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

by Natalie Dean

  “No. And Mary-Lee isn’t the only one with full hands.” Jack explained that Carson was also down with the disease, leaving him with only one deputy to share the load. “He’s doing well,” Jack said hastily, not wishing to casting aspersions on Justin’s performance. “And with the smallpox, things have been quiet. But I don’t want Benjamin or Carson coming back until they’re fully recovered. That leaves me short-handed. I don’t suppose you’d consider putting the star back on?” he suggested. “Temporarily?”

  “You planning on deputizing me?” Aurelius grinned.

  “You willing?”

  “I don’t know . . . I’m enjoying my leisure. I bought a piece of land from the Kennesaws and I’m looking to build. Right now, I’m bunking with Mary-Lee and Benjamin, but I don’t want to wear out my welcome.”

  “After years of you being absent,” Jack said tartly, “I don’t reckon you’ll wear out your welcome any time soon.”

  “It’s new to me, being in a family again. I’m used to living on the run.”

  “Don’t tell me you miss it!”

  Aurelius considered this. Jack reflected that, although it was easy to see the resemblance between Mary-Lee Graves and her father, Aurelius’ years out in the open had tanned his skin and given him lines around his eyes and mouth, the signs of a man who hadn’t had much daylight shelter. He was tall and lean, rangy, in fact, and although he was in his early fifties, he moved with the deft, economical movements of a panther. His hair had gone from pale blond to white with no transition. He looked neither young nor old, but he certainly looked like he could handle whatever came his way.

  “No,” Aurelius said at last. “I don’t think I miss it. But it changed me.”

  “All the more reason why you ought to become a lawman again,” Jack said promptly. “Sit down,” he told Aurelius. “I’ll fill you in. We’ve got trouble brewing with the Comanche. This latest smallpox outbreak has them restless, Fort Worth tells me. They think we do this deliberately.”

  Aurelius accepted Jack’s invitation and sat down upon the bench beside the desk, stretching his legs out in front of him. “Comanche restless,” he repeated. “That doesn’t bode well.”

  “No. The Fort is keeping us apprised of what they see so we can be prepared. Trouble is, with a town down sick, I don’t have my usual reinforcements. Then there’s this other matter of a runaway slave. His owner wants him back bad.”

  Aurelius’ lips curled in disdain. “I have no truck with slavers,” he said.

  “Doesn’t much matter,” Jack said frankly. “It’s the law.”

  Silence. Aurelius studied the scuffed toes of his well-worn boots. Time for a new pair, he guessed. He’d lost track of such things in all of his years fleeing from his brother’s avaricious searching. Settling down was what he wanted to do. He wanted to be part of Mary-Lee’s life; he owed it to her. And to the baby coming. At the same time, he wanted a chance to live his years as something other than a man on the run. Such changes took time.

  “Are you hunting this runaway?”

  “Nope. Folks in East Knox Mills keep to themselves and we let them. If a newcomer shows up in their midst, it’s up to them to decide whether they welcome him or not.”

  Aurelius nodded. “You expect this slave’s owner to come for him?”

  “Maybe not directly, but I’m getting the feeling that he’s got people searching. When folks own slaves, they see them as property, the way you or I would search high and low if a horse ran away.” Disgust was plain in Jack’s tone. “This country can’t go on this way for long, part slave, part free. If it’s not solved before long, it’ll be my child and your grandchild dealing with it.”

  Aurelius shook his head. “It’ll be solved before then,” he said, “and it’ll be you and Benjamin dealing with it. There will be war. I’ve traveled quite a bit. I see it coming. It’ll split this nation apart and I don’t know if it’ll ever get put back together.”

  “That’s for the politicians to decide, I guess. I just have to deal with what happens if out-of-state slave hunters come into town looking for a runaway.”

  “It won’t be that simple, Jack.”

  “I’ve got restless Comanches with a grudge, I’ve got smallpox, I’m down two deputies. I’m going to make it that simple.” Jack managed a bleak smile. “For the time being, at least. I could use you, Aurelius.”

