Texas Bride: A Bitter Creek Novel

by Joan Johnston

  When he picked up a big butcher knife, gooseflesh rose on Miranda’s arms. “Is Mrs. Swenson here?”

  He left her standing there and returned a few moments later, butcher knife still in hand, with Mrs. Swenson.

  “Oh, child, what are you doing here? I thought you were getting married.”

  “I am married,” Miranda said. “I wanted to make sure you got my note and gave it to Nick.”

  “I did. The boys left right away. I’m afraid I have no idea where they are now.”

  “Thank you!” Miranda said. “Thank you so much, Mrs. Swenson. I’ll never forget your kindness.” Without waiting for the woman to say another word, she edged past the Indian with the butcher knife and ran back down the alley to the outhouse. She’d made use of the chamber pot at the hotel, so she didn’t really need to use the necessary.

  She snuck down an alley between buildings that led to the back of the wagon, watching to make sure Jake didn’t see her as she crossed the open space on the street. She tried to spy under the canvas that covered the supplies, but it was tied down so tight she could see nothing.

  “Nick?” she whispered. “Harry?”

  “We’re here,” Nick whispered back.

  Satisfied they were safe, Miranda took a deep breath and let it out. She patted her face with her hanky to remove the signs of exertion after her race to and from the boarding house, then walked to the front of the wagon, where Jake was readjusting the harness along the left-hand horse’s shoulder. “I’m back,” she announced.

  “I was getting worried. Thought you’d run off. Or fell in.”

  She laughed feebly. “No. I’m here.” She started to climb up onto the wagon seat by herself, but before she could, Jake was by her side. He set his big hands on either side of her waist and lifted her up so she could put her feet on the floorboards. She felt breathless when she sat down, as much from the feel of a man’s hands on her waist as from the height of the wagon seat.

  “You all right up there?” he asked.

  “Fine.” She was happy to discover the seat was padded but wished she had a hat or an umbrella to protect her from the relentless sun. But she wasn’t about to ask her new husband for anything.

  She’d already gotten the boys this far. Now she needed to impress Jake with how very helpful—and how little trouble—she was going to be. Before they reached their destination, she had to convince him that he hadn’t made a mistake marrying a mail-order bride.

  “Did you hear that?” Jake asked, glancing over his shoulder as he released the hand brake on the wagon, slapped the reins, and clucked at the horses to get them moving.

  “What?” Miranda said. “I didn’t hear anything.”

  Except Harry’s sneeze … and a whimper … followed by a “Shh!”

  Desperate to distract Jake from the noise being made by the two little boys, Miranda asked, “Will we be sleeping in the same bed?”

  She watched his Adam’s apple bob before he replied, “Married folk usually do. Is that a problem?”

  Miranda blushed. “No. My parents did.” Then, because she was curious, and because a great deal depended on his answer, she asked, “What is your home like?”

  “It’s actually an old Southern plantation house, two stories, with tall columns that hold up a second-floor gallery porch.”

  “That sounds enormous,” Miranda said, feeling hopeful that there might be room for all of the Wentworths. “And beautiful.”

  “It used to be both—grand in size and magnificent to the eye,” Jake said. “Part of it, one wing, was burned down after the war by carpetbaggers.” His voice sounded bitter as he added, “Those bastards shot my uncle Luke and then hung every one of the freed slaves who’d stayed on at Three Oaks to work the cotton.”

  “How awful!” Miranda said.

  Jake’s face looked so fearsome it didn’t invite conversation. He stared at the road that stretched endlessly before them, apparently lost in his dark thoughts.

  She understood his pain because she’d endured it herself. “My house burned down in the Great Chicago Fire,” she said quietly. “My parents weren’t able to escape.”

  “Sorry to hear it,” he said gruffly.

  “I’ve been at the orphanage ever since. I was required to leave when I turned eighteen.”

  He raised a questioning brow. “Is that why you applied to be a mail-order bride?”

  She nodded. She wondered how many rooms in Jake’s plantation home had been left intact. Enough to house the rest of her family? “Have you ever thought about rebuilding the house?”

