by Joyce Wright
© Copyright 2016 by Joyce Wright- All rights reserved.
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Contents
Another Mans Baby
More CLEAN Romance Books for you!!
Another CLEAN, Sweet Mail Order Bride Romance Book!!
About Author Joyce Wright
Chapter One
It was Jack Carruthers’ opinion that sooner or later, every wastrel, desperado, scoundrel and lunatic ended up in Texas. When he learned that his mail-order bride was waiting to meet him in the Drink Deep Saloon, he decided that it was time to add sucker to the inevitable population of the Lone Star State.
“You weren’t at the stagecoach to meet her,” Elizabeth Danvers, the proprietress of the saloon told him when he wandered in. It had been a half an hour after the stage had left and he was looking for his mail-order bride, Miss Etta Knightley of Oklahoma. There was no disguising the accusatory note in her voice. “Eldora saw her and brought her here.”
There was no use in explaining that he’d been late because cattle were freezing to death and he had spent the day trying to save what he could of a herd that shrunk in size every time it snowed. Elizabeth tolerated no excuses. The soiled doves of the Drink Deep might be the literal interpretation of the wages of sin that the preachers warned of in their Sunday sermons, but for Jack’s way of thinking, nothing could beat Lizzie’s gals when it came to Good Samaritans.
“She’s bone tired and worn out,” Lizzie said. “And ‘lessen I don’t know my women parts, that girl is in the family way.”
Jack’s head shot up from the glass of whiskey that she’d poured as they spoke. The bar was deserted in the mid-afternoon heat; the girls would be in their rooms and Tao, the Chinese cook, was in the back, preparing food for the meals that the Drink Deep served to thirsty customers when nighttime came.
“What do you mean?”
“When a gal has dark circles around her eyes, looks plum exhausted, and can’t keep her vittles down, I say she’s got a bun in the oven. I know you’ve promised to marry her, but you’d best make sure that you’re going to keep to those intentions. Otherwise, she’ll end up here, baby and all.”
“She didn’t say . . . never told me in her letter. Just said she was an orphan girl looking to marry.”
“It sounds like she’s telling the truth,” Lizzie said with pragmatic cheer as if the girl’s honesty trumped the reason honesty was required. “Ain’t the worst thing an orphan girl can do if she wants to find a husband, although I reckon the husband might not have been lookin’ for another man’s baby in his wife’s belly.”
It was three o’clock in the afternoon of the coldest winter in Texas memory and Jack Carruthers had been up before the sun, which wasn’t much of a sun at all this January, as the snow that had started in November was doing more to slaughter Texas beef than anything that a trail drive had delivered to the railroad. He was tired, he was damp from the snow, and now he discovered that he’d been swindled by the promise of a wife.
It had not been Jack’s intention to be a bachelor at the age of thirty but, although he’d risen through the ranks of cattle ranching from a green wrangler to trail boss for Big Jim Hoeffler’s Triple D Ranch, he was still living in the bunkhouse with the other cowboys. Big Jim was blunt. “Jack, if you don’t settle down with a woman soon, you’re going to be a lonely old cuss.”
Big Jim was right. Jack was weary of the all-night poker games and Saturday night carousing. He watched the young cowboys with a somewhat jaundiced eye as every penny they earned on a 1,000 mile cattle drive ended up squandered in Abilene when they got their pay. He was too old and too smart to spend money on saloon girls and a losing hand at a card game. He wanted a home. Big Jim, a widower who had been blessed with sons, saw matrimony as a business investment. If a man took a wife, he had a home, he got a family, and he had a stake in Texas. “If you don’t like what’s local, for God’s sake, set your sights farther. There’s mail-order brides from Massachusetts to California looking for a husband. Pick one. I’ll give you the cabin down by the creek for you and your wife. Might need a little fixing up but it’s sturdy and it’ll be a home for you and a family.”
After the summer cattle drive ended and the fall round-up was over, Jack had spent all of his free time fixing up the cabin. He’d put on a new roof and painted the doors, leveled out the floor and dug a patch for a garden in the spring. Money wasn’t a problem; he was a trail boss and Big Jim paid well. When the cabin was ready, he’d sent out his advertisement seeking a mail-order bride. Jack wasn’t particular; he needed a good woman who could keep house, cook, and sew. Not being married, he didn’t know what he wanted in a woman; he just knew that he wanted one and Los Lobos, Texas didn’t have any to spare. The town had a few women who were wives and whose daughters weren’t quite marriageable yet. But at his age, Jack had no interest in pretty schoolgirls, although the other hands were already eyeing up the pickings that would be available in a couple of years. There were the gals of the Drink Deep, but that wasn’t what he had in mind for a wife.
He’d thought that advertising for a good woman would cover what he couldn’t exactly write. Apparently it hadn’t.
“What are you gonna do, Jack?” Lizzie asked. It sounded like she was challenging him.
“I don’t know. What are you thinking?”
