Carson's Christmas Bride (Hero Hearts; Lawmen's Brides Book 3)

by Natalie Dean

  Carson’s Christmas Bride

  Lawmen’s Brides Book Three

  Natalie Dean

  Eveline Hart

  Kenzo Publishing

  © Copyright 2018 by Kenzo Publishing - All rights reserved.

  In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document by either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited, and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.

  Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher.

  Dedication

  I’d like to dedicate this book to YOU! The readers of my books. Without your interest in reading these heartwarming stories of love on the frontier, I wouldn’t have made it this far. So thank you so much for taking the time to read any and hopefully all of my books.

  And I can’t leave out my wonderful mother, son, sister, and Auntie. I love you all, and thank you for helping me make this happen.

  Most of all, I thank God for blessing me on this endeavor.

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  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

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  About Author - Natalie Dean

  Prologue

  August, 1852, Charleston, South Carolina, the Baker Plantation

  “Mary, you are such a worrier,” Sarah laughed as she closed the lid of her trunk. “I am going to be fine.”

  But her older sister’s face wore the worry frown that her siblings all recognized. Mary was a dear, but she could really take the cheer out of Christmas with her endless fretting. To Mary, adventure was something to be avoided. Better to remain where one was, where all was familiar, because that was the only way to be sure that there would be a roof over one’s head, food on the table, the assurance of people one knew, the utter absence of anything unpredicted or unexpected.

  Mary was thirty years old; at the age of twenty, she had married Loyal Reeves, the son of the neighbor whose rice plantation adjoined the Baker acreage. They had known each other since they were children. The Reeves farm prospered. Mary had borne seven children; five had lived. Her mother had attended every birth, rejoicing over the healthy, crying infants and stoic with resignation at the two who had not drawn breath at their birth. It was the way of things. It was expected. It was tragic, but it was not unexpected.

  Mary’s puckered frown deepened. “You are going off to the frontier,” she pronounced the word as if it were located in the general vicinity of Sodom and Gomorrah. “You will have to cross thousands of miles of wilderness. There are savages all along the way. You are marrying a man you do not know. How can you possibly say that everything will be fine?”

  “Because it will. I am going to the frontier, just as the Israelites went to the Promised Land. I feel like Joshua, or Caleb, telling the Israelites of the wonderful things that await them.”

  Mary’s face curved reluctantly into a smile. “And I am the doubting Israelites, doomed to wander the wilderness for 40 years because I have not the faith to believe?” she asked.

  “No, Mary,” Sarah said as she impulsively hugged her sister. “You would not wander. You would have told Moses himself that you were staying put and you were not stepping forward one more foot into the unknown.”

  “Sarah!” Mary said, shocked. “You must not say such blasphemous things. I am sure that I would have done no such thing.”

  “And I am sure that you would,” Sarah laughed. “Mary, you must believe that this is right for me. I yearn for something that I’ll never find here. Can you not understand that?”

  Mary studied her younger sister. Sarah was twenty years old, the most beautiful of all the sisters; Mary freely acknowledged this. She was strong-willed but so charming that her siblings acquiesced to her wishes because she beguiled them into doing so. She was the very essence of a belle; their mother, who had been a renowned Charleston beauty in her youth, told them all so. And yet, despite Sarah’s ravishing looks, the lustrous black hair that framed her heart-shaped face, the green eyes that greeted the world with a brilliant emerald gaze, and the enviable figure that apportioned curves exactly where they ought to be, Sarah was not satisfied with her lot. She could have had any of the eligible bachelors in Charleston paying court to her if she merely crooked her little finger in their direction, but she was not interested.

  No, she wanted to do missionary work out West. As if one could not be a good Christian right here at home. To do that missionary work, she had to be married. Instead of marrying a local lad, she had advertised herself as a mail-order bride. A Texas doctor had replied to her advertisement.

  A stranger! Mother had wailed. Brothers John and James had been stunned, their wives aghast. Sisters Bess and Ann had been horrified, their husbands puzzled at the news. Even Loyal, who was a dear man, had found the news perturbing. Father had been silent, but then Father had always been indulgent toward his youngest child. Letting her nurse at the Charleston hospital to take care of the wounded soldiers returning from the Mexican War when she was only seventeen! Then letting her marry—

  Perhaps it was the marriage, Mary thought. And then, losing him so quickly. Just three weeks after the wedding and he was gone. Mortifying, really. Perhaps that was what lay at the root of this restlessness in Sarah.

  Mary brightened. “You could marry a Charleston widower,” she suggested as if this were a palatable option.

