ROMANCE: MAIL ORDER BRIDE: The Other Man’s Baby (A Clean Christian Historical Western) (New Adult Inspirational Pregnancy Romance) (20 page)

Chapter 11

The horse and rider flew over a third fence, their bodies so closely coordinated it was hard to tell where she ended and he began.  Nicholas leaned over the gate and whistled appreciatively.  Beside him, his mother chuckled.  “Ah, so your old mama ain’t such a bad matchmaker after all, is she now?”

He winked at his mother and grinned. “Not bad at all.” Then he gave Rosa, who sat on his mother’s hip, a loud kiss on the jaw making her giggle. Seeing the results of Henri’s close relationship with her father had made him willing to try a little cuddling of his own daughter. Damned, if he didn’t like it, too.

Henri galloped toward them, her face shining with happiness, the Stetson he’d given her on their wedding day pulled low over her forehead. Warmth flooded his chest.  A woman made for him.

“And how was that, Mr. Van Buren? Wasn’t Jackson worth every bit of time and money it took to bring him down from Virginia?”

Nick offered his palm to the horse.  Jackson snorted and showed his teeth.

“No,” he said firmly. “Not worth it at all.” Then he offered the same hand to Henri. “But you are, Mrs. Van Buren.  Completely and totally, ‘til death do us part, worth it.”

Henri jumped down from her horse, then climbed the gate to kiss her husband on the mouth, unselfconsciously and with all the enthusiasm she could muster.  His wife was every bit as wild and untamed as Texas itself.

Rosa clapped and giggled. “Mama!" Mama!” She cried.

Henrietta smiled at her mother-in-law before scooping the baby into her arms. “Rosa, Rosa, Rosa,’ she chanted, making the baby squeal. She flew her through the air. “Oh Rosa, one day, you’re going to fly so high!  You have fairy wings stitched to your sweet little ankles.” She tickled each one and Nick smiled when the baby giggled. He loved the next part of their routine best of all. He held out his arms as Henri flew the baby into them. ”And you have a daddy who loves you more than Texas itself.”

“I can say that about both of you,” He whispered before claiming his wife’s mouth for another kiss.

**THE END**

D
ear Mr. Larkin,

I accept your offer of marriage. I have a four-year old daughter. My husband died in the floods which we suffered two years ago. East Texas has been my home since I came to Santa Teresa at the age of twelve as an orphan. I bring no dowry, and the few belongings that I did own were lost in the flood. It seems that everything was lost in the flood.

Salome Burnett Gascoigne

How was a woman supposed to feel on her wedding day when she was marrying a man she’d never met? Of course, Salome Burnett Gascoigne reminded herself, this was her second wedding day. The wedding day joy that she’d experienced when Father Diego joined her in marriage to John Cloud Feather Gascoigne was in the past, washed away with the floods that struck East Texas and sent buildings and bodies adrift on the wild waters that were unleashed. When the heavy rains came, as they did with regularity each spring, seasoned eyes watched as the water levels rose in the creeks. But no one had been prepared for the deluge that suddenly poured from the sky two years ago. John Cloud Feather, helping to save the schoolchildren from drowning, was been swept away by the mad torrents of water that claimed his life, not even leaving a body to be given the sacraments. The graveyard, too, had surrendered its buried bodies, washing them away and bringing a second death to the living who remained.

Salome was left a widow and this was her wedding day, but the recollection of the flood dominated her thoughts, perhaps because she was consumed by the need to cling to her memories, or perhaps to avoid the reality of what marriage entailed. The intimacy that she had shared with John Cloud Feather loomed as a violation against her long-ago vows.

Watching her, Father Diego could guess what she’d been thinking about. Memories were all that the residents of Santa Teresa had left. The priest looked at her with compassion. “Does Mr. Larkin know about Feather?” he asked gently.

Salome Burnett Gascoigne met the priest’s calm gaze. “He knows that I have a child,” she replied, evading the priest’s buried question. What he wanted to know was whether her husband-to-be knew that Feather Gascoigne was half-Indian. For too many Texans, all Indians were the fierce Apache or the warlike Comanche and it didn’t matter that there were other Indian tribes native to the region who had not caused suffering but who had suffered from it, and suffered from the hands of white man.