  “Without slaves, there was no way I could keep planting cotton, so I’ve become a rancher. The demand for beef has been good, but there are problems getting my cattle to market. The closest railhead is the Missouri Pacific in Abilene. I would have had to leave my late wife—” He swore under his breath.

  Miranda’s jaw dropped. “You’ve been married before?”

  He glanced at her, his eyes tortured, then turned his gaze back to the road. “I meant to tell you about Priscilla before the ceremony. I just never found the right time.”

  “How long ago did she die?”

  “I buried Priss last August,” he said through tight jaws.

  That was only six months ago! Miranda tried to imagine how Jake could even think of marrying again before a decent period of mourning was past. Decent being at least a year. But if he’d waited, she would be washing dishes right now. She had to be grateful that, for whatever reason, he’d decided to marry again.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” she said softly.

  “I loved her.”

  Miranda gritted her teeth. Of course he had. He’d married again for the reasons he’d mentioned in his advertisement. He needed someone to cook and clean. Someone to bear his children. He’d married a housemaid. And gotten himself a brood mare. “You should have told me you’re a widower.” She felt angry. And sad. And discouraged.

  “Would it have made a difference?”

  “I hoped …”

  “What?”

  She lifted her chin and replied, “I hoped my husband might learn to love me, even though we married under such unusual circumstances.” She lowered her eyes to her hands, threaded tightly in her lap. “I wonder now if your heart is free to love someone else.”

  He swore again.

  She heard a snort from the back of the wagon that she covered with a cough of her own. “I would rather you didn’t use that kind of language.” She didn’t want Harry, or especially Nick, who was older and more likely to try out such words, picking up bad habits.

  He didn’t apologize, but he didn’t swear again, either.

  He’d just turned to speak to her when the horse on the right shied away, then kicked out with both hind feet. Its hooves only missed her head because Jake yanked her halfway across his body at the last instant. The horses bolted and the wagon began to careen down the rutted dirt road.

  “Damned rabbits!” Jake grabbed for the reins he’d dropped when he’d rescued her from the kicking horse but they were beyond his grasp. She instinctively caught them as they slid across her lap toward the edge of the seat. She shoved the worn leather toward Jake, who wrapped both hands around the reins and pulled with all his might.

  “Whoa, Brutus! Whoa, Caesar!” he called in an amazingly calm voice. “Everything’s all right now. Easy, boys. Slow it down now. That’s it. Whoa, boys.” He turned to Miranda and said, “You’d think those damned rabbits were rattlesnakes, the way they jump when one darts out in front of them.”

  The wagon finally rolled to a stop. In the silence that followed the excitement, Miranda distinctly heard Nick yell, “Ow! Ow! Ow!”

  She stumbled down off the wagon seat and ran to the back of the wagon. Jake was a half second behind her.

  “What the hell is going on here?” he demanded.

  “Get this canvas off,” she ordered. When he didn’t move fast enough, she yelled, “Get it off! One of my brothers might be hurt.”
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  As Jake stood stunned, Miranda yanked on the knots that held the tarpaulin taut against the top of the wagon. She freed the cover enough to pull it back, at which point two towheads popped up.

  “Nick, are you all right?” Miranda asked anxiously.

  “Sheesh, Miranda. What the hell happened?” Nick said.

  “Nicholas Jackson Wentworth! If I ever hear you use language like that again, I’ll wash your mouth out with soap!” Miranda snapped. “Are you hurt? Or not?”

  Nick held up one hand cradled by the other, and she saw one of his wrists was already swelling.

  “A barrel of something fell over and landed on my arm.” He moved the hand a little, but he moaned when he did. “I think maybe it’s broken.”

  “Come here and let me see,” she commanded. “You might as well get out of there, too, Harry.”

  Miranda purposely didn’t look at Jake. She didn’t want to argue with him in front of the boys. She was pretty sure he’d use language she didn’t want them to hear.

