All Is Bright: Bridget’s Christmas Miracle (Mail-Order Brides of Laramie County 1)

by Faith Parsons

  MAIL-ORDER BRIDES OF LARAMIE COUNTY

  Bridget’s Christmas Miracle

  All Is Bright

  Faith Parsons

  All Is Bright: Bridget’s Christmas Miracle, by Faith Parsons

  Copyright 2015 - First electronic publication, December 2015

  All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distribute via the Internet or any other means, electronic or print, without the author's permission.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely incidental.

  THREE LOST SHEEP.

  TWO BROKEN FAMILIES.

  ONE BLIZZARD.

  After Chase Williams' first wife died of pneumonia while he was out-of-town, his young daughter stopped speaking. Three years later, he's still not ready to marry, but little Pearl desperately needs a mother. He doubts that any woman can heal his broken heart, but he's willing to propose to a woman who'll be kind to Pearl.

  As the oldest of six children, Bridget Doyle became responsible for the cooking and cleaning when her mother died of a post-partum fever. Marrying's not an option for her--if she leaves her two youngest siblings alone, who will stop their drunken father from taking the belt to them?

  Bridget discovers that her youngest brother, Tom, has been playing matchmaker: he's been writing letters on her behalf to a rancher in Wyoming. Not only has Chase proposed, he's agree to let her bring Tom and Mary with her. The catch--she's also got to find a way to communicate with his mute daughter Pearl, while playing second fiddle to the ghost of Chase's first wife.

  Will Bridget find a way to heal Chase's broken heart and bring two fragmented families together?

  All Is Bright: Bridget’s Christmas Miracle is a clean, inspirational mail order bride romance. While this book is part of a series, it can definitely be read as a standalone book.

  In Faith Parson’s heartwarming clean romance stories, courageous men and their mail-order brides join together to make a new life on the Western frontier.

  MAIL-ORDER BRIDES OF LARAMIE COUNTY

  Book 1 - All Is Bright: Bridget’s Christmas Miracle

  MAIL-ORDER BRIDES OF SALVATION

  Book 1 - Winning the Deputy's Heart

  Book 2 - Winning the Rancher's Heart

  Book 3 - Winning the Doctor’s Heart

  Book 4 - Winning the Bounty Hunter’s Heart

  Book 5 - Winning the Blacksmith’s Heart

  Book 6 - Winning Homesteader’s Heart (coming in January 2016)

  MAIL-ORDER BRIDES OF RESURRECTION

  Seven Brides for Seven Lawmen

  Book 1 - Samuel’s Secret

  Book 2 - Ethan’s Duty (coming in January 2016)

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  Chapter One

  Gritting her teeth, Bridget Doyle wrestled the heavy washbasin out onto the narrow balcony of her family’s Chicago tenement. It was a relief to set the basin of dirty water down and stretch her aching back. She rested her forearms on the tiny balcony’s railing with a sigh.

  Since Ma had died, it was all Bridget could do to keep up with the cooking and cleaning for Da and for her five siblings. When she needed a moment’s peace, she’d retreat to the balcony for a glimpse of the world outside their cramped apartment.

  The late autumn sun, dipping beneath the horizon, gave the smoky air an ethereal bluish cast. Somewhere in the rapidly-cooling evening, an infant wailed while a man and a woman shouted vile words at each other. A typical evening in the Irish neighborhood of Bridgeport.

  “It’s here!” Bridget’s little brother Tom burst onto the balcony, waving a piece of paper.

  Break over.

  “What’s here?” She bent down to grab hold of the tin basin. “Help me with this.”

  Tom gripped the other side of the basin and lifted.

  “Water coming,” Bridget shouted to warn anyone in the alley below, but all she heard was the scuffling of rats.

  Together, they tipped the basin and watched the dirty water cascade down four stories to the ground, where it splashed against the alley mud and mixed with other families’ washing water. Bridget heard a few panicked squeaks as some unfortunate rats got caught in the flood. The vermin wouldn’t find any food scraps in the water. All that was left on the Doyle family’s plates after supper was a few smears of gravy. Not that Bridget’s cooking was that good—seven hungry Doyles devoured every morsel.

  Bridget sighed again and wiped her hands on her thin, cotton apron after lowering the basin to the balcony’s floor. She brushed a few auburn strands of hair out of her eyes and waited for Tom to speak. His pale skin seemed almost ghostly in the rays of the dying sun, but his big, dark blue eyes shone with excitement. He had been so quiet at dinner—not even coughing as much as he usually did. While the older boys and their father grumbled and grunted about neighborhood politics, and the little ones scuffled and teased each other, Tom hadn’t said a word. He’d just smiled at Bridget conspiratorially between bites of turnip stew.

  She guessed she was about to find out what he’d been up to.

  “Bridey—look!” He held the paper up, his maturing voice cracking. “The rancher in Wyoming Territory said yes.”

  She squinted at the letter. “What are you about, Tom?”

  “Chase Williams. He’s got three thousand sheep, and a little girl ‘bout the same age as Mary, and horses, and everything.”

  How did her little brother know a rancher in Wyoming? “Thomas Kincaid Doyle, what did you do?”