Lizzie had that look on her face. She’d given her best years to a string of men who’d enjoyed her company for the night. When the clients began to slow down, Lizzie proposed marriage to the owner of the Drink Deep, and he’d accepted. He’d been shot a couple of years later in a poker game gone wrong. The murderer hadn’t meant to hit Loosh Danvers, but the bullet had done its work and the cowboy’s days ended at the hanging tree. Lizzie inherited the saloon and the respectability of a widow. Still, Jack considered her a savvy woman, shrewd in the ways of the world, who knew a sight more about women than he did.
“I’m thinking that she’s not a bad girl, from the looks of her.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t think she meant to fool you. Something might have happened betwixt the time when she accepted your proposal and the time she came here. You settled on her when?”
“After the fall round-up. I said I’d be preparing the cabin for her. I didn’t want her to come to a run-down cabin.”
“So she had to wait until you were ready.”
“It’s not my fault, Lizzie, if she was romancing some young buck after she promised to come to Texas and marry me!” Jack said angrily.
“You don’t know what happen. Just because a young buck hears no, that don’t mean he listens. You better talk to her.”
Jack sighed. “You’re saying that if she’s in the family way, I should just pay no mind and marry her.”
“I’m saying there aren’t a lot of women in Texas. You’ve got one waiting for you. She ain’t going back to where she was ‘cause she ain’t got no one to go back to. So she’ll stay here and I’ll hire her on until she can’t work and then, after the baby is born, she’ll stay here to work. That’s the way of things.”
Lizzie sounded as if it were his fault that his marriage plans had turned into a smashup. He didn’t know what he was going to do, but he couldn’t stand there jawing all day.
“Where is she?”
“Room number 5, upstairs. And Jack . . . “
“What?”
“Be nice to her, whatever you decide. I think she’s been poorly done by.”
Chapter Two
He knocked on the door but there was no answer. He knocked louder. Still nothing. Cursing softly under his breath, Jack turned the doorknob and entered the room.
Sleeping on the bed, fully dressed in a dark blue traveling outfit, her stockinged feet visible below the hem of the dress, was a slip of a girl who looked to be no more than eighteen years old, with pretty brown curls spread out on the pillow. She was curled up like a child, her knees nearly meeting her elbow as she lay on her side. He couldn’t see much of her face except for a snub little nose that peeked out from a curtain of curls.
“Miss Etta,” he said softly, but she was in such a deep sleep that she didn’t wake. “Miss Etta,” he said, louder this time. When she still didn’t respond, Jack gently touched her shoulder.
The girl shot up from bed. “No, please, don’t—“
The look on her face was one of pure fright. “Miss Etta, I’m Jack,” he said.
“I—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be startled.”
“I didn’t mean to be late for the stage. It’s a rough winter and we’re having a hard time of it keeping the cattle from dying. Beg pardon for not being there on time.”
Etta straightened, swung her legs to the floor and stood up. “I’m very sorry to meet you this way, Mr. Carruthers. I intended for all of this to be very different.”
To his alarm, he spied a tear spilling from each eye. Before too long, the single tear became a stream, dampening her cheeks. She had good skin, he noticed; she showed no signs of having been in the sun and her face was as creamy as if she’d bathed in milk all her life.
“I cannot marry you, Mr. Carruthers,” she said, holding back a sob. “I am very sorry.”
Jack pulled up a chair. “Maybe you’d better fill me in, Miss Etta.”
Despite himself and his intentions to ignore Lizzie’s advice, the girl’s appearance pulled on his heartstrings. She was dressed respectably and there was no paint on her face. Mindful of what Lizzie had said, he sat down in the chair facing her.
“Why is that, Miss Etta?”
“Because . . .” her pale face turned crimson. “I am . . . I am not what you sought.”
“Why is that? You’ve come a long way from Oklahoma to tell me you can’t marry me.”
“I . . .” She looked away from his gaze. “I am not fit to be anyone’s wife.”
“Were you fit when you answered my advertisement?”
Her chin went up. “I was.”
“Then what happened after that? We exchanged letters and I sent you the money for the ticket to come here.”
“I will endeavor to repay you for that ticket,” she said firmly. “I have no funds on me at present, but I will earn my way.”
“How will you do that?”
He didn’t exactly expect an answer, but he didn’t expect a waterfall of tears either as her slender shoulders shook with the burden of sobbing that, if he was any judge, had been building for a long time.
“I . . . dear God, please leave me to my fate. I have told you that I cannot marry you, and you would not want me for your wife.”
Damn him for a fool, but this little girl had gotten under his skin with her big, dark eyes and her tears. “Miss Etta, how old are you? You said in your letter that you are twenty three, but you’re the youngest-looking twenty three-year old I’ve ever seen.”
She shook her head as she accepted his handkerchief. “I am twenty three, nearly. I will be so on my next birthday.”
“Which is when?”
“December 31.”
“I see.” Well, she wasn’t eighteen, but she wasn’t twenty three either.
“I have always looked younger than my age.”
“You don’t have many years to look younger than,” he said ruefully, mindful of his thirty years, the lines that the sun had etched around his eyes, and his tanned skin. “But never mind that. You haven’t told me why you can’t marry me.”
