Montana Bride (3 page)

“I don’t know enough to pass as a nurse,” Hetty pointed out.

“Confucius say: ‘Real knowledge is to know one’s ignorance.’ I teach you.”

“I thought you said we’re only a week away from Butte.”

“I teach good.” Mr. Lin smiled and added, “You learn quick.”

Hetty laughed again. “I’m glad you think so.”

“Necessary to learn, so you learn.”

He was right, Hetty realized. She’d done a lot of things lately she’d never imagined herself capable of doing.

Grace reappeared in a blousy brown dress with the shawl tied in a knot to camouflage her chest. She twirled in a circle and said, “How’s this, Mom?”

Hetty crossed to the girl and gave her a quick hug. “You look beautiful, Grace. Except for that smudge on your nose.”

“What smudge?” Grace said, rubbing at her nose.

Hetty smiled. “I was teasing.”

“Oh.” Grace looked surprised. Then she grinned. “That was perfect, Hetty. I mean, Mom. Be sure you do something just like that when we meet Mr. Norwood. That way, he’ll believe you’re my mom for sure.”

Hetty felt her stomach flutter with fear. She hoped it would be that easy to deceive her bridegroom.

Karl Norwood paced the boardwalk in front of the Copper Mine Hotel, unable to make himself go inside. He was eager to meet his mail-order bride. And anxious and nervous and a little worried. What if he didn’t like the look of her? What if she didn’t like the look of him, which was far more likely? A man couldn’t be more ordinary than Karl was. Average height, average build, brown hair, brown eyes, a face that had nothing to make it particularly noticeable in a crowd.

He hoped Mrs. Templeton appreciated intelligence. He was well educated, with a doctorate from Harvard, and had traveled the West, especially the Wyoming and Montana Territories, doing research in botany. His articles about the Indians’ use of native plants for food and medicinal purposes had been published in several prestigious university journals.

Karl would never be wealthy, like his older brother Jonas, who owned a piece of the Union Pacific Railroad. But he was willing to work hard to make a good life for his wife and be a good father to her two children and several more he hoped they would have together.

He straightened his tie yet again, pulled down his gray wool vest, shifted his shoulders in his gray-and-black herringbone suit, adjusted his flat-brimmed, flat-crowned black hat, then shot a troubled glance at his friend, Dennis Campbell, who grinned back at him.

“What’s so funny?” Karl asked.

“You,” Dennis said. “Stop pacing. Settle down. You’re as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs.”

“It’s not every day a man meets his bride,” Karl said.

“Especially on his wedding day,” Dennis added. “You don’t have to marry the woman today, Karl. You can give yourself a little time—a week—to get to know her. What if she’s a harpy? Or a crone? I can’t believe you didn’t demand a photograph.”

There was a simple reason why he hadn’t. Mrs. Templeton might have demanded one in return. Karl didn’t want to be judged for his plain looks any more than he planned to judge his bride by her appearance. To be honest, he’d been found wanting too many times in the past. As far as he was concerned, it was a point in Mrs. Templeton’s favor that she’d never demanded a picture of him.

Dennis ground out a cigarette under his boot and said, “This lady comes with a couple of kids. You sure you want that kind of responsibility right from the start?”

“I don’t think two little kids will be much of a burden,” Karl replied.

Dennis snorted.

“They won’t!” Karl insisted. “I’m hoping we’ll have a few more. Mrs. Templeton is an educated woman, so she’ll be able to teach our kids. Her letters have been intelligent and—”

“You don’t even know the lady’s first name,” Dennis pointed out. “You haven’t seen a picture of her. In my experience, people—especially women—lie. What if you’re disappointed when you see her?”

“I’m thirty years old.”

Dennis rolled his eyes, but Karl kept speaking.

“I may be stuck in the back of beyond for a couple of years. I want a family, the sooner, the better.”

“It’s sooner, all right,” Dennis said. “I’m not so sure about the better. You might end up with the ugliest woman in the Montana Territory. Last chance to change your mind.”

