Daniel slanted a glance at Wes. Did he not know that Charlotte had tried marrying Sam before Robbie Ashton charmed her? Surely he had to have some inkling that his sister had attempted to find a husband for herself twice this spring—and that Sam had been her first choice.
Of course, no one knew Sam had been writing Ellie for over a year when Charlotte decided she’d rather marry a familiar ranch hand than whatever stranger her father picked.
And watching Sam and Ellie together now sure wouldn’t give Wes any clues as to what had happened with his sister. Even sitting at the table, Sam couldn’t help but steal glances at his wife.
Ellie chose that minute to come to the table, balancing three plates with some kind of folded up meat pies in her arm. She set one in front of Wes, then him, then Sam.
“You have to admit, most women are married by her age.” Sam leaned back in his chair. “She turns twenty-one in a few more weeks.”
“My sister deserves to be happy, and though she seems to think Andrew Mortimer will make her happy, I’m not so sure.” Wes spread his napkin on his lap.
“Trouble is, she needs to find someone who makes both her and your pa happy, and that might be near impossible.” Daniel stuck a finger in his collar and tugged. Why did the air inside a room always seem to get hotter when he was talking about Charlotte?
“Poor woman.” Ellie placed a bowl of gravy in the center of the table. “I should probably be jealous of her living in that big fancy house and having rich men at her fingertips, but hearing all this only makes me want to ride out to the ranch and give her a hug.”
“Don’t worry, darlin’.” Sam reached for Ellie’s hand and gave it a squeeze. “God has His plan for Charlotte all figured out, just like He did for us. Now let’s pray before this food gets cold.”
Both Wes and Sam looked at him. Daniel couldn’t rightly say why he’d become the unofficial chaplain among them, but he’d been the first one to pray even back when their childhood friends Cain and Harrison had been living in Twin Rivers.
He bowed his head over his plate and uttered words of thanks.
“Thank you for lunch, Ellie.” Wes picked up his fork. “It smells delicious. But what is it?”
“It’s a pasty. They come from the copper mines up by Lake Superior.” Fondness filled Ellie’s voice, and her eyes took on a dreamy look as she talked about the faraway place where she and her siblings had grown up. “It’s leftover meat and vegetables rolled into a pie crust. Miners take them into the shafts and warm them over a fire when they break for lunch.”
“They’re phenomenal. We should start using them on cattle drives.” Sam reached for the gravy and ladled a heaping spoonful on top of his meat pie, then broke through the pastry shell with his fork. Steam wafted up from the meat and vegetables inside.
“Sam, you used a matchmaking service to find Ellie, right?” Wes shoveled food onto his fork but didn’t raise the utensil to his mouth. “Where a person in an office matched you up with Ellie and recommended you write her?”
“Yes.” Sam’s brows drew down. “Why do you ask?”
“Because I’m thinking about getting a bride myself.”
Sam choked on the bit of sweet tea he’d just downed, spraying droplets of liquid all over his plate.
“What do you mean, ‘getting a bride’?” Daniel searched his friend’s face, but Wes’s eyes were as dark and unreadable as always. “You’re still in love with Abigail.”
“That doesn’t make me any less in need of a wife.”
“You’re not ready.” Sam slanted a glance at Ellie, who had turned from the stove to watch them, her forehead knit with a puzzled look. “A bride expects her new husband to love her.”
“That’s why I’m thinking I’ll find a bride the way you did. Except I’ll take out an ad in the paper myself. I’ll put right in there that I want a practical marriage only, no mess of emotions.”
“It’ll never work.” Sam took another gulp of sweet tea, managing to swallow it this time. “Even if you were ready to marry again, if you wrote an ad saying one of the richest men in Texas was willing to marry a complete stranger, half the women in the Midwest would respond. You’d get two hundred letters a week.”
“So I won’t tell them I’m one of the richest men in Texas.”
“Oh, and that’s a good idea.” Daniel set his fork down, the rich flavors of Ellie’s cooking warring with a sour taste in his mouth. “Just how long do you plan to hide that from your bride?”
