Forget-Me-Not Bride
by Margaret Pemberton
In the Alazkan Klondike, at the height of the gold-rush, respectable women were thin on the ground and the San Franciscan based Peabody Marriage Bureau did a roaring trade despatching mail-order brides to women-starved stampeders. When half-Irish Lilli Stullen boarded the S.S. Senator as a Peabody bride, she did so not because she was hungry for a gold-rich husband but because it was the only way she could remove her orphaned younger brother and sister from the clutches of their hated uncle. To Lilli, the sacrifice of marrying a man she had never met was small in comparison to ensuring Leo and Lottie's happiness – or it was until she met 'Lucky' Jack Coolidge, a professional gambler with devilry in his eyes – a man no woman had ever been able to hold. Lilli was certain that when they arrived in the Klondike, Jack Coolidge would pay off her husband-to-be and marry her himself. She had reckoned, however, without the man who...