“It doesn’t matter what Mrs. Templeton looks like, Dennis. I’m going to marry her,” Karl said, tugging at his silk tie, which seemed to have gotten tighter around his throat. “I promised my brother I’d get to the Bitterroot Valley before winter sets in to start logging. It’s already mid-November. If I don’t leave now, I might have trouble getting there at all.”

“You could wait and marry when the job is done,” Dennis suggested.

“It could take a couple of years to prove this logging operation can produce the kind of lumber quotas Jonas expects,” Karl replied.

“You should have married that debutante back in Connecticut,” Dennis said. “She liked you.”

“And I liked her. But how do you think she would have fared here in Butte?” Karl gestured at the muddy, wheel-rutted street, at the land surrounding the mining town that had been stripped of all vegetation in order to dig for copper and silver and gold, at the filthy, unshaven miners, and the rowdy saloons. “I need a woman who’s proven she can survive a life as bleak as this.”

That was not the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Karl would have snapped up the Connecticut debutante in an instant, if she’d shown even a flicker of attraction to him. Her eyes had glazed over when Karl mentioned his work. They’d brightened only when she’d spied a better-looking swain, at which point she’d excused herself and left him standing alone. Karl had never shared with his handsome friend how often that sort of thing happened to him.

Karl wanted a beautiful bride as much as the next man. But he’d long ago realized that he had no right to hope for beauty when he didn’t have good looks to offer in return. For a while he’d hoped that some more-than-handsome woman might be captivated by his intelligence. But that had never happened.

Karl sometimes wondered if he’d studied so long and hard to improve his knowledge because he’d known his looks were so unimpressive. “I don’t think a debutante could deal with the isolation and primitive conditions of a place like the Bitterroot Valley,” Karl continued, giving a good reason, other than his plain features, why he hadn’t chosen a debutante for his bride. “I have to bite the bullet. I need to go in there and meet my mail-order bride, walk her to the church, and marry her.”

“I think you’re crazy,” Dennis said.

“Mrs. Templeton has proven she can give birth to healthy children. And you’ve got to admit, it’ll be helpful to have a nurse on hand. When men are working with axes, there are bound to be accidents.”

“Not if I can help it,” Dennis said. “That’s why I’m here, Karl. To help you complete this job with the fewest complications. That includes injuries.”

Karl had mixed feelings about his childhood friend’s assignment as his second-in-command. Dennis’s father was the head gardener on the Norwood estate in Connecticut, where the two boys had grown up together. Dennis had gone right to work for Karl’s elder brother at seventeen. There was no question his friend had far more experience being a boss than Karl.

But Karl had pleaded for the chance to show Jonas he could do the job. He’d wanted to prove to his brother that the years he’d spent studying, and then traveling the American West doing research, hadn’t been a total waste, as Jonas so often muttered they were. His brother had eventually given Karl the job, but he’d sent Dennis along to “help.”

Karl had never been in charge of anything like this proposed logging operation, and frankly, the project was daunting. They would be working in the middle of nowhere, and it was his job to supervise a team of a dozen loggers while they cut as many ponderosa pines as they could over the winter. In the spring, he had to find a site for a millpond and build a mill.

Meanwhile, Jonas hoped to convince his partners of the benefits of building a rail line to the valley, so the lumber Karl produced could be shipped east.

Karl was most worried about his ability to manage the lumberjacks, unruly ruffians who judged a man entirely on his physical strength and stamina, two things Karl lacked. Two things Dennis had. So maybe his brother had known best after all.

“I’ll tell you what, Karl,” Dennis said, setting a friendly hand on Karl’s shoulder. “I’ll go in first. If she’s a hag, I’ll wave you off.”

Before Karl could stop him, Dennis opened one of the double doors leading into the Copper Mine Hotel and stepped inside. Karl quickly followed after him. He was dwarfed by his friend, who was six foot four to Karl’s five foot ten, so his view of the red-silk-covered Victorian sofa in the center of the lobby was blocked.