Surely Wes knew one glimpse of the A Bar W with its grand hacienda and trio of barns would reveal how wealthy he was.
“Until after we marry and I bring her home.”
“So your plan is to take out an ad in some newspaper asking for a bride, and tell her what?” Sam sat back and crossed his arms over his chest, half the food on his plate still untouched. “That you’re like me? A rancher with a small herd and a tract of land who needs a wife to come care for his house while he works the ranch?”
Wes gave a single, curt nod of his head. “Exactly.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard of.”
“Why now?” Daniel asked. “You weren’t even thinking of a wife two months ago.”
“And then Pa had his whole ridiculous house party. Every woman that came was either single or brought a single daughter or friend along with her. Last year, the women were polite and standoffish, considering I hadn’t buried Abigail all that long ago. But this year…” Wes pressed his eyes shut and pinched his eyebrows as though a headache had formed just above his eyes.
“The afternoon of the ball this woman, Lydia was her name, found me in the yard and said she wanted to explore what looked to be an abandoned cottage she’d seen riding the day before. So I took her out to the old bunkhouse. I shouldn’t have, but she’d been so clingy, and I figured if I tolerated her for a half hour, she’d leave me alone. Except once we stepped inside, the door locked behind us.” Wes hung his head, his shoulders slumped in an unnatural position for a man who went to the city and brokered deals for thousands of cattle at a time.
“Seeing how you didn’t have yourself a wedding, you must have figured out how to break the lock.” Daniel took another bite of his gravy-soaked pasty.
“Charlie was headed back from a ride right about then and saw us get trapped. She had just let us out when Lydia’s mother and sister came ambling along on their own pair of horses. I daresay they were more shocked to find we had been freed from the bunkhouse than they would have been to find us in a compromising situation.”
“So a woman you don’t want to marry tries trapping you into a wedding, and you suddenly decide you need to get hitched to a different woman you don’t want to marry?” Sam swirled his remaining sweet tea in his glass. “Makes perfect sense.”
“Nothing like this happened when Abigail was alive. Now I can’t go to a city without women looking at me and adding up dollar signs in their heads.” Wes shoved his hands into the air, only to let them drop listlessly back to the table. “I’m just fortunate Charlie was around or I’d already be hitched.”
Daniel picked up his long-forgotten fork and took a bite of food. “If you’re bound and determined to get married to someone you don’t love, marry someone from Twin Rivers like you did with Abigail. At least then she won’t feel like a complete stranger.”
“Who?” Wes took a gulp of tea. “It’s not like there are a lot of women around, and just about every one of them would tell me yes the first time I paid her a call. If I run an ad for a bride, I could weed through the responses until I find a woman willing to work hard and who won’t care whether or not I have money. I don’t see a downside.”
Sam crossed his arms over his chest. “I see twenty downsides. You won’t know anything about the woman you pick.”
“That’s what we said when Ellie came, and look how well that turned out.” Wes waved his hand absently toward Sam’s wife.
“I’d been writing her for a year. We knew plenty about each other, but even mo
re, I can tell you God was in our relationship from the first letter I ever wrote to her.”
Ellie, who’d been busy by the stove, turned to face them. “Sam was honest with me from the beginning. He told me he had little but the land he’d inherited and a hundred head of cattle. I don’t like you misrepresenting who you are to this woman you mean to send for.”
“I don’t like you marrying at all, because your feelings for Abigail still run too strong.” Daniel placed his elbows on the table and leaned forward. “If you came to us and said you wanted to marry a poor woman who needed help or protection, I could maybe see it. But your plan is akin to playing a trick on a woman.”
“No woman who marries a man she believes to be poor will complain once she finds out her husband is one of the richest men in Texas,” Wes snapped.
“She will if she values honesty.”
