His Bewildering Bride (The Brides of Paradise Ranch - Spicy Version Book 3)

by Merry Farmer

  A ghost of a grin returned to Travis’s lips. “Is that what you want to do? Sew?”

  The very thought of being able to start over, to try again to build a business in this new town filled her with sunshine. “Yes,” she answered with a smile. “Very much.”

  “All right then.” Travis relaxed into his chair, setting his fork beside his plate without taking a bite. “If you want to sew or start a dress shop or something like that, I won’t stop you.”

  “Really?” She blinked. “Do you mean that? You wouldn’t mind it if your wife worked outside of the home?”

  Travis shrugged. “I don’t suppose I would. You’re obviously talented, and I can see in your eyes that you love it.”

  “Thank you, Travis.” She brimmed over with joy far more powerful than she expected. The chance to try once more to start a dress shop was even more fantastic than marrying and having a home. “That’s kind of you. Many husbands wouldn’t feel the same way.”

  She was left tingling with possibility. It was the first time she’d called him by his given name, the first time she’d referred to him out loud as her husband. It brought a flush to Travis’s handsome face.

  “I don’t know if I’ll end up being like most husbands,” he said. “Although I suspect every husband is unique in his own way.” He punctuated his comment with a smile, then asked, “Are you finished with your supper?”

  Wendy glanced down at her plate. As delicious as the food had been, between the amount that she’d already eaten and the odd conversation she’d just witnessed, she didn’t think she could manage another bite. “Yes, I am.”

  Travis nodded and stood. “Let’s go find your hotel room, then.”

  He came around the table to hold her chair out so she could stand, then offered his arm to escort her across the dining room. A few more patrons had arrived for supper, but none of them stared at the two of them together as much as Rex Bonneville and his daughters. The one named Melinda narrowed her eyes when Wendy glanced at her, but her gaze quickly flickered to Wendy’s gown. That was all Wendy needed to blossom into a proud smile.

  Mr. Gunn had a key waiting for them as they passed through the lobby. He showed them up to the second floor and a hallway that ran down the south wing of the hotel. Wendy had no idea such stately buildings existed on the wild frontier. The room Mr. Garrett had arranged for her was more spacious and beautiful than any room Wendy had lived in before. Her luggage had already been delivered and, as Mr. Gunn explained, one of the maids had taken the liberty of unpacking and hanging Wendy’s gowns.

  “I never dreamed I could be welcomed so cordially,” she told Travis when the two of them were alone again.

  “Well, except for my lunk of a brother,” Travis said with a shrug.

  “Yes,” Wendy agreed as diplomatically as she could.

  “Haskell is pretty excited about the prospect of brides coming out here from Hurst Home,” he went on to explain. “Folks have bent over backward for them in the hopes that others will get word of how nice it is and come. There’s a lot of single men eager to settle down and not nearly enough women.”

  “I know of several friends from Hurst Home who would like to find a husband.”

  That was it. The end of the conversation. The two of them stood there in silence. Travis rubbed the back of his neck. Wendy glanced around the room, fatigue beginning to sink into her bones. What now?

  After a few more seconds, Travis said, “I guess that’s it. I’d better be getting back to the ranch.”

  Wendy’s heart stumbled over itself. “You’re…you’re not staying here with me?”

  Travis’s eyes went wide. “I didn’t think you’d want me to, seeing as we just met and all. Howard Haskell is letting me stay on at his bunkhouse until things are sorted out with Bonneville, but I suppose…I suppose I could stay, if that’s what you’d like.”

  Was it? Yes. He was her husband. She wanted to get to know him better.

  No. He was a virtual stranger and so different from her it was laughable. It wouldn’t have been proper.

  Yes, if there was any chance that he might kiss her again.

  No! She shouldn’t be thinking things like that about a man she hadn’t known at this time yesterday.

  “If you’d rather stay where you’re comfortable,” she stuttered, “then by all means, don’t let me keep you from going home.”

