by Holly Bush
Jennifer shrugged and smiled. “There was certainly nothing humorous about my dealings with Rothchild, but you must admit Mother thinking that Zeb was he, and calling out to him that evening, was, if not funny then certainly ironic.”
Jolene leaned forward in her seat and covered Jennifer’s hand with her own. “You are over it then. You have come to terms with . . . all of it.”
“No more or less than you have come to terms with Little William’s death, or Julia with being parted from Jillian all those years. But we battle on, don’t we? If we hadn’t we would not have found our husbands, the loves of our lives. You two would not have your children and I would not have my nieces and nephews and another addition to our family that will present him or herself in seven months or so,” Jennifer said and touched her stomach.
“Congratulations!” Jolene said and leaned forward to kiss her cheek.
“What wonderful news!” Julia cried. “What will the bank do without you?”
“The Crawford Bank will soon have new blood. Zeb will begin working with Father in less than three weeks. He will finally be done traveling back and forth to Washington helping Max get settled with a new chief of staff.”
“Perfect,” Jolene said. “An honorable man to carry on our family business for the next generation.”
“None of it would be possible without these wonderful men in our lives,” Julia said. “Your husbands are as dear to me as my own.”
“Nor without the strength and courage of the women in this family,” Jolene said and held her sister’s hands.
Jennifer held Julia’s hand then, completing the circle of family, and looked at the two women beside her. “Nor without love. Love does not end, even with tragedy and sadness, and has given us the will to go on.”
Hello Readers!
Thank you for purchasing Her Safe Harbor, Crawford Family Book 4. I hope you enjoyed Zeb and Jennifer’s story. Please share your thoughts with friends and family and with others on review sites and social media. The first book in this series is Train Station Bride, the second book is Contract to Wed, and The Maid’s Quarters Crawford Family Book 3, is a novella featuring a character from Contract to Wed.
Follow me on Face Book at Holly Bush, at hollybushbooks.com, or on Twitter @hollybushbooks to hear all the latest updates. I love to hear from readers!
You can also read excerpts from my other Prairie Historicals, Romancing Olive, Reconstructing Jackson, and Victorian Romances, Cross the Ocean and Charming the Duke at my website. Red, White and Screwed, a Women’s Fiction title, is a new category for me and I’m hoping you’ll give it a try! Find these books at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Itunes. Thanks again for your purchase! A sample of Romancing Olive is below.
Romancing Olive - Excerpt
Spencer, Ohio 1891
Olive Wilkins found the sheriff’s office as promised, beside a busy general store. The walls were thick stone, and the bars at the windows cast striped patterns on the floor. A weary-faced man with sun-toughened skin sat behind the desk.
“Just a minute . . .” the sheriff said.
Olive waited dutifully as he wrote, letting her eyes wander from the cells in the corner of the room to the gun belt looped over the hook near the door to the sign proclaiming Sheriff Bentley the law in this small Ohio town.
“What can I help you with, ma’am?’ he asked, as he looked up from his papers and tilted back his hat.
“My name is Olive Wilkins, and my brother, James Wilkins, and his wife, Sophie, lived here in Spencer. I am here to take his children back to my home in Philadelphia, but I am not quite sure with whom they are staying. The note from my sister-in-law’s family is unclear,” Olive explained as she pulled the oft-folded and unfolded letter from her bag.
The sheriff sat back in his chair and tapped his pencil stub against his mouth. “John and Mary are staying with Jacob Butler.”
“How are the Butlers related to my brother’s wife?”
“They’re not,” Sheriff Bentley replied.
“Then how did the children come to——”
“None of Sophie’s family, the Davises, would take them in,” he interrupted.
“Oh.”
“Jacob Butler couldn’t abide two children living on their own in that shack, so he took them home. He was your brother’s closest neighbor,” the sheriff explained.
“Sophie’s family abandoned them?” Olive asked. Could this man be talking about James’s nearest relatives? Could there be two sets of orphaned children in one small community? With the same names? No, there could not be.