As she opened her mouth to speak, he continued, “But Lizzie has told me what she thinks. She suspects that you’re carrying a baby.”
He expected the tears to begin anew, but although her lower lip quivered, she steeled herself to remain composed. “Mrs. Danvers is correct,” she said.
“How’s about you tell me what happened?”
It was surprisingly easy to be calm. He realized that, although she was his mail-order bride, no emotions were at play as of yet. They had not courted or romanced; their letters had been brief and not particularly revealing. She had told him that she was an orphan living with a family and caring for their children, but that she had no kin of her own and wanted to move. What she had been or done before this moment could not be altered, but the fact remained that she was a woman in a state where females were in short supply. He was a bachelor. Texas was not a place where the lily-livered flourished.
“I would rather not.”
“Maybe so, but before we’re wed, we should know about each other. If there’s going to be a child before you and I are man and wife, I think I deserve the reason why.”
“Why would you marry me when you know the truth?”
She was young. The young were not pragmatic. Lizzie had it right. He’d fixed up the cabin and planned for a wife. That was still on track.
“You look respectable,” he said. “Whatever happened, and I don’t know if you fell in love with a bounder who told you a tale and left you or if you were ill-used by a villain, but a woman on her own in the West is a woman heading for trouble. You don’t want to earn your living the way you’d have to if you stayed here without a husband. You wouldn’t want your child to be born into that, would you? Now, I don’t know anything about what happened, and I don’t know if you and I will get on, but I reckon I can learn to be a father.”
Her dark eyes filled up with unshed tears; some of them glistened on the thick fringe of her eyelashes. “If you could do that, I would be most grateful to you for your kindness, Mr. Carruthers, and I promise that I would be no trouble to you and I would make sure that the child would not trouble you either—“
Jack held up his hands to halt the avalanche of words tumbling from her mount in tandem with the rush of tears streaming from her eyes.
“Miss Etta, it’s best not to make those kinds of promises. All we can do is our best.”
Chapter Three
Jack left Etta in the hands of Lizzie and the girls that night, knowing that he could count on them to take care of her. He returned to the ranch feeling as if his head contained too many thoughts for his heart to contain. That night, in the cabin that he’d fixed up, he sat at the rough-hewn table that he’d built, lighted the lamp against the early darkness, and considered his future.
Lizzie was a dab hand at planning. What Etta needed, she said, was a proper wedding. On the Drink Deep. In fact, at the Drink Deep, since Los Lobos was served by an itinerant preacher who wouldn’t be in town until Sunday and Lizzie didn’t think it wise to wait. One of the saloon regulars was a Congregationalist minister who’d left Connecticut to try his luck with Nevada silver, but the mines had failed and he had ended up in Los Lobos, doing odd jobs and drinking. Lizzie threatened to shut him off from the bar if he wasn’t sober the next day so that he could marry the couple. The promise of free-flowing whiskey after the wedding was sufficient enticement and the Reverend Addison Montgomery nursed his beer through the evening, obviously of the opinion that sober was a relative term. Eldora decided that she would stand up for Etta, and Big Jim vowed that if he couldn’t be best man, he wasn’t going to the wedding.
Jack had much to think about and he was of no use in
planning for the wedding, so his departure was not much commented on by the women; If Miss Etta thought anything of it, she gave nothing away. His bride-to-be was not what he had bargained for, but it didn’t sound as if she’d gotten out of life what she’d expected either. It was possible that she was lying and that she was marrying him to avoid a predicament of her own making, but she didn’t look the lying type and Lizzie could spot a liar on sight. She still hadn’t told him what had happened and he’d given up asking. When she was ready, she would tell him. Texas was big enough to hold secrets that couldn’t be shared and she didn’t look to be a loose woman who would bedevil their marriage with wanton behavior. She didn’t look wanton at all, to tell the truth; she barely looked old enough to put her hair up.
He smiled, despite himself, and shook his head. She said she was twenty three. And in eleven months, she would be. Here he was, thirty, about to be married and become father to another man’s child. There would be talk, when her time came, and no telling what folks would think. In the bunkhouse, the hands would speculate but no one would slander a woman, especially the wife of the trail boss. If she were due to deliver in the summer, he’d have to make sure that Lizzie was apprised of it; he’d be gone on the cattle drive, like as not.
If there were any cattle left to drive to Abilene. He was tired of seeing dead cattle frozen stiff, their bodies stuck to the hard ground. He wasn’t sentimental but it was troubling to see the herd suffering from the cold and snow. Big Jim was expecting losses, and he had deep pockets, but there was no question that this winter was hitting the ranchers hard. And with last year’s low prices for beef, ranchers had already seen a drop in profits.
Jack lived simply and had amassed a good amount of savings over the years. He hoped to buy his own spread one day, at least by the time he was thirty-five. Now in a year when he’d decided to take on the responsibilities of marriage—and a family—he realized that his goal might not happen in the time frame that he’d set. But as he’d said to Etta, all they could do was their best. Texas was home, but if he went broke in Texas, they’d move elsewhere. He’d done his share of traveling as a young man and thought to have it behind him.