  He rubbed his hands in front of him, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “It is pretty busy on the ranch, what with the calves and all. I might not officially work for Howard anymore, but I’ve been helping out.”

  “And I should probably rest after the activity of the day.”

  “You probably should.”

  “There will be plenty of time in the days and weeks to come.”

  “That’s right. There will be.”

  “We don’t have to have everything settled between us now.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Silence.

  They looked at each other. Wendy saw a hard-working, unsophisticated man with a good heart. Heaven only knew what he saw.

  At last, Travis took a breath. “Well, all right. I’ll be going. You have a good night.” He turned to head for the door.

  “You too. And Travis?”

  He paused and pivoted to face her, eyes alight with expectation.

  She gave him her warmest smile. “Thank you.”

  He relaxed, broad shoulders loosening. “Don’t mention it. It’s the least I could do.” He continued on his way out, shutting the door behind him.

  The least he could do? Marrying her? That was by far the most anyone had ever done for her.

  But it meant she was a married woman, a new woman, a woman she didn’t recognize.

  What had she done?

  Chapter Four

  Wendy was up bright and early the next morning, sewing box open, converting one of her handcrafted dresses to something more suitable for the dusty streets of Haskell. Wyoming was something of a surprise to her so far. It was a different world from the lush, humid greenery of Tennessee. The West was full of mountains and valleys, dust and rock, and entirely different vegetation. Clothing in this untamed new land would need to be serviceable while still maintaining the standards of fashion.

  But as much as she told herself those were the things she should be thinking about—design and construction and building a new business, now that it was something she could actually plan and strive for—her rebellious heart kept pushing her mind back to thoughts of Travis Montrose—his handsome face, his soft way of speaking, the way he looked at her as if she was a woman, not a color. Before long, her fingers stopped flying and her work sagged to her lap, and she found herself staring out the hotel window at a herd of cattle in the distance.

  Was Travis out working with those cattle now, even though he was in limbo between two jobs? What must his life be like, toiling on the land, working for someone else, caring for animals that, frankly, made her nervous? She could almost see him with his sleeves rolled up, his shirt unbuttoned at the top, firm muscles flexing as he…as he… What did ranch hands actually do? Her mind’s eye was fixed on the sight of his broad shoulders and winsome smile. Her husband had such welcoming eyes.

  Where was he? Why had he left her in a hotel all by herself hours after marrying her? If he truly was between jobs, couldn’t he have spent time with her? Had he pretended to be accepting of her, and was he really as repelled by her as his brother?

  A knock at the door shot an arrow straight through Wendy’s looming worry. Travis? She gathered her sewing and stood, laying it on the bed before darting across the room to open the door.

  The expectant smile she’d put on faded at the sight of a petite, blond woman in the hotel’s maid’s uniform and cap with a basket over her arm.

  “God morgon, Mrs. Montrose,” the maid said with a smile. “My name is Olga. I’ve come to tidy your room.”

  “Oh.” Wendy’s face fell before she could recover from the disa
ppointment of not seeing Travis. And why should she be so flustered about a man who she had only just met and barely knew? “Thank you, Olga, please come in.” She stepped aside, gesturing for the maid to enter.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” Olga went on in her lilting, Scandinavian accent, crossing to put the basket on the small table by the window. She took out a rag and set to work right away cleaning the windows. “Truthfully, I thought you’d gone out.”

  “No, I was just working.” Although it didn’t seem right to work now, not with someone else in the room. Wendy crossed to the bed and checked the stitching she’d done that morning to be sure she’d come to a good stopping place.

  “I was certain Travis would come back to town to take you to breakfast,” Olga went on, arm working like a fury as she washed the window. “But everybody knows Travis is very responsible. He must still be helping out at Paradise Ranch. I bet he’ll—Ooh!”

  Olga glanced over her shoulder at Wendy, then broke off her rambling comments with gasp. She pulled away from the window and skipped across the room, clutching the window rag to her chest.

  “Is that what you were working on?” she asked.