  Harry came scrambling toward her and launched himself into her open arms. She pulled him close and hugged him tight, then set him down. He hid behind her skirt, eyeing Jake suspiciously. Nick had trouble scooting out of the wagon with the use of only one hand. Finally, he slid down onto the ground, groaning when he landed.

  “Let me see your wrist.” Miranda held out her hand and Nick laid his wrist in her palm. She didn’t see any obviously broken bone projecting from the skin, but when she tried to move the wrist, Nick howled.

  “That hurt!”

  At last, Miranda met Jake’s gaze. Her chin was tipped up defensively. “Do you have anything I could use to wrap his wrist? I don’t think it’s broken but—”

  “Let me take a look,” Jake said.

  Nick started to pull away when Jake reached for his wrist, but Miranda said, “Be still, Nick.”

  Miranda watched as Jake gently manipulated Nick’s wrist.

  When he was done, he said, “Move your fingers.”

  Nick slowly moved his fingers.

  “It’s not broken,” Jake said. “Looks like a bad sprain, though.” He pulled a red kerchief from his hip pocket and wrapped it several times around Nick’s wrist to keep it from moving, then tied it in a knot. When he was done, he took a step back and said to Miranda, “I think maybe you better introduce us.”

  She put an arm around Nick’s shoulder, although she had to reach up to do so and said, “This is my brother Nicholas, Nick for short. He’s ten and a good worker.”

  “Not with a sprained wrist, he won’t be,” Jake said.

  “He wouldn’t have been hurt if your horses hadn’t run away with the wagon,” Miranda shot back.

  “Who’s the runt?” Jake asked.

  Miranda tried to get Harry to come out from behind her, but he wouldn’t. At last she gave up and said, “Harrison is four. We call him Harry.”

  “How did they get here?” Jake demanded. “More important, why are they here?”

  “I traded in my first-class tickets to pay their passage,” Miranda said. “They’re here because I didn’t think it was safe to leave them behind at the orphanage.”

  “It’s a hell of a lot safer for kids in Chicago than it is here in Texas,” Jake said.

  “That’s a matter of opinion.”

  “What are you planning to do with them?” Jake asked.

  “I hoped they could live with us.”

  “There’s no room.”

  “You just told me you have a plantation home—”

  “That’s half burned down.”

  “Half a plantation sounds pretty big to me,” Miranda argued.

  “It might be if there wasn’t anybody but you and me living there. But my crippled father-in-law lives with me, and I’ve got—”

  “Nick and Harry won’t take up much room,” she interrupted. She started to say they could sleep with her. But that wouldn’t work, now that she was a wife. It was a good guess that Jake hadn’t planned a wedding night that included two little boys. “Surely there’s someplace in the house they could sleep. They don’t need a bed, just a pallet on the floor will do.”

  “That’s a good thing, because I don’t have an extra bedroom,” Jake said in exasperation.

  Harry tugged on her skirt. She glanced down and automatically reached for her hanky and wiped his nose.

  “The runt looks like he’s sick. What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s got a cold.”

  “I can’t have a sick kid living in my house,” Jake said.

  “It’s only a cold,” Miranda protested.

  “Colds are contagious, right?”

  “Neither Nick nor I have caught Harry’s cold, if that’s what you’re asking. We’re both fine. Harry just needs a warm place to sleep and a little food in his stomach and he’ll be well in no time.” At least, that was her hope.

  “I’m hungry, Miranda,” Harry said. “And I need the necessary.”

  “Didn’t you eat and take care of business at the boarding house? Mrs. Swenson promised to feed you.”

  “There wasn’t time for any of that,” Nick said. “I figured we better get to the wagon lickety-split. I didn’t want to risk getting left behind.”

  Without a look in Jake’s direction to see what effect that admission had on his temper, Miranda took Harry’s hand and walked off toward a patch of cactus that would provide a little privacy so he could relieve himself.

  She watched Jake take off his hat, run a frustrated hand through his black hair, then slam the hat back on and yank it low on his brow. He focused his gaze on Nick and said, “When was the last time you ate, boy?”