  “Why should I want to marry a Charleston widower?” Sarah asked curiously.

  “Because you are a widow,” Mary answered in matter-of-fact tones.

  Dear Mary, Sarah thought. Always so quick to find what, to her, seemed a logical explanation for what she could not understand. As if she wanted to go West to marry a widower because the disappearance of Dante Robards just weeks after their wedding had branded her in some morbid fashion. True, Dr. Boone was a widower, having lost his wife in a smallpox outbreak in the town of Knox Mills. But as he had written, he sought solace in the Lord’s work and he needed a wife who would join him in that work. Sarah, with her nursing skills and her faith, would be the perfect helpmeet for the frontier of Texas.

  “I do think it very foul of Mr. Robards to disappear in that ungentl
emanly fashion,” Mary went on.

  Sarah did not wish to talk about, or even think about, her marriage. She had been in love as if she were consumed by a fever. Dante Robards was handsome, suave, a man of distinction and breeding. Or so she had thought when she accepted his proposal just weeks after meeting him. Then she had found out that while it was true that he was the oldest son of a cotton plantation owner in Mississippi, he had been turned out by his father and disinherited. He was a gambler and he made his living on the turn of the cards. When he vanished, the assumption was that he had been done in by one of the men to whom he owed money. Sarah had worn her widow’s weeds for a year and lived a private, retiring life in her parents’ home. After a year of mourning, she resumed her wardrobe and her maiden name. Mother had been scandalized by both actions, but Father had seemed to approve.

  Mary sighed. A good deal of this, she thought, could be blamed on Mr. Robards.

  “Mary, it’s not about him. Truly it isn’t. I simply want more from life.”

  “But what more can a woman want?” Mary asked.

  They were in Sarah’s bedroom. Her trunks were packed. Tomorrow she would leave for the wild unknown territory beyond civilized South Carolina. Tonight, the family would gather to dine together and bid her good-bye. They had all done their best to persuade her to change her mind and they had failed. Mary, however, did not capitulate so easily.

  “I don’t know,” Sarah answered honestly. “Love, I suppose. A purpose. When I was nursing, I felt as if I mattered. I was doing something worthwhile, something that needed to be done, and it was not something that everyone could do.”

  “That sounds quite like what it is to be a wife and mother,” Mary said tartly.

  It was no use explaining to Mary. Or to anyone, Sarah realized as she placed her Bible in her carpetbag. She felt called to go where she had never been, to do the Lord’s work in a place where life was not a well-worn habit. She knew that her family did not believe she had the stamina to last in the West. They were worried, of course, just as Mary was, but they were also dubious. They thought that Sarah, with her fastidious habits and her fashionable clothing and pert manner, was too much a belle to manage in a part of the country where life was dangerous and rough-edged.

  They did not realize that beneath her refined exterior, Sarah Baker had her own rough edges. She had concealed them for most of her life because she was a good Charleston girl. But inside, she craved a society where people were not ranked according to their family heritage or their social standing, but by their own accomplishments. She had read that women in the West were independent; no one would describe Charleston women that way. Charleston women were expected to be ornamental and dutiful; good daughters, good wives, good mothers, subject to the will of their fathers and husbands who regarded their womenfolk as frail vessels to be shielded from the reality of human life.

  But Sarah had seen men suffer in the hospital where she nursed. She had mopped up the blood after an amputation and she had held the hand of a dying man as he cried out for his wife. In the hospital, she had not been the spoiled youngest daughter of Josiah and Elizabeth Baker of Charleston. She had been needed and useful and she had not fainted when she cleaned a suppurating wound, nor blanched when she viewed a gangrenous limb. She had only been seventeen years old, but Dr. Madison had told her parents that she had the nerves of a woman twice her age and the spirit of a soldier. Mother had not found this to be a flattering portrait of her youngest daughter, but Father had smiled at the praise.

  After the nursing ended, life had seemed strangely stale. Perhaps that was why she had succumbed so readily to the wiles of Dante Robards. He was ten years her senior and a man of the world. Nothing like the Charleston beaux. But marriage had not been a fitting substitute for her work at the hospital. Dante had left Charleston without notice and eventually, it was assumed that he was dead. Sarah did not miss him. She regretted the foolishness that had led her to think she loved him, that was all.

  It would be different in Knox Mills, Texas, she was certain of that. The Lord was calling her to trust Him, to travel through the Wilderness and reach the Promised Land. There, she and her husband, Dr. Graham Boone, would tend to the sick bodies and souls of the people of Texas. She would be loved, and she would be needed. Everything that she longed for was waiting for her in Texas. It was in Knox Mills, Texas that she was needed.