“The Davis clan couldn’t tell you how many children or dogs belong to them, but they sure didn’t want more.”
Olive frowned, certain she had misunderstood. “My brother’s children lived alone on a farm? Surely Sophie’s family would have never ——”
“I don’t rightly know I’d call Jimmy’s place a farm,” the sheriff interjected, and met Olive’s bewildered eyes. “The worst part is I don’t know how long the children were in the house with their mother dead and if they saw her murder.”
Olive’s knees threatened to buckle, and her eyes darted from the sheriff’s face to her handbag to the desk. “How could that be? The Davises’ letter only said that James and Sophie had died. I . . . I just assumed that it had been influenza or a dreadful accident of some kind.”
The sheriff stood, came around the desk, and seated Olive in a chair. “Jimmy was killed when he got caught cheating at cards. He wagered the farm, and the man who killed him rode out and tried to stake his claim.” He looked away and grimaced. “When I got back to town a couple of days later, I rode out to check on Sophie. It looked like she put up a hell of a fight.”
Olive clutched the letter from her brother’s in-laws in her hand. In her mind’s eye she pictured her only sibling as a young man when she had last seen him. The pride of her mother and father, a charming and handsome boy who filled their Church Street home with laughter. At twenty years of age, he had loved Sophie Davis with such abandon; he’d left all he’d known behind to make a life with his new wife on the plains of Ohio. Sophie’s kin were farmers, and she wanted no life other than that which the soil and the tilling of it brought. So James announced his intentions of making Ohio his new home where he would farm and raise his family.
The death of Olive’s parents, only a year apart, had left her bereft, but she had cared for them through their illnesses and had seen their demises inch closer with each day. The news of James’s and Sophie’s deaths, however, left her grief-stricken. But her misery would certainly pale in comparison to the devastation John and Mary must feel. Without preamble, this pair of deaths had orphaned her ten-year-old niece and four-year-old nephew.
“And the children?” Olive asked.
“Couldn’t find hide nor hair of them wild things. Searched everywhere. Jacob checked the house about a week later and found them living there. Mary gave him a fight. She was scared to death, even though she knew Jacob and his children. And John, that boy hasn’t spoken a word since,” he replied.
Tears threatened Olive’s eyes. She could not decide which of all of this horrifying news was the worst. But it could not be. The sheriff must have some of this information wrong, otherwise . . . “I’ll have to make sure that Mr. and Mrs. Butler understand how thankful I am someone took in Mary and John.”
The sheriff propped a hip on the corner of his desk. “There is no Mrs. Butler. Jacob’s a widower. His wife died a year ago giving birth to their youngest son.”
“How . . . can you tell me how to arrange transportation to the Butlers’?” Olive asked.
“I’ll be going out that way tomorrow. I’ll rent a wagon, unless you ride. No? Then I’ll take you out there,” he offered.
“That’s very kind of you, Sheriff,” Olive replied. The social courtesies came without thought while her heart grappled with what the man had said. She pulled her cloak tightly around her and left the office feeling numb.
Oli
ve found herself walking aimlessly through town. In her mind she played and replayed the story the sheriff had told her, and it rubbed raw all that she knew to be true of how she was raised, how James was raised, how life was to be lived. She glanced down and only then realized she still held the letter that had brought the heartbreaking news.
Sophie’s family had written her that there was no one to take in the two small children after their parents’ deaths, so Olive faced the greatest challenge she had ever known. She would rescue these orphans, blood of her blood, and love them and take them back to Philadelphia where she would raise them in their father’s childhood home.
Olive had stared out the train window on the trip to Spencer, mile after mile, dreaming of Sunday afternoons at the ice cream parlor, helping John with his studies, and someday leading Mary into womanhood. What a wonderful continuation of the Wilkinses’ legacy Olive would be able to bestow. She would be firm but gentle, patient, with high expectations of these bright shining pennies. She would read them the letters their father had written, take them to church, and love them, and they would love her.