  “Mmm hmm.” Wendy showed her dress to the excitable maid.

  Olga reached out, but stopped short of touching Wendy’s work. “My hands are dirty,” she explained. “But it’s so beautiful. You have such small, even stitches. I noticed how fine your dresses are when I unpacked them yesterday.”

  “That was you?”

  “Ja. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all. Thank you.”

  Olga glanced up at her with wide, blue eyes. “Did you make all of those dresses yourself?”

  “I did.” Wendy grinned. Olga’s enthusiasm was infectious.

  “I was a seamstress back in Sweden,” Olga revealed.

  “You were?” A sudden bolt of kinship made Wendy warm to the tiny maid even more, and made the gears in her mind turn.

  “Ja. My family had a shop in Gothenburg. I was sad to leave it, if truth be told.”

  “Why did you?” Wendy sat on the edge of her bed, gesturing for Olga to sit with her. She was a resident of Haskell now, and married or not, it was about time she made friends with other residents. And since sweet Olga didn’t seem to bat an eyelash at how different they were, Wendy decided to focus on the ways they were the same.

  Olga shrugged as she sat. “My Papa made the decision that we would all move to America to seek our fortunes in the great, open West.”

  “Did he find his fortune?”

  Olga’s face fell. “No, Papa died on the ship over. Mama too. It was terrible. Half of the passengers and crew perished on that journey.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Wendy reached for the young woman’s hands, dirty or not, and squeezed them. “What did you do?”

  “Papa wanted to go to the West, so I took my share of the money we had and bought a train ticket. My brother, Hans, said I was foolish, that we should go to Minnesota, where so many of our countrymen had gone. I told him I would meet him there, but I had to do as Papa said and see the West first.” She shrugged, her smile returning, and finished with, “I ended up here. Mr. Garrett hired me as a maid, and Mr. Gunn has been kind in teaching me everything I need to know.”

  “But you miss sewing,” Wendy guessed.

  “Ja.” Olga let out a breath, lowering her eyes with a sheepish smile.

  Wendy grinned. If she did manage to start a new dressmaker’s business here in Haskell, if there were enough customers to warrant it, she had a feeling she had just found her first employee.

  “Olga, would you be interested in—”

  She didn’t have a chance to finish her question. There was a knock at the door. In their haste to get acquainted, neither Wendy nor Olga had shut the room’s door again, and now Travis stood in the doorway. Wendy’s heart danced in her chest.

  “I hope I’m not interrupting,” he said, taking a step into the room. He was dressed slightly more formally than yesterday, his face freshly shaved and his hair still damp from being washed.

  “Not at all.” Wendy bounced up from the bed and crossed to him. It was silly to be so excited about a man coming to see her, but this was her husband. “Olga was just sharing the story of how she came to be in Haskell.”

  “I should be working,” Olga said, flying back to the window and scrubbing it with extra vigor. She did a poor job of pretending she wasn’t interested in them.

  Travis laughed. “Now, Olga, you know as well as I do that Mr. Gunn isn’t going to mind you taking a few minutes to talk to Haskell’s newest citizen.” Travis shifted closer to Wendy and added, “Gunn always says that people are more important than work, and if you treat everyone with value, they’ll work harder, because their hearts will be in it.”

  Wendy smiled from ear to ear. “I like Mr. Gunn more and more every moment.”

  “He’s a rare fellow.” That was it. Travis closed his mouth and blushed, as though just realizing he was in a woman’s hotel room. He glanced around, twirling the hat he held in his hands, then peeked back at her. “I thought I’d come by and give you a tour of the town, this being your first full day here and all.”

  “I’d like that.” She’d like more. She’d like to hear what Travis had to say about the town and its inhabitants. She’d like to hear what he had to say about himself.

  The two of them stood there, staring at each other in silence, for so long that Olga started to giggle. Travis cleared his throat and said, “Well, let’s get going.”

