The Feisty Bride's Unexpected Match: A Western Historical Romance Book

by Lydia Olson

  Sarah was seated at a table in the corner of the saloon as dusk began to settle over Clarendon. Crane was ordering shots from Carl the bartender, and they were awaiting the last of the deputies in the sheriff’s employ to arrive. Again, today was the day he had chosen to propose, and all she had to do was force a smile and say, “Yes,” when the time came for him to ask the question. She had been dolled up in makeup and a violet dinner dress, the fabric of which made her itch as she sat at the table and waited for the inevitable. After ordering the shots, Crane returned.

  “I have some business upstairs to tend to,” he said. “Once I return, I’ll start the proposal. Act surprised, got that?”

  “Okay,” Sarah agreed with a nod.

  It felt like the millionth time she had said that word in the past two months.

  Crane left the room and strode up the steps to the second floor. Sarah watched with disgust and revulsion as he left. She sat in silence, staring at the table and wanting nothing more than for the moment to be over. A moment later, David Bryant walked into the saloon.

  Sarah’s heart began to beat feverishly inside of her chest when she saw him. My love! she thought. My God, I never thought I’d see his face again. She perked up in her chair, wanting so desperately to call out his name—but then she remembered the rules that Crane had given her, and she made sure to keep quiet.

  David looked forlorn as he approached the bar. He looked as though he had just gotten finished with some kind of manual labor—his clothes sported stains, and his hands were tough and calloused, like that of a rancher.

  I wish I were there with him. I wish that I could watch him as he builds his new home, she wished desperately.

  Sarah tracked David as he approached Carl and ordered a drink. A beer was then placed down in front of him, and as David went to take a sip—he stopped as he became aware of Sarah from the side. Time seemed to freeze as the two made eye contact. David didn’t budge, but after a moment, he took a careful glance around and then approached Sarah’s table and caused her nerves to spike even more than they already were.

  David stared at Sarah.

  Sarah stared at David.

  Finally, he broke the silence: “Hi.”

  Sarah swallowed. “Hello.”

  “Are you … okay?”

  Sarah shook her head. “No. No, I am not.”

  David waited a moment. “I … keep thinking about you.”

  Sarah said nothing.

  “I haven’t thought about anything else,” David said. “I just … I know that what happened was not, well, it wasn’t the truth. I know about Crane and what he does. I know he’s corrupt.”

  “David, please,” Sarah pleaded. “We can’t do this. We can’t.”

  “He can’t get away with this. I know he’s not a good man, and I don’t want him to rob us of a future.”

  “You have to go, David. He’ll be back at any second.”

  Taking a step forward, David said, “Then tell me.”

  She looked away. “Tell you what?”

  “That you love me. That it was real.”

  She closed her eyes. “David.”

  “Say it, Sarah,” David said. “I know it’s true. If anything—just tell me that what we had wasn’t a lie.”

  Sarah looked up. All of the memories that she shared with David began to flood her mind: the stagecoach, the fishing lessons, the natives, the cave—all of it. It was the best time of her life, one that brought a newfound hope and energy to her life after the passing of her father. David wasn’t wrong about anything he had just said. Sarah knew that. But it wasn’t a choice for her to be with him. Michael Crane would simply never allow it. But wanting so much to tell David that she loved him, that she had wished it was he who she was spending her life with, she said to him, “No, David. Our love was not a lie.”

  A hint of smile formed on David’s face. He looked at Sarah with all the love in the world in his eyes, and she looked right back at him the same way. But when she saw Michael Crane emerge at the top of the stairs, she looked away and slipped back into her performance as the dutiful fiancée-to-be and focused her attention back on the table.

  David looked over her shoulder as Crane walked down the steps. He quickly retreated from the area and headed toward the doors of the saloon, leaving before Crane had a chance to spot him. Sarah wanted to cry, but she couldn’t. All she did was say, Goodbye, my love, inside her head as David left the tavern.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” Crane announced as he clapped his hands together. “Can I have your attention, please?”

  Sarah sighed. Here we go.

  The moment of truth.

  Or forced circumstances, whatever one wishes to call it.

  All heads in the saloon turned and focused on Crane. He then directed his attention toward Sarah, and said, “Could you come here a moment, my dear?”

  Sarah stood up reluctantly. She couldn’t stand that everyone in the saloon was looking at her with curious gazes as she joined Crane at his side, his other deputies gathering in front of them with besotted faces and wobbly stances.

  Just get it over with, you cretin, Sarah thought.

  “As you know,” Crane said, “I have been taken with Miss Harris here for quite some time. She, well, has been a light in a world otherwise devoid of light.”

  Sarah clenched a fist. I wrote that line for him.