  Chapter 1

  November 2, 1852, Knox Mills, Texas

  Mayor Abe Winslow, his customary gloom replaced by a smile, accepted the congratulations of his supporters. The election results had just been announced; the votes were counted and he had been elected to a second term as mayor. The outcome had been in doubt during most of the summer, until the Texas Rangers had managed to expose the Townsend clan for their perfidious corruption. Lance Townsend had left town in disgrace, his intention to become mayor dealt a death blow. Old Abel Townsend had backed another candidate for the position, but the voters of Knox Mills had decided that they liked the work that Mayor Winslow had been doing and they wanted him to remain in office.

  Now that the voting was done, and the outcome announced, Knox Mills was celebrating. The sounds of banjos and fiddles could be heard throughout the town as the main street was taken up by dancing. Knox Mills was having a celebration and the townspeople were out in full force.

  Jack Walker, who had been concerned, up to the last minute, that the Townsends might try something underhanded, even at this stage, had sent earlier to Fort Worth to have soldiers count the votes. It was an unusual request, but the soldiers respected the work of the U.S. Marshals. Captain Avery Litzinger and Lieutenant Robert Mains had shown up in Knox Mills the day before so that they could be there for the voting as well as the counting.

  Captain Litzinger gazed at the frolicking men and women partnering one another as the music played.

  “Looks like folks are having a good time,” he observed. “Seems a shame they have to do their dancing out in the street.”

  Jack just smiled. “We’re growing, but there’s no place in town that could host a party this big,” he said. “The weather is good, the music is fine, and folks want to enjoy it. They tell me this is the mildest November Knox Mills has had in years.”

  “It’s a fair sight,” the captain agreed. “It doesn’t hold a candle to Michigan, mind you, but it has possibilities, although I’ll have to give Texas the edge for the weather. It gets mighty cold in Michigan.”

  “Michigan? That’s where you’re from?”

  “I was,” the captain agreed. “I’ll go back there one day, when I’m out of the army. Looking forward to it. What about you? You plan on settling here? You’re from back East, aren’t you?”

  Jack thought of his wife and baby boy at the house he had built. His home was wherever they were. “Knox Mills is home now,” he said.

  “Marshal! Marshal!”

  “What’s the matter, Elmer?”

  “It’s Boone, again. Drunk as a sailor. He’s raising a ruckus in the saloon because they won’t serve him any more liquor,” Elmer Raice told the marshal. “He says he’s celebrating because his wife is coming on the stage tomorrow.”

  “His wife?”

  “Haven’t you heard?” Elmer asked. “Boone got himself a mail-order bride, she’s coming all the way from Charleston. I reckon she don’t know what she’s in for.”

  Jack Walker sighed. “Excuse me, Captain, I’d better see to this. Boone’s a mean drunk and he’s liable to shoot someone because he can’t tell a gun barrel from the bottom of a whisky glass when he’s this way.”

  “What about your deputies?” the captain asked.

  “Benjamin Graves is at the office, keeping the jailbirds quiet. We’ve had a few incidents today; nothing serious, but enough to put them behind bars for the night. And Carson . . . there’s Carson.”

  The captain followed Jack’s pointed finger. A tall, lean young man with ebony dark hair was dancing with a woman. He was graceful enough, but it was clear
that he enjoyed dancing for the sheer physical release that it provided. As he and his partner twirled to the music, it was obvious that she had eyes only for him, and he was oblivious to her adoration.

  “That’s part of a deputy’s duties?” the captain asked with a grin. “Maybe I should take up law enforcement when I leave the military.”

  “Carson usually gets the bottom of the privy tasks,” Jack said, “because he has the least seniority. It doesn’t hurt to give him some time to enjoy himself. Besides, I’ve got a new deputy coming in, and then he’ll get the work that Carson gets.”

  “Including the dancing?”

  Jack’s smile acknowledged the sally. “It might be awhile before we have a party like this. I’ll stop in at the hotel to say good-bye before the day is over. For now, I’m off to the saloon to bring Boone in.”

  As he entered the saloon, chaos greeted him. Boone wasn’t using a gun, he was splashing whiskey from a bottle at anyone who came near. No one feared the bottle, but they were wary of what a glass bottle could do if it became a weapon. Others, who found the spectacle a form of entertainment, were egging him on, asking him what he’d do when his mail-order bride arrived. There were warnings of what she would do if she caught him in a saloon, to which Boone issued slurred threats of how he would respond if any woman tried to tell him what to do.