Texas Bride: A Bitter Creek Novel

by Joan Johnston

  It was a testament to how much Creed loved his wife, that he hadn’t insisted on speaking to her himself.

  Alex hadn’t trusted the man to stay gone forever. And as long as Jarrett was alive, there was always the possibility that he would run into someone who would bring word back to Bitter Creek of his existence.

  So he’d offered Creed the deed to a cattle station in Queensland, Australia, which would put his rival an ocean and a continent away. It would also salve Alex’s conscience, since it was clear Creed had been cheated out of his home by an imposter.

  Jarrett Creed had been gone nearly ten years, but Alex had never stopped worrying that someday he might return and take back what had been stolen from him.

  So Alex’s heart always beat a little harder every time he returned to the house after he’d been away. His stomach always fluttered till he crossed the threshold and saw his wife’s face, her gray eyes alight with hard-won love for him.

  Although he’d been willing to hire servants, Cricket had insisted she could take care of the house on her own. It gave them more privacy, she said. So they lived in the house alone.

  It was eerily silent when he entered.

  “Cricket? Nash? Noah?”

  The house was cold. The fires in the fireplaces had been untended long enough to burn out. Alex was not the sort of man to panic, but he could think of no reason why his wife and sons should be gone so long from the house in weather like this.

  “Cricket?” he called again as he sprinted up the winding staircase. His heart jumped to his throat.

  Had his family been stolen away by the man he’d banished all those years ago?

  The bed in their room was unmade. The boys’ room had twin beds that had also been left in disarray. He checked the other rooms upstairs and found them empty.

  “Cricket!” he bellowed. “Are you in the house? Answer me!”

  He heard icy snow rattle against the windowpanes. He heard the whistle of the icy wind against the wood-frame house. But there was no reply to his anguished cry.

  His wife and his sons had mysteriously gone missing.

  Cricket Blackthorne wanted to meet her son’s mail-order bride, but the only way to do that was to go to Three Oaks. Otherwise, their paths were unlikely to cross. Jake had stopped coming to church after the death of his first wife, and because of Alex’s stranglehold on the businesses in Bitter Creek, Jake was forced to go all the way to San Antonio for supplies. She decided to bake a dried-apple pie and take it over as a welcome gift to Jake’s new bride.

  At least, that was the original plan.

  By the time Cricket got the pie baked, she realized that the snowy weather was going to prevent Jake from moving his cattle off Blackthorne land by sundown. She could have let things come to a head between her husband and her son, but she was certain Alex would keep his promise.

  And then, she would have to keep hers.

  She didn’t want to leave Alexander Blackthorne. She loved him despite his many flaws. Or perhaps because of them. He was not so different from her first husband, Jarrett Creed. Both were proud, stubborn, sometimes ruthless men. Both had endured difficult childhoods. It seemed Alex’s had left him scarred far more deeply than Jarrett’s.

  Alex was less likely to show compassion. Less likely to give way in an argument. Less likely to surrender, even to the lovemaking of his wife. It was as though he was afraid that if he showed any softness at all, he would be punished for it.

  Sometimes she missed Jarrett with an ache that was almost palpable. She yearned for the simple life they’d lived with their three sons and two daughters in the years before the War Between the States. The conflict had torn the country apart—and decimated her family.

  Cricket still grieved the husband who’d been killed in that horrible, seemingly endless war. Her three sons had returned to find their home invaded by an autocratic Englishman. Jake had stayed, but Flint and Ransom had headed for distant Wyoming within months of their arrival.

  It didn’t seem fair that she should lose so much. Long before the war was even a glimmer in some Southern gentleman’s eye, she’d lost her second daughter, nicknamed Muffin, to pneumonia. Cricket had never stopped mourning the lost promise of that four-year-old child.

  She’d been able to bear that calamity because she’d still had her elder daughter, Jesse. Because of the war, Jesse was now gone, too. Six months before the end of the conflict between North and South, Cricket’s twenty-year-old daughter had cut her hair, dressed in buckskins, and enlisted as a man to fight.

  There had been no word from her daughter since.