  “I am completely enthralled with this woman,” Crane continued. “She is everything I could have ever wanted in a partner. She is kind, courageous, and quite humorous. She is also the most doting women I’ve ever met.” Crane held up his sleeves to show off a pair of silver cufflinks. “In fact, she bought me these as a gift, just this last night.”

  A few people whistled their approval. A couple of others cheered.

  Yet another lie, Sarah thought. I wouldn’t buy this man a gift if I had all the money in the world.

  “It’s ironic that she purchased these cufflinks for me,” Crane said, “because I, coincidentally here and now, have my own gift that I wish to give to Miss Harris.” He reached into his pocket and produced a small box. Everyone began to chatter in anticipation. “I don’t want to live one day without this woman,” Crane said with a faux smile. “Her presence is the only thing to bring me joy, and I want to spend the rest of my life working as hard as I can to show her how much I love her.” He turned to Sarah and got down on one knee. “So, Sarah Harris. My love. My life. Will you marry me?”

  Sarah noted the faces of everyone in attendance. All of them were watching eagerly for her to say the words. Her stomach turned in knots. She wanted nothing more than to spit in Crane’s face and run far away. But, like everything else that she wanted to do—it just was not an option.

  “I will,” Sarah said with a smile as everyone clapped, and cheered, and hollered. Crane slipped the ring on her finger, and he stood up on a chair to receive applause. As always, he craved attention.

  Sarah felt nothing other than sorrow as all the patrons sang their praises to Crane. She looked at the doors to the tavern, hoping that David would return to rescue her and make the nightmare go away. But he didn’t. It was nothing more than a pleasant fantasy—in the middle of her unbearable nightmare.

  ***

  Darcy, the woman who co-owned the tavern in Little Rock with her husband, was in the midst of closing everything down and putting away the freshly cleaned dishes as the clock sneaked up to the midnight hour. She was gently nudging a drunk man out of the door, the man laughing and requesting “just one more drink,” only to find it was to no avail. As soon as he was ushered outside, Darcy closed the door and breathed a sigh of relief.

  Her husband entered the room. “Looks like everything is tidy,” he said. “I’m going to head upstairs. Are you okay to lock the door?”

  Darcy showed her husband the keys. “I’ll just be one minute, love. I’ll see you there.”

  Darcy’s husband smiled as he left the room, Darcy moved to the door and prepared to insert the key
into the lock. She thought about making herself a cup of tea right before bed, debating if she would go with an English tea or some kind of herbal brew—and that was when the front door to the tavern was violently kicked open. Gasping, Darcy held her hand over her mouth as she dropped the keys and backed away. A man stood in front of her, gaunt with pale skin that looked as if it had been stretched over a skeleton.

  “S-sir,” she stammered. “I’m sorry, we’re closed.”

  The stranger said nothing as he moved toward Darcy, as the woman backed up slowly toward the bar.

  “Sweetheart,” her husband called out as he entered the room. “I thought I heard—” He ceased speaking when he saw the stranger in his tavern, his expression like that of someone who had just seen a ghost.

  “Good evening, folks,” the stranger said with a croak in his voice. “I apologize for the hour of night, but I’ve been a bit on the mend for the past little while, and I could surely use a drink.” He produced a six-shooter and drew back the hammer. Darcy and her husband startled in reply. As Darcy examined the stranger’s features, she would have assumed he was a ghoul or some kind of demon from scripture, based on his horrific-looking features. But once she looked past them, once she saw the fire in the man’s eyes, she realized that she was looking at a man who was notorious in several states, a man who, until just now, everyone presumed was dead.

  “Don’t worry,” the man said. “I just want a drink. And all the cash you have on hand.”

  Without hesitation, Darcy complied with the man’s wishes—the man who went by the name of Tucker Bartholomew Willis.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  David’s ranch was a paradise—at least it should have been. He had been too preoccupied in the past two months trying to figure out why Sarah had ended their relationship before it had really begun, and what Crane had done on his part to make that the case—although he had a few guesses.

  Seated on the porch of the log cabin nestled on the easternmost corner of the twenty-acre property, David moved back and forth in his rocking chair, one that had been around since he first visited his uncle here as a child. The cabin and the fields were still true to David’s memory, down to every last piece of furniture. The golden rays of the dawn sun cut through the clouds and shined on the plentiful wheat fields on the ranch, casting a glow on David’s face as he sat in his chair and contemplated.

  Can I get her back? She said it herself—she still loves me. What have you done to her, Michael Crane? What in God’s earth have you done?

  David couldn’t conjure up anything close to a plan, in terms of trying to find out how to get Sarah back or confront Crane. All he had done since he arrived in Clarendon was prepare his uncle’s ranch to be lived in once more, write his parents, and meet with the chattier townsfolk on several occasions to gather what information he could about Michael Crane. David knew the man was holding Sarah against her will in some way or another.

  He just knew it.