  Tom held up the letter like a shield. “I did it for you, Bridey! You said no to Seamus and Aengus and Carl—”

  “Because they wouldn’t let me bring you and Mary with me.” Ciaran and Davin, at sixteen and seventeen, already worked with Da in the factory. Siobhan would be fifteen next month, old enough to get work herself. But Tom was too sickly for factory work, and Mary was only seven. Bridget had accepted years ago that she’d be an old maid of twenty-five by the time Mary was old enough to do without her. “I’m not leaving, so just stop trying to get rid of your big sister.”

  “But that’s what I’m trying to tell you. He knows everything and he said he wants—” Tom’s voice cracked as he was overcome by a coughing fit.

  Bridget, used to the strained hacking that often wracked her little brother, gave him several hard thwacks on the back. It never seemed to help, but as least it was something she could do, instead of standing by helplessly as Tom gasped for air. She led him inside, out of the unhealthy air. Not that the air inside was much better.

  By the time Tom caught his breath, Bridget had fetched him some of the cold tea remaining in the pot from dinner. She waited until he’d calmed.

  “Explain yourself. Slowly. Who is Chase Williams and why is he writing to you?”

  “He wants to marry you.” Despite his pallor and ragged breathing, Tom was still smiling. “He proposed.”

  Proposed. A total stranger in the western territories had proposed. To her. The sudden surge of
hope that filled her…she gave it a vicious stomp. Ma hadn’t had a choice about leaving them. Bridget did. And she couldn’t choose to abandon her youngest siblings.

  Life was so unfair.

  “How does this man even know I exist?”

  “It didn’t cost anything to put your name in. I didn’t want you to be sad if no one was interested.”

  “Put my name in what?”

  “A mail-order bride catalogue.”

  Bridget clenched her jaw to keep her mouth from falling open. Quiet Tom, who spent his days with his nose in a book, playing matchmaker for her? She was supposed to be taking care of him, not vice versa.

  “So this rancher picked me at random?”

  Tom turned even paler. “No, Bridey. I’ve been writing to him. As you.”

  She closed her eyes. Took a deep breath. Opened them again. “Then it’s not me he wants to marry, it’s you.”

  “I only wrote things I knew you would say. Sometimes I asked you.”

  Lord, he had. Odd questions seeming to come out of nowhere, about what she liked, what she thought, what she wanted. The little rat. But she couldn’t be angry at him. Not when he was so worried about her becoming an old maid.

  Bridget took a deep breath. “How long has this been going on?”

  “Six months,” Tom answered. “He said Mary and me could come too.”

  Had this rancher understood what Tom was asking when he’d agreed to that? Or was it possible that Tom might be the one who didn’t understand? Taking in two extra mouths to feed for the sake of finding a wife. That could mean the man was a successful rancher.

  Or it might mean he was desperate.

  Bridget fingered the jagged, pink scar on her left cheek—a remnant of a whiskey bottle hurled by Da for some minor infraction shortly after her mother died. At least now Da left her alone. Being trapped in an unhappy marriage with a strange man in an unfamiliar place? Spinsterhood would be better.

  “Please, Bridey,” Tom begged. “Just read the letters. Give him a chance. For me and Mary.”

  “For you and Mary?”

  “I don’t want to work in the factory with Da.” Tom looked almost guilty for saying it. “Chase’s ranch has sheep and horses and dogs, and he grows so much food he can eat it right out of the garden, and he says the air ain’t sooty at all.”

  “Oh, Tom.” All the anger dropped out of Bridget at once. He seldom complained, but that didn’t stop Bridget from worrying about how sickly he was. Always the first to get sick in the winter, and the last to recover in spring. If marrying this rancher meant that Tom would get better, that he and Mary would never be hungry again… “I’ll read the letters. But don’t get your hopes up.”

  Tom nodded happily and hurried to the room he shared with his brothers, returning with a handful of rumpled papers. He held them out to her. “Mr. Chase thinks you’re pretty.”

  Bridget couldn’t help blushing, even though it was a spurious compliment from a stranger. Her fingers flew once again to the scar on her cheek. “That just proves he hasn’t seen me.”

  “He has too, I drew you for him.”

  Saints preserve me. “Did he send a picture back?”

  “He said he didn’t have a picture and he couldn't draw.”

  So she was choosing a husband sight unseen. On her eleven-year-old brother’s advice. But it wasn’t as if she had better options here. Marriage to a poor man like her father, scraping by for the rest of her life while Tom coughed himself to death and Mary followed in her footsteps. Maybe dying in childbirth just like Ma before she could see her siblings in better circumstances.

  What if this rancher could give them a better life? What if he was a good man looking to start a family of his own?

  “Off to bed with you. I’ve got some reading to do.”

  Chapter Two

  Standing on the platform and squinting down the tracks of the Union Pacific line as buffalos danced in his stomach, Chase Williams had to admit that he was nervous, and he didn’t like it. Not one bit.

  “I’ve faced down bandits, blizzards and wolves, so why should I be queasy at meeting a slip of an Irish girl?”