“You both probably think I’m a fool, but I’m not. I know what I want to do is a bit… unusual, but I also know what I had with Abigail, and I know what I lost the day she died. A love like that only comes around once in a man’s lifetime. I just wish I’d had more than four years with her. They weren’t enough. But then, I don’t know that ten years would have been enough, or twenty or thirty.” The usual darkness left Wes’s eyes, replaced by a vulnerability so open and heart-wrenching that Daniel found himself studying his plate.
“God might have more in mind for you.” Sam’s voice was gentle as he spoke. “Might even have another woman who—”
Wes slammed his hand down on the table. “He doesn’t. Don’t say such a thing. How would you like it if I told you Ellie could be replaced by someone else?”
Sam winced and rubbed the back of his neck. “I didn’t mean it that-a-way. We all know Abigail can’t be replaced, but that doesn’t mean God has an empty future ahead of you.”
“I never said my future would be empty. It just doesn’t have another woman like Abigail in it.” Wes blew out a breath, long and hard, then gave his head a small shake. “I’m not worried about the money one of those socialite wives would cost me if I marry from my pa’s set of business acquaintances. But I can’t take one of those fancy women from Austin or Houston or San Antonio and move her here to Twin Rivers when she’s used to balls and charity work. Who would she talk to?”
“Anna Mae and Ellie.” Daniel couldn’t exactly suggest Wes’s new wife would have Charlotte to talk to if Charlotte ended up marrying Mortimer and moving away.
“You think my highfalutin’ wife would see them as worth her time?” Wes glanced over at Ellie, who was making one of her delicious dried apple pies if the rolling pin in her hand was any indication. “Don’t be offended, Ellie. I just mean this new wife of mine would look at the womenfolk around Twin Rivers and see the type of people who would make good household staff, not friends. If I have to share my name and my house with a woman—and I mean that part about sharing my name and my house, because I certainly won’t be sharing my feelings or anything more—I’d rather it be with a woman like Ellie or Anna Mae or Charlie. One who’s not afraid of work. One who doesn’t mind living on the desert and says thank you for the roof I put over her head. A socialite would spend all her time complaining my roof is too far away from her friends and fancy parties.”
Daniel could see Wes’s point, but still… “It likely won’t be as easy as you make it sound.”
“This bride you pick, whoever she is, she’ll have hopes and dreams and feelings, and if you neglect her…” Sam’s words trailed off, and he slanted a glance at Ellie.
“She’ll be thankful for my money and my house.” Wes’s hand curled into a fist on the table. “She’ll want for nothing.”
“Except your heart,” Daniel muttered.
“What makes you think I have a heart left to give her?”
Daniel sighed. Did his friend really think he had so little to offer now that Abigail had died? Couldn’t he see his own value, that he still had purpose here on earth? But the hard glint in Wes’s eyes told him not only that Wes believed what he’d said, but that arguing would be a waste of time.
“Well, as insightful as this conversation has been…” Sam pushed his empty plate to the center of the table, then ran a finger around the inside of his collar. “I… uh, I have something to say, too.”
Daniel and Wes both looked at him.
“Come here, darlin’.” Sam reached for Ellie, who turned and wiped her flour-coated hands on her apron. She sent him a puzzled look, but the moment her hand landed in Sam’s, he tugged her into his lap.
She giggled but pushed against his chest. “Let me go. We have company.”
Sam only held her tighter, a smirk tilting the side of his mouth. “We’ve got some news to share.”
Ellie grew still in his arms. “Wait, I thought—”
“We’re having a baby.” A wide, goofy grin split Sam’s face.
“We haven’t even told the children yet, you goose.”
“And as soon as we do, they’ll let the entire town know. Daniel and Wes should hear this from me.”
“All right.” A blush worked its way across Ellie’s cheeks, and her eyes filled with tenderness.
“That’s great news.” Daniel scooted back from the table and walked over to give Ellie a hug, then clapped Sam on the back. “Family life looks good on you.”
“Isn’t it wonderful?” Sam flashed another one of his grins, this one so large it just might blind everyone in the valley. “Not that I don’t count Ellie’s siblings as family, but this will be different. I’ll have kin, offspring, people that share my blood. And look at this.” Sam raised his hands to encompass the room. “I’ve even got a house for them to live in, a tract of land I own.”