  He offered his arm. Wendy took it. Together, the two of them walked out through the sleepy hotel halls and into the sunny streets of downtown Haskell. A stiff breeze was blowing from the west, and Wendy had to keep one hand on her hat to stop it from blowing away.

  “So here’s the main part of Haskell,” Travis explained as they walked. “You’ve got your mercantile, the bank, the jail down there, the saloon, of course, and, well, that pink building there…”

  Wendy turned to the building Travis was trying not to look at. It was indeed pink, and a couple of scantily-clad young women lounged on the porch, clutching shawls around their shoulders. “Oh dear.” Wendy tried not to laugh, but it was so obviously a whorehouse that she couldn’t help herself. She tilted her head to one side, wondering if whoever owned the place and employed the “ladies” would be interested in providing warmer clothing for them. She wasn’t above sewing dresses for working girls, as long as it could be done discreetly. And they might stand a chance of being dressed more modestly if she had a hand in things.

  “Down there is the station, which you’ve already been to, and the church,” Travis went on, oblivious to her thoughts.

  “It’s a beautiful church,” she said. Her attention was still on the buildings that made up Haskell’s main street. “Are all of these shops occupied?”

  Travis stopped walking and faced her with a grin. “I think one or two might be free. Let me show you something else, though, if we can see if from here.”

  They changed directions and walked up the slight slope of the street. Wendy glanced over her shoulder as they went, more curious about possible vacant stores than where Travis was going. How big were the storefronts? Was there storage space in the back? Could she decorate the windows with examples of her work to draw the eye of passing women? Her mind spun with possibilities.

  They approached the hotel, but rather than heading back inside, Travis took Wendy around the corner to the side roads that ran perpendicular and then parallel to Main Street. There were more houses on those streets, as well as a few smaller businesses—such as a newspaper and print office and Mr. Waters’ livery—lined the roads as well.

  “Haskell certainly has room to grow,” Wendy commented as they walked on.

  “Howard designed it that way,” Travis agreed. “He wants Haskell to become as big as Cheyenne, or even Denver. I don’t know if that will happen.” He sent her an amused grin.

  “You never know, it could.”
And if she was really able to set up a dress shop before it did, fortune might smile down on her in ways she’d never imagined.

  They walked all the way to the edge of town, where a long, lonely road disappeared into the distance. The cattle Wendy had seen from her hotel window were barely visible as dots against the green and brown of the vast landscape.

  “There.” Travis pointed to the other side of the road from where the cattle roamed. “See that clump of buildings way off over that way?”

  Wendy squinted and looked. Sure enough, across the distance, a cluster of buildings stood out against the backdrop of mountains. “They look like a group of houses wandered away from town and got lost,” she chuckled.

  Travis’s lips twitched, partly in humor, but a bit of the light went out of his eyes. “That’s The Village,” he explained. Wendy dragged her eyes away from the houses to focus on him. “You know, the houses Howard is building for his ranch hands who send to Hurst Home for brides.”

  “Cody’s house.” Wendy gazed out over the vast, open stretch once more. She had to shield her eyes and squint to make them out. “I had no idea it was so far from the heart of town.”

  “It’s about midway between town and Paradise Ranch.”

  “Which is Howard Haskell’s ranch, right?”

  “Right,” Travis answered.

  Wendy lifted on her toes and searched the horizon. The landscape was more open than she was used to in the city, but also barren enough to make her shiver. “And where is Mr. Bonneville’s ranch?”

  “It’s about five miles that way.” He pointed just slightly to the right of The Village. “One bit of it adjoins Virginia Piedmont’s part of Paradise Ranch on the far side.”

  Wendy’s shoulders sagged. She peeked back at the rooftops making up Haskell, thinking of the empty storefronts on Main Street, then turned to stare off to the horizon. Five miles was a long way away. Travis had mentioned a cabin on Bonneville’s ranch that he would be given with his new job. She would be expected to live there too, of course. It would be a challenge to do the necessary socializing that led to courting new clients if she had to mind a house and husband so far from the town’s center, especially if she couldn’t afford to buy or rent a shop outright.