He presumed his bride was sitting there alone, since he’d sent a note to her room at the hotel asking her to meet him first without her two children present. He ran into Dennis when his friend stopped in his tracks. Karl took a step back as he heard Dennis whistle appreciatively and whisper over his shoulder, “You are one lucky son of a bitch.”

Karl peered around Dennis’s shoulder and felt his heart jump.
She’s breathtaking.

His mail-order bride was perched on the edge of the sofa. A riot of blond curls surrounded a perfect, heart-shaped face. Her perfect, bashful smile had produced, heaven help him, perfect dimples. Her perfect, sky-blue eyes were focused unerringly on Dennis.

She wasn’t alone on the sofa. To her left sat two children he presumed were hers.

His next thought came unwilling.
Those two children had different fathers.

Karl was familiar with both Mr. Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
and Gregor Johann Mendel’s study of genetics with pea plants. Karl doubted that a blue-eyed, blond mother and one individual father could have produced both a green-eyed redhead and a dark-brown-eyed child with black hair.

His mail-order bride had been pregnant before she’d married Mr. Templeton. Or she’d been unfaithful to him.

Maybe he was wrong. Maybe there was some combination of genes in Mrs. Templeton and her late husband that could have produced two such dissimilar children. Karl didn’t want to believe such a beautiful face concealed such a deceitful heart.

Mrs. Templeton’s letters, which had been both witty and smart, and the fact that she was the mother of seven- and nine-year-old children, had led Karl to think of his mail-order bride as a mature woman. But the waif with lost-looking eyes and tumbled blond curls who sat before him, fidgeting nervously with a torn string on her ill-fitting dress, didn’t look even close to the twenty-eight years she’d claimed. Which was a problem, because the two children looked considerably older than their stated ages.

Karl smelled a rat.

“Are you Mr. Norwood?” Mrs. Templeton asked Dennis.

He heard Dennis laugh. Then his friend stepped aside and gestured at Karl. “Here’s your groom.”

Karl watched the hopeful smile on his bride’s face ebb as she surveyed him from flat-brimmed black hat to muddy black boots. He felt his heart squeeze as he realized he’d been compared to his tall, good-looking, broad-shouldered, blue-eyed, black-haired friend and found wanting.

“I’m—” Karl cleared his throat of the frog that had caught there and said, “I’m Karl Norwood. You must be Mrs. Templeton.”

His bride rose, but the two children stayed seated next to each other on the sofa. She extended her hand with a hesitant smile and said, “My name is Henrietta, but I’ve never liked it. My sis—” She cut herself off and lowered her eyes timidly, so her lashes sat on cheeks the color of peaches and cream.

Karl was enchanted. He felt his insides twist with sudden desire, felt his heart pound so hard he feared she might hear it. How had he chosen a bride so beautiful sight unseen? Her face was flawless except for several small scabs near one eye. It looked like a cat had swiped her with its paw.

In a low, tremulous voice that shivered along his spine, she said, “Please, call me Hetty.”

Karl had to swallow again before he could speak. “All right. Hetty.”

At the sound of her name, she blushed, painting her cheeks a rosy pink.

All the suspicious inconsistencies should have put him on guard, but Karl was too captivated to complain. He still had concerns about Mrs. Templeton’s basic honesty, but he could forgive what had happened before they’d met. Lots of people came West hoping to put a shadowed past behind them. What mattered was Mrs. Templeton’s—Hetty’s—behavior from now on. Karl was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

Assuming she still wanted to marry him, now that she’d seen what she was getting.

“This is my friend, Dennis Campbell.” Karl gestured to Dennis.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Campbell,” Hetty said.

Dennis touched a hand to his hat brim, smiled so that an entire mouthful of perfectly straight white teeth became visible, and said, “The pleasure is entirely mine.”

Karl noticed that Hetty’s blush deepened under Dennis’s intense perusal. Karl felt a flare of jealousy and tamped it down. It wasn’t Dennis’s fault he was so good-looking. But the girl seemed entranced. His voice was sharper than he’d intended as he asked, “Would you introduce me to your children?”