  Aurelius was mindful of duty. “Okay.”

  * * *

  Jack Walker was much more successful in persuading ex-U.S. Marshal Aurelius Jameson to fill in as a deputy than Sarah had been in cajoling Elijah Shepherd to go to Dr. Darnley to be vaccinated. He refused, politely, her offer to have him ride in the wagon with her.

  “I walk everywhere I need to go, ma’am,” he said. “I’m not afeared of walking. But this is where I need to be.”

  When she tried to insist, he remained stubborn. Finally, the other man spoke. “It’s not fittin’, missus.”

  “What do you mean?” Sarah asked in exasperation. She had spent two hours looking after the patients, wiping their foreheads with clean water that the other man, who had not given a name, had brought in from the well. She had spooned broth into the mouths of those who were able to sit up and eat it. Then Preacher Shepherd had brought her a cup of coffee and told her to rest and drink it. He had a commanding presence and it had not seemed polite to refuse. That was when she had renewed her request for him to come with her to the hospital so that he could be vaccinated.

  The other man and Preacher Shepherd looked at each other, exchanging some mysterious communication that seemed to need no words. Preacher Shepherd drew a deep breath. “Ma’am,” he said, “I ‘spect you’ve got a great big heart. But my flock, we stay here. We make what we need or we do without. We get along fine. We’s free, you see. If we go into town with you, we remind folks that we’re here. We keep our papers close by at all times, but paper is easy to get rid of, and if folks decide that freed slaves might just as well be slaves again, well, we’d have nothing to fight with, you see.”

  “No one would do that!”

  “No slaves in town?” the other man asked.

  “Who are you?” she demanded. The coffee was good and had restored her sense of purpose. “I have no name to call you by.”

  “Some folks call me Laz,” he said.

  “Short for lazy,” joked Preacher Shepherd.

  “Very well, Laz,” Sarah continued, “yes, there are slaves in town. But the people of Fort Knox are not the sort who would come here, disturbing your community, to take you into slavery. They know very well that you are free now.”

  “Meaning no disrespect, missus,” Laz said, “but you’ve got white skin and I don’t. That’s what makes you free.”

  “That’s absurd!”

  “Maybe so,” he said. “But that’s how it is. Preacher . . . “

  “Go along now,” the big man said, as if he understood what Laz meant, although Sarah could not discern any message. “Come back later. Mrs. Baker has been doing a fine job here, the Lord’s work, ma’am, and we’re grateful.”

  “But you won’t come to town?”

  “No, ma’am, I won’t,” he said. “This is my place.”

  “What if you fall ill?”

  “I haven’t yet, ma’am,” he said.

  “But you might! And then what happens?”

  “Then I go to Glory Land and I meet my Savior.”

  “Elijah Shepherd, you are a very stubborn man.”

  “My wife said the same thing.”

  “Your wife?”

  The smile faded. “She’s gone now. She died this summer of the smallpox.”

  “Do you have children?”

  “I did have, ma’am.”

  “Did have?”

  “Two died. One was sold down the river. I don’t know where he be now.”

  The man spoke simply but the pain was etched in his face.

  “How did you become free?”

  “My master hired me out f
or my fiddle playing and he let me keep my earnings. When I had enough money for me and my wife to be free, I went to Master Curtis. My son was sold before I had enough time to earn his freedom.”

  “I am sorry,” Sarah said, knowing as she spoke that her words were inadequate. Her experience as the daughter of an affluent Charleston family who owned slaves had not prepared her for the reality of what it meant to those families of bondage.

  “Lots of folks are, ma’am,” he said.

  “But it’s not enough, is it?”

  “The Lord brought me here, ma’am,” he said. “I’m mighty grateful to him.”

  “But if you should catch the smallpox—"

  “I’m ready to meet my Lord any time, day or night.”

  “Perhaps you are, Preacher Shepherd. But your flock may not be quite as ready to lose you as you are ready to meet your Lord. You might consider that.”