It was Father Diego who first brought the advertisement for a mail-order bride to Salome’s attention. The community, reduced in numbers by the flood, was being resettled. It was a long process to find new homes for people whose lives had been completely disrupted by a vengeful nature, but he regarded it as his duty. For a young woman with a child, marriage was the obvious solution. Salome, recognizing the pragmatism of his suggestion, had responded to the advertisement. Leaving Santa Teresa would not be easy; she would be leaving behind her memories, and they were happy ones. She possessed no hope that what was ahead of her would inspire any memories to match the ones she was abandoning.

The community of Santa Teresa was a collection of people who had known tragedy in their lives even before the flood. The young Mexican and Indian children, many of them orphans, would have been branded as half-breeds outside Santa Teresa, despised for the ancestry which had been part of Texas long before the Yankees came to conquer.  Inside the community, they were taught to read and write, but they also learned a brand of tolerance that Father Diego taught from his knowledge of the gospels and his kindly heart.

Salome had come here ten years ago after her parents were killed making their way across the prairie. She had been twelve years old; a silent, haunted girl for whom the mission settlement was her refuge from the bloody death that had struck the wagon train caravan. She grew to womanhood here, taught in the school here and eventually, when she was sixteen, had fallen in love here with John Cloud Feather Gascoigne, the Indian schoolmaster. Father Diego had married the young couple and baptized their daughter a year later. The events of their lives were a familiar tally of life in East Texas, where grief and joy were never far apart: five years of married harmony that ended in widowhood; one child thriving, another buried in the parish graveyard.

Father Diego had comforted his people as best he could, moved by their numb acceptance of loss. Salome would not leave East Texas; the souls of her dead child and her dead husband tied her to this rapacious land. A widowed woman whose husband was half-Caddo Indian, half French, with a beautiful daughter whose lineage was plainly visible in her bone structure and coloring, had choices to make.

Father Diego agreed to perform the ceremony provided that Kenyon Larkin came here for her and that they left as man and wife. Larkin had agreed, although he’d made it clear in his letter that he was no Roman Catholic, adding, “I’m not much of anything. I haven’t seen much of God lately.” That admission of battered faith had done more to win Father Diego’s trust than any false profession of religious belief could have done.

Salome’s few belongings were already packed. Her wedding ring was packed away as well; removing it from her finger had brought her to tears, a torrent of grief as she felt her husband leave her a second time. Feather was not so bereft; the wooden animals that her father had carved for her had turned up after the flood waters receded, safe in the metal box where they had been stored. She had been just two when her father died, but she seemed to remember him. The carved toys were her inheritance from the kind, wise, loving man who had adored his daughter and his wife and the community in which he had lived.

Salome was not marrying for love this time; the laconic letters from the man who sought a wife were a comfort to her because they clearly expected nothing in the way of passion
. I am about to turn 30,
he had written.
I lost my wife in the flood. I am alone,
he had writte
n, and I no longer wish to be.
There had been a clarity in his communication which had helped her to decide. To marry a man who was no stranger to the loss of life from the flooding would not be a betrayal of her love for John Cloud Feather Gascoigne. It was an acknowledgment that life went on although the love she had known was not gone. But Feather would have a home; she was a girl child and no threat to a man who would want sons. Feather would need a husband one day, and that would be for Salome to arrange somehow. Marriage was not the answer to all of her problems but it was a solution to the immediate one.

O
n his wedding day to Lorna, Kenyon Larkin had been dressed in his Union blues, his sword at his side and the War Between the States behind him. Lorna Cale was a Texas girl who’d gone to Georgia to stay with members of her family during the fighting. It was an odd courtship, to fall in love with a Confederate girl while serving with Sherman, but it had happened. Her family had been wary and her surviving brothers, all Confederate veterans, were cool to the marriage, but Larkin was a soldier and he’d fought because that was his profession. Politics was all talk and he wasn’t much of a talking man. He’d promised Lorna that when he left the army, they’d settle in her hometown, Beulah Land, in East Texas. Where he lived didn’t matter to him as long as Lorna was with him. He had no family living; he’d enlisted in the army at the age of sixteen after cholera killed his parents.