  That was ten years ago. Cricket imagined Jesse somewhere too far away to write letters, married to a man she loved, surrounded by laughing children. Anything else was too painful to contemplate.

  Even the cessation of hostilities hadn’t brought an end to the devastation. Cricket had lost her half brother Luke to a band of murdering carpetbaggers three months after the war was over. Long ago, Luke’s wife, Tomasita, and their three young children had all died of the smallpox they’d gotten from folks just moving through, to whom Luke and Tomasita had given shelter.

  Don Cruz Guerrero, who’d married Cricket’s eldest sister Sloan, had returned to Spain six months before the war started, unwilling to choose sides, taking Sloan and their two children with him. In thanks for his service to the king of Spain during the next several years, Don Cruz had been given an enormous grant of land near Madrid, far larger than the ranch he owned in Texas.

  The Guerreros hadn’t returned when the war ended. Cricket had exchanged enough letters with Sloan to know that her sister’s eldest son, Cisco, had married a beautiful senorita in Spain and made her a grandmother.

  Her beautiful daughter, Ana Maria, had finally, after two disgraceful broken engagements, found a third man, an English lord, to whom she was engaged—although the wedding at St. George’s in England had already been postponed once.

  Cricket’s sister Bayleigh, one year older, still owned a ranch not far off with her half-Comanche husband, Walker Coburn, but Bay’s children were grown and gone. Her daughter, Grace, had married a man headed to California, and her son, Whipp, had left to seek his fortune in the Montana Territory.

  Lately, Bay and Walker had been ostracized by their neighbors because he’d argued before the Texas legislature that the Indians remaining in Texas shouldn’t be hunted to extinction or moved to a reservation.

  The next thing Cricket knew, they’d gone for an extended visit to friends in Boston. She’d discovered that Walker was taking advantage of his proximity to Washington to make his pleas on behalf of the Indians to members of Congress.

  “Hey, Mom, is that pie for us?”

  Cricket slapped at her ten-year-old son’s hand as he reached for a bit of piecrust, but Nash laughed and jerked his hand away before she could catch him.

  “So, is it?” Nash’s twin brother, Noah, asked as he joined his brother in the kitchen.

  “It’s not for you. It’s for Jake’s new wife.”

  “I didn’t even know he was courting,” Nash said. “Who did he marry? My teacher, Miss Pettigrew, sure is pretty. That’s who I’d marry.”

  Cricket hadn’t realized what a can of worms she was opening, but there was no help for it now. She would have to explain. “Jake’s new wife is a mail-order bride.”

  The identical twin boys, showing signs of their father’s height already, with their father’s straight black hair and their mother’s distinctive gray eyes, made equally confused faces at each other.

  “He ordered a bride? How did he do that?” Nash asked.

  “Through the newspaper.” As Cricket explained, she wrapped the pie in a dishtowel and tied the corners together so she’d have a way to carry it on horseback. “The man who wants a wife advertises in the newspaper, and the woman who would like to be his bride answers the advertisement.”

  “I never saw any ad like that in the San Antonio paper,” Noah said.

  Cricket had be
en using the newspaper to help teach the boys to read. “He advertised in a Chicago newspaper.”

  “Whoa!” Noah exclaimed. “So his mail-order bride came all the way from Chicago?”

  “Yes, and she brought her two younger brothers along with her,” Cricket said.

  “How old are her brothers?” Nash asked.

  “I don’t know,” Cricket replied. “Would you like to go meet them?”

  The minute the words were out of her mouth, Cricket realized it was a good idea. The boys could help her herd Jake’s cattle back onto his land. They would also diffuse the tension, if there was any, between her and Slim and Jake’s new bride. Slim hated Blackthorne and merely tolerated her, but he’d always been cordial to her sons.

  “Dad won’t like it,” Noah pointed out.

  Alex had made it clear he didn’t want his sons fraternizing with Jake and Slim. “I’ll take care of any objections from your father,” she said.

  Cricket was pretty sure Alex was going to be a lot more angry about the fact that she’d moved Jake’s cattle than the fact that she’d taken her sons along to deliver an apple pie to Jake’s bride. He would grumble, but it would be too late for him to counter her actions.