  Chapter 24

  Sarah was unaccountably quiet during supper. Lucy, anxious because she thought that the supper was not pleasing, asked her several times if she wasn’t hungry.

  Sarah managed a smile. “Your cooking is excellent, Lucy,” she assured the girl.

  “Lucy works hard,” Carson said.

  Was there criticism in his words? Sarah looked at him closely, but he was intent upon his plate, although she noticed that he hadn’t made much of a dent in the meal either.

  “Too hard,” he added.

  “I want to do my part,” Lucy said.

  “You’re doing more than your part,” Carson said. “I’ll be lending you a hand. It’s time I started earning my keep around here.”

  “You helped me today,” Lucy reminded him. “You stirred the applesauce.”

  “It’s very fine applesauce, too,” Sarah said hastily. “Deputy Harlow is right, however. You are working too hard. I shall clean up from the meal. Why don’t you children go and play?”

  “It’s too dark out to play,” Carson said.

  “They can surely play inside,” Sarah said pointedly. “They have checkers and a checkerboard.”

  “That’ll do for two.”

  “I don’t want to play,” Lucy argued. “I’ll help Miss Sarah in here.”

  Although Sarah tried to persuade Lucy to go and amuse herself, the little girl refused. She would dry the dishes, she said, and Sarah could wash.

  Sarah had to hide a smile at the way the little girl did so enjoy giving orders, even when she was ostensibly just helping. “Very well,” Sarah said meekly.

  “Miss Sarah,” Lucy began when Carson and the other children had left the kitchen and she and Sarah were the only ones in the room.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you going to be nursing much longer?”

  “Only as long as I’m needed,” Sarah said. “Why?”

  “Just wondering. I think Deputy Harlow misses you when you’re gone.”

  “I hope he’s getting enough rest.”

  “I think he’s tired of resting, Miss Sarah. He went down to the barn with Erich this morning to help with the milking. He looked real tired when he came back. I told him he ought to go to bed and rest, but he didn’t want to. That’s when he helped me with the applesauce.”

  “I think Deputy Harlow wants to get back to being a lawman,” Sarah told Lucy. “Men don’t like being cooped up in the house.”

  “They don’t? Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose it’s because the house is really a woman’s domain.”

  “What’s a domain?”

  “A—like a kingdom. Women like their kingdoms. Don’t you?”

  Lucy dried the plate in her hands and stacked it on the table so that Sarah could put it away because Lucy wasn’t tall enough to reach. “I like being outside,” she said. “I like fine weather and swinging on the tree swing.”

  “I do too . . . well, I liked swinging on a tree swing when I was a girl. But . . . I like the way a home feels and it’s women who make it feel that way.”

  “Is this your home now?” Lucy asked in a low voice as if she feared the answer.

  “It is if you’re willing for it to be,” Sarah said. It was true. The cabin was humble and nothing like the grand Charleston abode where she had grown up. The smells of whatever had been cooked during the day lingered in the house long after the meals had been eaten. The floorboards were roughly hewn. The windows were too small. The bedrooms were Spartan in their plainness. The furnishings were functional and that was the best that could be said of them.

  But somehow, it had become home to her.

  “I’m willing.”

  Sarah handed her another plate. “Then it’s home.”

  “For Deputy Harlow, too?”

  “He boards with Mrs. Luckett. Or he did,” she corrected herself. “Yes, I think this is home for him, too. Or it will be.”

  “Why did he say he has to start earning his keep?”

  Lucy’s questions, innocently asked, probed into realms of thought that Sarah had not considered and was not sure that she wanted to consider. She had also noted Carson’s comment and had also been puzzled by it. He would return to his work as a lawman when he was well and he would resume earning his wages. In the meantime, Sarah had more than enough money to keep her family fed and comfortable, so she was at a loss to understand the meaning of his words.

  “I don’t know, Lucy. I suppose he’s bothered by being ill and feeling helpless.”

  “Miss Sarah . . .”

  “Yes?”

  Lucy wiped the plate well after any moisture was gone. Her gaze remained on the plate. “Miss Sarah . . .

  do you know what will happen to Pa?”

