UNCOMMON DUKE, AN

by BENSON, LAURIE

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  Christmas Dance with the Rancher

  by Carla Kelly

  BOOK ONE OF WESTERN CHRISTMAS PROPOSALS

  Chapter One

  Chastened, subdued and unhappy, Ned Avery woke up to “Cheyenne! Cheyenne! Fifteen minutes” from the porter walking through the rail car and clanking his three chimes.

  I’m not going home without a chore girl, Ned thought for the umpteenth time.

  Why had he left Pete alone with Pa for his recent trip to Cheyenne? Ned had gone over with Pete his plain and simple orders of taking care of Pa for ten days while Ned and his hands pushed the herd through to Cheyenne and onto the railcars for Chicago. Over and over and each time Pete nodded in his kindly way. Bread and tinned meat and fruit were each carefully numbered and arranged on the kitchen table, and still Pete nodded.

  I was a fool to think he’d follow through, Ned berated himself silently, as the Union Pacific slowed and steamed to a stop at the depot on Fifteenth Street.

  Even now, just a day after his return to the ranch from Cheyenne, he could still see the kitchen table with eight days’ worth of food gone, but two still as Ned had left them. Sitting in the rail car now, the crisis over, his heart started beating faster at the memory of food uneaten. He had run down the hall through the connecting rooms, calling for Pa, who was still alive for some reason.

  Pa’s mild indictment, as he deflected any blame from Peter and Ned, had hurt worse than the mess Pa lay in. “Son, I tried to get up and help myself,” Pa had told him, his voice softer than a whisper.

  The porter opened the door of the car, which pulled Ned out of his personal condemnation. Silent, he took his carpetbag from under the seat and waited behind an army officer for his turn to get off the train.

  Who’s going to run this ranch if I can’t trust Pete when I have to be away? ran through Ned’s mind again. In the end, there was only one solution: they needed a chore girl. Pa railed against being so dependent, but they still needed a chore girl. So he left to go straight back to Cheyenne.

  “I don’t know where to look,” he had whined to Mrs. Higgins, the wife of his nearest neighbor who had agreed to watch Pa and Pete while he made a rapid return to Cheyenne.

  “The Lord will provide,” Mrs. Higgins had assured him.

  He found this platitude not even slightly comforting. After sweet little Pete, as bright a brother as anyone could want, was kicked in the head by an irritated cow, and never grew up much in his mind, Ned hadn’t seen any reason to bother Deity.

  He knew better than to return a sharp comment to Mrs. Higgins, since she was kind enough to watch Pa and Pete, so he strove for diplomacy. “Mrs. Higgins, if the Lord is busy and not inclined to help, can you think of how He might provide a chore girl?” he asked. “I need a hint.”

  She gave him a pitying look, as if wondering why a grown man should ask such a question, but at least she didn’t turn away. She was going to get her licks in, though.

  “Ned Avery, when did you last go to church?”

  He thought a moment, hoping for an easy answer, but nothing came to mind beyond Ma’s funeral now well over ten years ago when he was twenty.

  “My mother’s funeral,” he said quietly, which at least seemed to deflect the scold he thought he saw in Mrs. Higgins’s eyes.

  “She was a good woman,” Mrs. Higgins said. “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.”

  This was no time for a theological argument about the Lord’s weird choice of people who should quit the earth, so Ned bit back his own comment. “Where can I find a chore girl?” he repeated.

  “Where does the Lord provide the most?” Mrs. Higgins asked, then thankfully answered her own question, because Ned was still coming up short. “Try a church in Cheyenne.”

  “Just wander up and ask the preacher if he knows of a chore girl?” Ned asked, his patience lurking just this side of exasperation.

  “No! Sometimes churches take in unfortunate women who have fallen on hard times.”

  “So I’ll need to count the silverware every night and hope no one tries to take advantage of my chastity?” he teased.

  “Try it, Ned,” Mrs. Higgins had said, and she did not sound amused. “You are trying my Christian patience.”

  * * *

  He tried it, asking the depot master where there might be a church in Cheyenne. Ned just barely remembered Cheyenne before the railroad came through, with Irishmen jabbering and swearing, and Mama trying to cover his ears and Pete’s at the same time. Cheyenne’s boomtown growth had brought gamblers and fancy ladies and Chinese laundries and cafes, but no church then. The matter hadn’t troubled him since, but now, if Mrs. Higgins was right, he needed to find a church.

  The depot master knew him. Hell, everyone knew the Averys of Medicine Bow. Dan Avery had been a Mississippi rebel among the earliest of former Confederates who followed the construction of the Union Pacific and stayed. From 1868 up to 1890, they had endured, and now times were better.

  “Ned, you might try Third Street. There’s a First Methodist Church on the corner.” He chuckled. “And you might try the Second Methodist Church on the opposite corner! There was a theological argument, I believe, and some chairs were thrown around.”

  Uncertain, Ned lingered at the depot. For some reason, he turned his attention to that corner of the lobby where only two nights ago, he had noticed a woman sitting on a trunk, chin in hand. He thought it odd that she wasn’t sitting on the bench, which made him suspect she trusted people as little as he did.

  She was long gone now, but he remembered her pale skin and her brown eyes, probably nothing special in themselves, except that her eyes were large and the brown so deep.

  He also remembered the worried look in them, and how he had just resisted the urge to go over there and ask her if something was wrong, and if he could help. He had even checked back later that evening, but she was gone by then. Whoever was supposed to meet her in Cheyenne must have finally arrived. Ned couldn’t help hoping she gave the man—husband, fiancé, whatever—a piece of her mind. Ladies had no business sitting alone in train depots.