  The snowy weather might have been an obstacle to her success, but she’d grown up at Three Oaks back in the days before statehood, when Texas was a Republic, a sovereign nation with its own president and its own army and navy. She could find her way there blindfolded.

  The three of them easily located Jake’s longhorns. The boys were good cattlemen, even at ten, but it took a great deal of effort to keep the cattle headed in the right direction for the three and a half long hours it took to drive them back to Jake’s ranch house, with snow blowing in their faces the whole way. The wind was so cold and fierce, it was no wonder the longhorns had turned their tails to it last night and drifted so far onto Blackthorne land.

  The three of them left the cattle huddled under one of the three oaks that surrounded Jake’s house and took their horses into the barn. They left their mounts saddled but scrubbed the snow off their hides with clean straw and put them in stalls with a little hay to eat before they headed to the house.

  “That pie’s got to be near frozen by now,” Nash said.

  “We can heat it up on the stove,” Cricket replied. “It’ll taste better warm, anyway.”

  “You think that lady from Chicago will know she should share it with company?” Noah asked.

  Cricket laughed and tugged down her son’s hat. “If she doesn’t, Slim does.”

  As they slogged through the snow the short distance to the house, Cricket wondered what kind of wife her son had picked the second time around. The girl must have written an impressive letter, since Cricket’s friend at the post office in San Antonio had told her Jake had gotten twenty-three replies. Her son had been so devastated by his wife’s death that Cricket felt sure he would never have married again, if not for the need to have a mother for his daughter.

  She had her fingers crossed that this wife would turn out to be not only a great mother but a great wife.

  She knocked at the kitchen door and let herself and the boys in. The twins dusted the snow off their hats by swatting them against their trousers and stomped their boots on the rug inside the door to get rid of the wet snow.

  “Hello? Anybody home?” Cricket called.

  There was no answer.

  Cricket felt a shiver roll down her spine at the eerie silence. She’d expected Jake to be gone, but where was his new wife and her two brothers? And Slim and the baby? “Hello!” she called again, louder.

  A skinny boy appeared in the kitchen doorway. He looked scared until he laid eyes on the two boys. Then he looked belligerent. “Who the hell are you? What do you want?”

  Cricket was taken aback by the boy’s language and shot her twins a look that warned them not to say anything. The boy was nearly as tall as her twins, but he looked to be nothing more than skin and bones.

  She took off her coat and hung it on the back of a kitchen chair, then checked the stove to see if it needed more wood on the fire. “I’m Jake’s mother,” she said. “I brought an apple pie as a welcome present for your sister. I presume you’re one of the former Miss Wentworth’s brothers.”

  “I am,” the kid said.

  “What’s your name?” Cricket asked.

  She saw the kid deciding whether he was going to tell her or not. Finally he said, “I’m Nick.”

  “Where’s your sister?” Cricket asked.

  “She rode out to find Jake.”

  Alarmed, Cricket asked, “Has something happened to him?”

  The boy sneered at her and said, “Nothing but that Blackthorne character showing up here and threatening to steal his cattle if he didn’t move them.”

  “My dad wouldn’t steal anything!” Nash retorted as he approached the boy with clenched fists. Noah stayed by his brother’s side, their shoulders brushing, presenting a deadly united front.

  “Nash, Noah,” Cricket warned. “Remember you’re guests in this home.”

  “He called Dad a thief,” Nash protested.

  “Well, since Jake’s cattle are outside under the live oaks, I guess your dad can’t very well be a thief, can he?” Cricket said.

  “You brought the cattle back?” Nick said. “Did you see my sister?”

  “No, I’m sorry, we didn’t. When did she go after Jake?”

  “This morning, right after breakfast.”

  Cricket bit her lip. “Was it snowing?”

  The kid nodded, his eyes desolate. “I told her not to go. I knew she’d get lost!”

  “She’s probably on her way home right now with Jake. Where’s Slim?”

  “He’s in his room with Anna Mae and my little brother.”