After the war, they’d ended up in northern Texas, where he’d continued his service to the army, keeping the settlers safe from the hostile Indians. When they returned to Lorna’s hometown, his neighbors took his Union blue past in their stride; Kenyon didn’t talk of the war and he shipped lumber and cattle just like everyone else. He wasn’t a Texan, but he was no longer a Yankee in Beulah Land either.

Larkin was a man who by nature kept to himself; it was Lorna who was a regular sunbeam and who knew everyone in town by name and by family. The townspeople had welcomed her husband into their midst with a cordial spirit that allowed him to be private. Even in his grief, when the bodies of the drowning victims turned up after the waters receded and he stood over her grave while the preacher sent her to heaven, he’d been undemonstrative. No tears. He wasn’t a crying man.

Since her passing, he only went into town once a season for supplies, filling the wagon according to the needs of the calendar and buying in profusion so that he would not have to venture into town again and face the sympathetic eyes of the people who had known Lorna, mourned her passing and pitied him for his solitude. But he couldn’t farm coffee and fence posts needed nails. He had most of what he needed and he didn’t want much.

He should have been accustomed to death. His parents and the war had indoctrinated him into the frailty of human flesh. But Lorna’s death had been the true lesson that life was fleeting, and death ravenous. He was not a fanciful man but he hated death as if it were a lover who had stolen his wife away against her will. Sometimes he felt like East Texas had taken her from him and as he gazed out upon his land, he always watched for signs that the rivers and creeks were going on the rampage again. All East Texans did; it was a natural instinct for a region afflicted by wild weather. But for Larkin, East Texas had taken his beloved from him.

Now, as he made his preparations to marry his second wife, Larkin thought back on his blessed first marriage. That promise that he’d made had killed her. They’d enjoyed three years together in East Texas. Good years. Now the good years were gone, washed away in the torrents of water that ravaged East Texas without warning,

Kenyon Larkin didn’t want a wife because he needed someone to cook his meals, wash his clothes, or warm his bed. He’d been a widower since Lorna’s death and he’d managed the practical tasks well enough. If he couldn’t learn to cook his meals, then he deserved to starve. If he didn’t know how to clean his soiled clothes with a basin of water and soap, then he deserved to be naked. If his clothes wore out, he wasn’t so poor of pocket that he couldn’t buy new shirts and britches. Larkin’s ten years in the army taught him how to take care of himself. He could do most things on his own or else do without.

Kenyon Larkin didn’t want a wife for any of the expected reasons and he wasn’t telling anyone why he’d advertised for a wife now. For one thing, he was a plain-speaking man and he didn’t feel up to courting any of the women in Beulah Land, Texas. He didn’t have pretty words or fancy thoughts, but that had been good enough for the finest woman God ever saw fit to put on the Earth. A mail-order bride was going into marriage with her eyes wide open and she wasn’t expecting romance; at least that was his understanding of the deal.

Which was how he wanted it because he had no romance in him. Still, he wanted a wife because there was a difference in a house with a woman living in it, and Kenyon Larkin missed that. A woman thought of things like weaving red rag rugs for the floor because they brightened a room, or fancying up a front yard with flowers planted where no one would expect flowers to bloom. Lorna’s talent for bringing life out of nothing was little short of a plumb miracle, but the flowers were there, growing back every year, a reminder of her presence. A wife knew how tired a man was at the end of the day, tired from work and the hot sun. But somehow, after a hearty meal, a woman could bring out two glasses of lemonade to the front porch, sit down in the rocking chair beside him, and the aches of the day faded to nothing, just because she was sitting there next to him.

He wanted a wife because there were differences between a man and a woman and he missed that. He was not from this wild, raw land and he blamed it for what it had done to his life when the rains took Lorna from him. But he couldn’t leave because this was where Lorna had been born, where she lived, and where her body waited in the ground until he was ready to join her in death.

Seeking a mail-order bride was not an easy decision, but he was twenty-nine years old and he wasn’t dead yet. Before a Texas flood carried him off too, he wanted to feel the peace of a front porch with a woman at his side.
 

However, it seemed only fitting that a man intending to be married should dress with respect for the vows, so he’d bought himself a new shirt and new britches.  Lorna would have expected him to do what was right and he wasn’t going to let her down.