  David had come to learn about Crane in the two months he had been in town. Much of it was rumor, insinuation, secondhand stories. From what David gathered, Crane was certainly corrupt, and it appeared that the sheriff turned a blind eye on the younger man’s misdeeds.

  “Sheriff don’t do nothin’ ‘bout Crane,” a drunk whispered to David in the saloon one night. “He’s bent, I’m tellin’ you, that deputy. Yessir, he is, but I know a lot of lawmen that are.”

  David took a few strolls through town, only having seen Crane a handful of times from a distance. He gathered that the deputy was wealthy, more than he should have been. David knew that the lawman was untouchable, but if he were somehow able to come across something of value, some sort of leverage, he hoped to do the deputy in.

  But I don’t know how, David thought. What are the chances I could even get close to something like that?

  The more David tried to find a solution, the more he was learning there might not be one. So, during the time he spent by himself, when he wasn’t working or talking to Twombly, he sat on his porch and wished that Sarah was by his side.

  I wonder if she knows I’m thinking of her. I wonder if she is thinking of me.

  David held his head in his hands. He wanted to be happy. He wanted to live his life. But he was tortured without Sarah, and nothing would ever feel right to him unless he had her by his side. But he needed to work if he was going to keep his home. He needed to bring in money if the place was to stay under the Bryant name. So, David waited on the porch for the early morning meeting he had set a man named Jacobs about securing the supplies and livestock necessary to start running the ranch once again.

  Jacobs arrived at eight in the morning like he said he would. He was on horseback. His thick beard and hair were a raven’s color with streaks of gray. David placed that the man was not much older than his own father was as he brought his horse to a settle near the porch.

  “David?” Jacobs asked. “I was referred to you by Carl from the saloon in Clarendon.”

  Carl had mentioned Jacobs to David a handful of times during David’s evening stops at the saloon. David had been there every night after Sarah had left him and disappeared into Crane’s house. Every night, David went back to that very saloon, had a single beer, and hoped in vain that Sarah would show up—but she never did.

  David stood, walked down to meet Jacobs, and shook his hand. “Yes, indeed. Thank you for coming. He told me that you were friends with my uncle.”

  “Proud to say that I was. I was sorry to hear of his passing. I managed to attend the funeral.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t,” David said. “Thank you for being there, and for meeting with me.”

  Jacobs glanced away. “I had been planning on it for quite some time.”

  David’s eyebrows rose. “Is that so?”

  “Yes, I have,” Jacobs said. “Your uncle told me to have a little chat with you when you arrived and took possession of the ranch.”

  The look that Jacobs had on his face, and the why he spoke made David curious. “Why is that?” he asked.

  Jacobs took off his hat and ascended the steps of the porch. “I was good friends with your uncle,” he said. “Very good friends.” He motioned with his hand clutching his hat toward the house. “Spent many a night here speaking with him by the fire. I’m proud to say he was my friend, and he confided in me.”

  Everything sounded so serious to David. “I feel like you want to tell me something, Mr. Jacobs,” he said. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to hear what it is. I’ve had a rough couple of months, so I’m a little tired. No offense.”

  “None taken,” Jacobs said. “I’m here to talk to you about Michael Crane.”

  Well, I’ll be …

  David stuck his thumbs in his belt loops and took a deep breath. “What about him?”

  Jacobs held up a finger and gestured to the house. “Your uncle left you this house for a reason,” he said as he reached into his pocket. “I was told to give you this when you arrived.” He produced a letter and handed it to David.

  David took the letter. The envelope was made of thick paper so tan it looked nearly red, his name written in bold black ink on the front. He ripped open the back seal and pulled out the note, reading the contents to himself.

  Nephew,

  I hope this message finds you well. If you end up reading this, it means that I have died. I’m sure that whatever circumstances you hear that resulted in my death will surely be a different accounting of the actual facts, and I am entrusting my final words to you and to my friend Jacobs. I trust him. I know he will deliver this letter into your hands.

  David looked up from the letter. Wait, he thought, I thought Uncle Fletcher died from illness. He looked back at the page and continued reading:

  One year ago, a young man by the name of Michael Crane arrived in Clarendon. I ended up befriending this young man after he moved into town. He was short on money and needed a place to stay while he found employment. I was happy to oblige young Michael, an
d he assisted me on the ranch while he went about finding employment in town.

  A month into Michael Crane’s stay, he was employed by the sheriff. I am not a big fan of the sheriff. I have always been concerned about the man’s integrity. He’s easily persuaded. Surely enough—this ended up affecting Michael Crane. Crime rose in the town, as did young Michael’s assets. He became quite wealthy, and I’m sure much of it had to do with his association with the bandit known as Tucker Willis. Tucker is a heathen of an individual, and I am certain, as are others in Clarendon, that the two have some sort of arrangement.