  “Do you think they’d like a piece of pie?”

  “I know I would,” Nick said. “We haven’t eaten since breakfast.”

  Cricket looked around the kitchen, noticing the unwashed dishes in the sink, the plates still on the table from breakfast. Alex must have frightened Jake’s new wife into leaving the house in a hurry. She’d obviously planned to be back before lunch or she would have made arrangements to feed the kids. Cricket was surprised Slim hadn’t fed them.

  “Did you tell Slim you were hungry?” she asked.

  “Wouldn’t ask that old man for a scrap of food if I was starving to death,” Nick said. “Which I am,” he added under his breath.

  Cricket felt her heart sink. It seemed things in Jake’s household were already headed downhill, and he hadn’t even been married for a day yet. She opened cupboards looking for something she could make for lunch and found a loaf of bread, a round of cheese, and a smoked ham. She searched through drawers looking for a clean knife to cut the bread.

  “Noah, find a knife and cut some slices of cheese. Nash, you find another one and cut some of that ham.” The three of them spread out around the kitchen, on whatever flat, empty surface they could find. Cricket looked at the boy still standing in the doorway and said, “Why don’t you go get your brother and Anna Mae and Slim? After lunch we can all have a slice of apple pie.”

  He stared hungrily at the pie, with its lattice crust, which she’d set on top of the stove to warm up, then turned and left the kitchen.

  “What’s wrong with him, Mom?” Nash asked, once he was gone.

  “He’s just hungry, I expect.” And lonely and scared, she thought. “Let’s get these sandwiches put together before they all get back here.”

  Cricket barely had the breakfast dishes cleared from the kitchen table when Slim showed up in the doorway in his wheelchair. Anna Mae was sitting in his lap. A very small boy appeared from behind the wheelchair, which he’d apparently been helping to push. His nose was running, and he swiped his sleeve across it as he said, “Nick said you have pie.”

  “What’s your name?” she asked the little boy as she crossed and wiped his nose on a dishtowel.

  “I’m Harry. Who are you?”<
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  “You can call me Cricket.”

  “Like the bug?” Harry asked.

  Cricket laughed. “Yes, like the bug.”

  “That’s a funny name.”

  “I guess it is,” Cricket agreed. “Are you hungry, Harry?”

  “Starving,” the boy admitted.

  If Nick was thin, Harry was a wraith. When she’d wiped his nose she’d felt his forehead was hot with fever. The little boy should be in a warm bed, not running around half dressed in this cold house.

  “Won’t ask what you’re doin’ here,” Slim said. “I ’spect I can figure it out for myself.”

  “The boys and I brought a pie over to welcome Jake’s bride.” She took a deep breath and added, “Since we were coming anyway, we rounded up Jake’s strays and brought them home.”

  Slim glanced at her sharply, then sniffed and said, “Smells good.”

  The pie was warming up and the smell of cinnamon wafted through the kitchen. “I don’t think Jake’s bride will mind if we have some of that pie before she gets back,” Cricket said.

  “If she gets back,” Slim muttered.

  “I’m surprised you’d send a tenderfoot out in a storm like this,” Cricket ventured as she set ham and cheese sandwiches on plates she’d had the twins put on the table.

  “Didn’t have no choice,” Slim said. “Had to get word to Jake about those cattle, so I sent Miranda out to find him. Didn’t ’spect you to show up here.”

  Miranda. Cricket felt a pang of sadness. That had been her daughter Muffin’s name, although they’d rarely used it. “Miranda should have found Jake by now, don’t you think?”

  “Probably got throwed and froze to death,” Slim said.

  “Miranda’s a good rider,” Nick said in her defense. “Or, at least, she used to be.”

  More likely, Cricket thought, Miranda and Jake were out on a wild-goose chase, hunting down the cattle Cricket had already returned. While everyone else started eating, Cricket found cups and pumped a glass of water for each of them to drink. Once that was done she said, “I’m going out to move those cattle into the corral. I don’t want them straying again before Jake has a chance to fix the fence. When I get back, I’ll cut everyone a piece of that pie.”