Daniel’s throat tightened. How much he took for granted with his own family—like the fact that he’d grown up with one and still had two living, breathing parents. “I couldn’t be happier for you.”
“Sam.” Wes’s voice emerged as a faint croak. His face had gone deathly pale, and he sat completely still on the opposite side of the table. “You can’t…”
But then he clamped his mouth shut, his Adam’s apple bobbing. For the second time that afternoon, Wes’s usually guarded eyes flashed with emotions.
“I have to get back to the ranch.” Wes shot up from his chair.
“Wait.” Sam nudged Ellie out of his lap.
The door to the house banged shut before Sam had time to stand.
“I’ll go after him.” Daniel moved to the door and heaved it open only to find Wes already astride Ares. “Wes!”
Wes looked over and raised his hand goodbye, then bolted out of the yard.
“Is he upset we’re going to have a baby?” Ellie’s voice floated through the door Daniel had left open.
Sam mumbled some kind of answer about how hard loosing Abigail had been on Wes, but Daniel couldn’t quite make out all the words.
The three of them had been friends for years. He could remember fishing at the river and canoeing upstream to Closed Canyon and playing hide and seek around the Westins’ ranch. He still recalled the time they’d caught Preacher Russell kissing Miss Emmaline before they’d been married, and putting a scorpion in the top drawer of the teacher’s desk at school.
Their laughter and smiles had come so easily then.
Sure, Sam smiled easily now that he’d found himself a wife, but what had happened to Wes? He’d lost his wife and a child, yes, but couldn’t he be just a little happy for Sam and Ellie?
Instead Wes was making plans to lie to a stranger and then marry her.
Daniel shifted from one foot to the other. Then again, who was he to condemn Wes when he couldn’t talk the woman he half-loved out of her plans to marry another man, he’d let an entire month go by without apprehending any more rustlers, and a rancher he’d known his whole life was on the brink of poverty because of it?
He, Sam, and Wes might be far removed from those days of playing hide-and-seek, but Sam was the only one who had anything good to sho
w for all the years that had come between.
A scream of pain rent the night.
Wes stood outside the door of the room he shared with Abigail, his heart pounding, sweat dripping down the side of his face. Was something wrong? Did it take most women this long to bring a babe into the world?
As the oldest child in his family, he remembered two of his three younger siblings being born. Ma had been in her room for a few hours, maybe half a day at most for the delivery. But Abigail had been ensconced in their bedroom for nearly two days, and he’d not been allowed inside once.
Silence followed the scream, and he could just make out the comforting murmurs of the midwife’s voice while Doc Grubbins issued instructions in a low, calm tone.
Wes drew in a breath, long and slow. Everything would be fine. Bringing a babe into the world was painful for women, but things shouldn’t take much longer now. He’d probably be holding his child within the hour.
Another scream pierced the night, this one so fierce and agonizing that his blood turned cold.
Wes woke with a start, but sitting up in bed did little to wipe the image of his pale, lifeless daughter from his mind. She’d been cleaned of blood, but that had somehow been worse, since her skin held a sickly grayish hue. Both Doc Grubbins and the midwife said the grayness indicated the babe had been dead inside Abigail before the birthing process started.
And Abigail…
Wes swallowed, but the thick ball of grief sprang right back up to fill his throat. His wife’s skin hadn’t been gray that night, no. It had been as pale as fine porcelain, yet her body had been just as lifeless as their daughter’s.
And the blood. Mounds and mounds of blood-soaked sheets and rags and towels had been piled on the floor beside the bed. He’d not known a person’s body held so much blood until he’d seen the soiled linens for himself.
Wes climbed out of bed—the very bed Abigail had once shared with him, the very bed she’d lain in on that fateful night—and strode to the west-facing window. A gust of wind whipped at him, ruffling his hair and his nightshirt along with the curtains pulled to the side of the window. He stared out over the landscape, the jagged rocks and scrubby bushes familiar even in the darkness.
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