  “Because she’s going to be your wife in about an hour,” his practical self answered.

  Well, yes, there was that.

  Chase W straightened his shoulders.

  “She’s just a girl,” he reminded himself. A very pretty one, if the hand-sketched portrait she’d sent was in any way accurate. She came across as smart and kind in her letters. Seemed like she had a sense of humor, too, although her spelling could be a mite better.

  But really, as far as Chase was concerned, she could have the face and personality of an old ewe’s backside. As long as she was a good mother to Pearl. The fact that she’d asked to bring her brother and sister told him she was a caring person. He’d bet most men seeking a mail-order bride wouldn’t be willing to take on the extra burden of two children to feed. But she’d been clear from the beginning that she wouldn’t leave her siblings behind. She valued family above all.

  Exactly what Chase was looking for in a wife.

  By happy coincidence, her sister—Mary, if he remembered rightly—was just a year older than Pearl. And he could always use another ranch hand, so her brother Tom was welcome too. Most of the Irish men Chase had known were big, strapping lads, and no stranger to hard work. It was a fine situation, he thought. Almost as if God himself were setting things to right.

  Except… Chase gave a shake of his head, but that didn’t drive the thoughts away. Except with Ada. He couldn’t see the Lord’s hand in that, no matter how hard he tried. Ada, his beautiful, proud wife, dead and buried under the early snows before he’d even known she was sick. He hadn’t even been there to hold her hand as she died.

  Chase wasn’t ready to marry again, he knew it. But Pearl needed a mother, and that’s why he’d started looking for a mail-order bride. There were simply no respectable unmarried women to be found in Laramie, Wyoming Territory. Most of the women he’d written to had stopped replying when they learned he had a child from a previous marriage. He’d been lucky to find a woman who was willing to take on a stepdaughter. Expecting more than that was asking for a miracle.

  The train whistle brought him out of his reverie. He straightened his shoulders again, wishing he could have brought some flowers. Even though this December had been unseasonably warm and sunny—it had gotten up to thirty-five degrees already today—the only green thing remaining was the grass in the valley where his sheep were pastured.

  He was still smiling at the thought of giving his bride a bouquet of tough prairie grass when the train rolled to a smoky stop in front of him. Only a few passengers were disembarking, and anyone else who was meeting them had wisely chosen to wait inside the warm station.

  Then he saw her. His breath caught in his throat and the buffalos resumed their nervous dance. She might be just a slip of an Irish girl, but she was about to be his wife, and God bless him if she wasn’t even prettier than her picture.

  As she made her way down the steps, holding tightly to the hand of a rambunctious little girl with hair the color of flame, he noticed the milky paleness of Bridget’s skin, and how a few auburn curls had come loose from her tight bun and fluttered like dandelion fluff in the wind. Her lips curved up in a smile as she bent her head to say something to the little girl—Mary, he presumed. He thought, just briefly, that those lips would soon be his to kiss. She was tiny, smaller even then Ada...

  Ada. The comparison brought him up cold.

  He cleared his throat of the guilt that Pearl up unbidden like a spring flood. When Ada had died, he’d sworn he’d never again look at a woman the way he’d looked at her. And here he was, being disloyal to Ada’s memory over a girl he barely new.

  This is for Pearl, he admonished himself.

  Just then, the little girl pointed and shrieked. “There he is! There’s Mister Williams!”

  Bridget’s eyes followed Mary’s finger to the tall, hand
some stranger who stared at her with cold, dead eyes. Her hand unconsciously flew to her cheek. Oh no, he thinks I’m ugly. Or too young. Or he thinks he made a mistake.

  She said a quick prayer that he would not outright reject them, leaving them cold and alone on the platform. Or if he did, that he’d at least pay for their return tickets. Da had refused her even a few pennies of traveling money, so they’d had nothing but the sandwiches she’d packed after he’d stormed out to the pub.

  “Miss Doyle?” the stranger called, traversing the few yards that separated them.

  He looked nothing like she’d imagined. No, he looked so much better than she’d imagined. Don’t get attached just yet. He smiled now, but she’d seen the look on his face when she’d stepped down from the train, her scar clearly visible in the watery winter sunlight.

  “I’m Chase Williams. How do you do?” He stuck out a gloved hand.

  “Please, call me Bridget,” she managed, her thoughts still ranging wildly. What if there’s no return train until tomorrow, or even next week? Where would they stay? She didn’t have enough money for even one night in a boarding house.

  “I’m Mary Margaret Doyle!” Mary piped up, yanking her hand from Bridget’s and plucking at Chase’s sleeve before Bridget could stop her.

  “I’m seven. It’s cold here. Where’s Pearl?” Her head darted back and forth along the platform, as if Pearl might be hiding under one of the benches or among the weed stalks lining the tracks. “Is she inside? I’m hungry. It’s cooooold here!”

  Surprise flashed across Chase’s features at Mary’s outburst.

  Oh no, here it came.

  Chase couldn’t keep the surprise off his face as Mary looked up at him, eyebrows raised. It had been so long since his own daughter had spoken to him, he’d forgotten how exuberantly straightforward children could be. He held out his hand.