  Too late, Sarah recalled that she had intended to ask Marshal Walker about that very matter. What were his plans for Graham Boone after he was well enough to leave his sickbed? But she had been so caught up in the news that the smallpox had broken out among the freed slave community that she had hurried off to help.

  “I shall find out tomorrow, Lucy, I promise,” she said. “I will speak to the Marshal about your father.”

  “Miss Sarah . . .”

  “Yes, Lucy?”

  “I like the way it is now, with you here. And Deputy Harlow.”

  Sarah dried her hands and brought the little girl close to her. “I like it too, Lucy.”

  After the children were in bed, Sarah went to the bedroom. Carson was laying on top of the bed, but not in it. He looked tired, but not ill. Sarah moved closer to touch his forehead in order to confirm that he was no longer feverish. She was startled when he jerked his head away.

  Hurt that her touch offended him, Sarah moved away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I only wanted to—"

  “You wanted to take care of me. To nurse me. To make me well.”

  “Is that wrong of me? Am I at fault because I don’t want the smallpox to claim your life?” she asked him, her temper rising at the way that he resented her care.

  Carson released his breath in a long, slow sigh. “No . . . but Sarah, I’m not a patient anymore.”

  “I know that,” she replied, stung at his remark.

  “I feel like I’m a burden.”

  “How can you say that? You are here and the children are not alone. You helped Lucy prepare—"

  His dark eyes blazed. “That’s not what a man should be doing. That’s what a woman should be doing. Minding the house and preparing the food. Not traipsing all over town on an endless series of errands of mercy.”

  “If I don’t help with the nursing, people will die! It’s very selfish of you to think so little of your fellow man!”

  “It’s very selfish of you to think so little of the children you claim to love!”

  “How can you—how—"

  “Because it’s the truth. There’s Lucy, trying to do what she saw her mother do. The children don’t know what’s to become of them, Sarah, and they need some kind of reassurance from you. Why can’t you see that? Just because you came West to marry a man you thought would welcome you
as a partner in ministry doesn’t mean that you can ignore the other responsibilities that you’ve taken up. We’re married. We have a family. It’s the family that belonged to a dead woman and a drunk. But we’ve taken them as ours, haven’t we? Don’t stand over me like you want to see if I’m feverish,” he said crossly. “Sit down beside me. Or better yet . . .” his voice deepened. “Lay down beside me, Sarah. Better yet . . . lay with me.”

  “You’re—"

  “Just lay here with me,” he said softly. “Just let me hold you.” He touched the softness of her face, tracing the gentle curve of her cheek. Her dark-lashed eyes stared up at him, her expression a mixture of fascination and trepidation. He ran his thumb along her full lower lip. Her lips were meant to be kissed if ever a woman’s were, he thought. A woman’s body was ripe with mystery. Marriage was meant to solve that mystery and to provide answers to the unknown. But he and Sarah hadn’t had time for any of that. She’d arrived in Knox Mills intent on marrying a man who turned out to be very different from what she had expected. She’d ended up becoming a mother to that man’s children because there was no one else to take on the role. It was only when Carson feared that she would end up married to Graham Boone that he had realized that he had fallen in love with her himself. But they had married before courtship and had become parents before familiarity. “Lovely, lovely Sarah,” he whispered. “I intend to woo you every day of your life, to make up for all this waiting.”

  She made a sound. It sounded like a whimper, but he knew from the expression in those deep green eyes that something else had inspired her response. He realized with an unsummoned intuition that, although she was a woman and the intimacy of marriage was not new to her, she was, inexplicably, innocent in many ways.

  He lowered his head. “Just one kiss,” he said. “Just one.”

  Chapter 25

  Piper Walker said that she would be pleased to ask the women of the prayer group if they would be willing to help with the nursing.

  “You should have asked before now,” Piper said firmly as she offered Sarah the sugar bowl for her tea. “You have had far too much to handle. The Boone children, that dreadful experience with Dr. Boone . . . why, you haven’t even had time to enjoy being a bride.”