  Nick’s eyes never left the ground. “I don’t remember.”

  Jake turned to Miranda, his hands balled into fists at his waist, and said, “Why haven’t you fed these kids?”

  “We’ve eaten what we can, when we can,” she said. “You can’t buy food without money, and we don’t have any.”

  “You should have left them at the orphanage where they were safe.”

  “That’s just the point. They weren’t safe there,” Miranda said as she returned with her younger brother in tow. She straightened one of the braces that ran across Harry’s shoulder, holding up his short pants.

  Jake grimaced as Harry swiped at his runny nose with his sleeve and said, “I can’t have a sick kid in my home.”

  Miranda put her hands on her hips and demanded, “Why is a big, bad man like you so afraid of a little cold?”

  “It’s not me I’m worried about,” he shot back. “It’s my two-year-old daughter!”

  Jake watched the blood drain from his new wife’s face. Finding out he’d been married before was one thing. Apparently, finding out he also had a child was something else entirely.

  “What other secrets are you keeping?” she said, her voice trembling with emotion.

  “I could ask the same thing.”

  “None!”

  He might have believed her, except her brow furrowed after she spoke and her blue eyes looked shadowed. He wondered what else she’d concealed from him. Neglecting to mention her two brothers was a lie of omission at least equal to his failure to mention his daughter and the old man. His marriage was off to a roaring start, with lies and deceit on both sides.

  He shook his head. Two more mouths to feed. Two more kids who would be at risk in this wilderness. A bigger chance his new wife would end up exhausted at the end of every day. A bigger chance she’d sicken and die.

  It said something about the harshness of this land that, when he’d just married the woman, he already imagined her dead and buried. His Chicago-born bride didn’t understand how hard life was on an isolated ranch. Endless chores, work from dawn to dusk, and even then he felt like he couldn’t catch up. And there was no help to be had if disaster struck.

  He hadn’t wanted the responsibility of another wife, but he’d been desperate. He’d figured the rewards would balance the risks. Now he had two more small, p
recious lives to worry about—and protect from danger.

  “Get in the wagon,” he ordered Nick.

  “I don’t have to do what you say,” the kid said sullenly.

  Jake turned to his new wife and said, “I can see he’s not going to be a bit of trouble.”

  “Get in the wagon, Nick,” she said. When the older boy continued to stare through narrowed eyes at Jake without moving, she said, “Please, Nick. Do what he says.”

  When the boy had trouble climbing up one-handed, Jake got hold of the back of his trousers and tossed him up onto the wagon bed. The kid yelped in surprise as his butt landed on a crate of tinned peaches. The runt had a death grip on Miranda’s leg and started shrieking when Jake grabbed him by his skinny ribs and tore him away.

  “What are you doing?” Miranda cried, snatching at Jake’s shirtsleeves. “Leave him alone!”

  Jake tossed the runt onto a feed sack in the back of the wagon with the other one. “You coming or staying?” he asked as he tugged himself free of her hold and headed for the front of the wagon. He didn’t offer to help his wife up.

  But by the time he was ready to go, with the reins in his hands, Miranda was sitting there beside him. Spitting mad. Her teeth gritted, if the muscle working in her jaw was any measure. Her eyes narrowed and shooting blue fire.

  “You’re a bully and a brute!” she muttered.

  “You’re a liar and a cheat,” he shot back.

  That shut her up. For about a half second.

  “I won’t stand for you hurting my brothers.”

  “I helped them into the wagon.”

  “Threw them in, you mean.”

  He shrugged. “We needed to get moving. Daylight’s wasting.”

  He watched her survey the skyline, where the sun was sinking fast. She looked around and seemed to realize for the first time that they were in the middle of nowhere with night falling.

  “How far is it to your ranch?”

  “Couple of hours ought to do it.”

  She put a hand to her brow to shade her eyes so she could see into the distance and asked, “Will we get there before dark?”

  “Maybe. If we don’t keep stopping.”

  “You’re the one who stopped the wagon,” she reminded him.