  Never mind that. “Chore girl, chore girl,” he muttered out loud as he went first to the Plainsman to get a room for the night, ate lunch, and then went in search of the First or Second or maybe Third Methodist Church in town. Or maybe it was the Second Methodist Church on Fourth Street?

  The First Methodist Church promised some help, if only because a man stood by a signboard, putting up letters to spell next Sunday’s sermon. Ned watched for a moment as The Wag turned into The Wages of Sin.

  Ned thought about his most recent sin, a pleasant one, really, committed four days ago in Nettie Lewis’s parlor house on Third Street. Hopefully the man putting up the sign wouldn’t be able to read Ned’s misdemeanors on his face.

  “Sir, I’m looking for a chore girl,” he said, with no preamble. “The stationmaster said you might know some poor unfortunate lady a bit down on her luck and...”

  The man pointed across the street to the Second Methodist Church. “He takes in strays.”

  That was one way to put it. Ned couldn’t help conjuring up the image of a bedraggled pup that had wandered onto the Eight Bar many years ago. Mama had let him keep the ragged morsel until it became obvious they were harboring a wolf.

  Ned crossed the street to the building with raw, unpainted wood proclaiming itself the Second Methodist Church. He heard someone singing “Rock of Ages” in a vigorous baritone, and followed the sound.

  The singer was a man almost as short as he was round, slapping on paint in rhythm to his hymn. Ned watched in real appreciation until the man noticed him and stopped.

  “Did you come to help, sonny?” the man asked.

  Ned came closer and saw that the pa
inter was at least a decade older than his own father, but brimming with health and energy that Dan Avery no longer possessed.

  “Not quite, sir,” Ned told him. “I’m from the Eight Bar near Medicine Bow and I need to hire a chore girl in the worst way. A neighbor lady told me the Lord would provide, so I’m here.”

  “Reverend Lucius Peabody,” the man said. “Racine, Wisconsin, come West to rescue the damned. In the worst way, you say? That’s an odd way to phrase your needs in front of a minister of the gospel.”

  “Oh, no!” Ned began. “I mean I need to find such a person right now to help care for my father, who has heart disease, and look after the house. I’ll pay thirty dollars a month, but she has to be respect...”

  The minister held up his hand, brush and all, appearing not to notice the paint dripping down his arm. “I don’t run an employment agency,” he said, “but I might be able to help you. Come closer.”

  Ned did as he was bid, holding out his own handkerchief when the little man appeared not to possess such a thing. Reverend Peabody took it with a nod and wiped his arms after setting the brush in the tin can.

  “Two nights ago, the sheriff brought a little miss here. She’d been waiting for her fiancé from Lusk to pick her up at the depot.” The minister had dropped his voice to barely above a whisper.

  I know, I saw her, Ned thought, filled with chagrin that he had done nothing about his charitable impulse.

  “He hasn’t showed up yet?” Ned asked.

  “Worse than that,” Peabody said with a shake of his head. “She said her fiancé was a man from Maine, name of Saul Coffin. Sheriff Miller got a garbled telegram from Lusk’s sheriff, something about a shooting that left one man dead or nearly so, and the other in jail.” The minister looked skyward, as though expecting a vision. His hand went up to trace imaginary letters, courtesy of Western Union. “Bar fight. Stop. Coffin. Stop. Deader than Abe Lincoln. Stop.” He put his hand down. “Miss Peck said her fiancé had a foul temper, but who’s to say the coffin was just a coffin, with anybody in it, or the sheriff meant Saul Coffin?”

  “If Mr. Coffin never showed up, that’s a pretty good indication,” Ned began. “What’s the law like in Lusk?”

  “’Bout like this letter, sketchy, garbled and confused,” Peabody replied. “And the sheriff fought for the South. Writing coherent messages has never been his specialty.”

  He stood there for a long moment, sizing up Ned, who gazed back. “You don’t seem like a bad customer,” he said finally. “Follow me.”

  Not sure whether to be offended or amused, Ned followed him around the church to a side already painted, which featured a young woman standing on a wooden box, scrubbing the window.

  She was humming to herself and hadn’t seen them yet, so Ned hung back just to look at her, the same young woman he had noticed two days ago in the depot.

  Her hair was covered in a bandanna, but he already knew it was smooth and dark brown. He couldn’t see her entire face yet, but he recognized her trim figure.

  “Miss Peck?” the Reverend Peabody called.

  Even before she turned around, Ned knew he would see brown eyes of considerable depth. Now he saw interest and even recognition.

  “You were in the depot a few nights ago,” she said to Ned.

  At least, he thought that’s what she said. Her accent was charming, but nearly incomprehensible and made him shake his head.

  She must have seen that reaction several times since she had left wherever it was she came from. She repeated herself more slowly, and the words came out stilted and exaggerated, but understandable.

  “I was,” he replied. “Beg pardon, ma’am, but where are you from?”

  “The US, same’s you,” she said. “Maine.” She spoke slowly and distinctly. “Maybe you would introduce yourself?”

  Of course. Lord, he was a ninny. “Um, Edward Avery, ma’am, and you are?”

  “Katherine Peck,” she said. Still standing on the box, she set the wet rag in the bucket, swiped her hand across an apron many sizes too large for her, and held it out to him.

  He shook her hand, enjoying the firmness of her damp handshake.

  Ned had always been a man of swift decision. Perhaps Wyoming, with its vagaries and harsh living had pounded that into him. Maybe he even prided himself on his ability to size up someone. He took another look at Miss Katherine Peck, she of the impenetrable accent and no prospects, if she was washing windows for a preacher, and wasted not a minute.

  “Miss Peck, I’ll pay you thirty dollars a month to be my chore girl.”

  Copyright © 2016 by Carla Kelly

  ISBN-13: 9781488004438

  An Uncommon Duke

  Copyright © 2016 by Laurie Benson

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