stranger. Kyle didn’t say anything so she took that as a cue to continue.
“It wasn’t meant to be, mostly because I was a damn fool and didn’t tell him how I felt until it was too late.”
His piercing blue eyes gave her the strength to continue.
“It’s silly now that I think about it. But he’s marrying someone else so there’s not much for me to do.”She laughed a little bit.
“So you left town?”Kyle bit into his apple thoughtfully.“You must have really loved him.”
“I thought I did, at the time, but part of me also wonders if I was just using my broken heart as an excuse to leave...I never really felt like I fit in there.”
