The Christmas Brides (17 page)

Lincoln shoved his hat down on top of his head with a little more force than the effort required. His wife, Beth, had died two years before, of a fever, so Willand was referring to his mother. Cora Creed would indeed have been surprised to find five extra people seated around her supper table that night—if Lincoln hadn't left her with enough bags to fill a freight car at the train depot before stopping by the mercantile. She was headed for Phoenix, where she liked to winter with her kinfolks, the Dawsons.

“I'll be back tomorrow if I get the chance,” he said, starting for the door. With that storm coming and cattle to feed, he couldn't be sure. “To see if any letters came in on today's train.”

Willand glanced at the big regulator clock on the wall behind him. “My boy's gone to the depot, like always,
and he'll be here with the mail bag any minute now,” he said grudgingly. “Might as well wait.”

Lincoln went to the window, looked past his own reflection in the darkening glass—God, he hated the short ness of winter days—to see Miss Mitchell settling her unlikely brood in the bed of his wagon. Some thing warmed inside him, shifted. The slightest smile tilted one corner of his mouth.

He'd been advertising for a governess for his seven-year-old daughter, Gracie, and a house keeper for the both of them for nearly a year; failing either of those, he'd settle for a wife, and because he knew he'd never love another woman the way he'd loved Beth, he wasn't too choosey in his requirements.

Juliana Mitchell, with her womanly figure, indigo-blue eyes and those tendrils of coppery hair peeking out from under her worn bonnet, was clearly dedicated to her profession, since she'd stayed to look after those children even now that the Indian School had closed down. A lot of schoolmarms wouldn't have done that.

This spoke well for her character, and when it came to looks, she was a better bargain than anyone all those advertisements might have scared up.

Glancing down at the display, with all the toys Willand was hoping to sell before Christmas, Lincoln's gaze fell on the corner of a metal box, tucked at an odd angle under the bunting beneath the tree. He reached for the item, drew it out, saw that it was a set of water color paints, similar to one Gracie had at home.

Was this what the boy had been looking at when Willand pitched a fit?

For reasons he couldn't have explained, Lincoln was sure it was.

He held the long, flat tin up for Willand to see, before tucking it into the inside pocket of his coat. “Put this on my bill,” he said.

Willand grumbled, but a sale was a sale. He finally nodded.

Lincoln raised his collar against the cold and left the mercantile for the wooden sidewalk beyond.

The kids were settled in the back of the wagon, all but the oldest boy snuggled in the rough woolen blankets Lincoln always carried in winter. Juliana Mitchell waited primly on the seat, straight-spined, chin high, trying not to shiver in that thin cloak of hers.

Buttoning his coat as he left the store, Lincoln un buttoned it again before climbing up into the box beside her. Snow flakes drifted slowly from a gray sky as he took up the reins, released the brake lever. The streets of the town were nearly deserted—folks were getting ready for the storm, feeling its approach in their bones, just as Lincoln did.

Knowing her pride would make her balk if he took off his coat and put it around her, he pulled his right arm out of the sleeve and drew her to his side instead, closing the garment around her.

She stiffened, then went still, in what he guessed was resignation.

It bruised something inside Lincoln, realizing how many things Juliana Mitchell had probably had to resign herself to over the course of her life.

He set the team in motion, kept his gaze on the snowy road ahead, winding toward home. By the time they
reached the ranch, it would be dark out, but the horses knew their way.

Mean while, Juliana Mitchell felt warm and soft against him. He'd for got ten what it was like to protect a woman, shield her against his side, and the remembrance was painful, like frost bit ten flesh beginning to thaw.

Beth had been gone awhile, and though he wasn't proud of it, in the last six months or so he'd turned to loose women for comfort a time or two, over in Choteau or in Missoula.

The quickening he felt now was different, of course. Though anybody could see she was down on her luck, it was equally obvious that Juliana Mitchell was a lady. Breeding was a thing even shabby clothes couldn't hide—especially from a rancher used to raising fine cattle and horses.

Minutes later, as they jostled over the road in the buck board, Juliana relaxed against Lincoln, and it came to him, with a flash of amusement, that she was asleep. Plainly, she was exhausted. From the way her face had fallen as she'd read that letter, which she'd finally wadded up and stuffed into the pocket of her cloak with an expression of heart broken disgust in her eyes, she'd suffered some bitter disappointment.

All he knew for sure was that nobody had died, since he'd asked her that right off.

Lincoln tried to imagine what kind of news might have thrown her like that, even though he knew it was none of his business.

Maybe she'd planned to marry the man who'd written that letter, and he'd spurned her for another.

Lincoln frowned, aware of the woman's softness and warmth in every part of his lonesome body. What kind of damned fool would do that?

His shoulder began to ache, since his arm was curved around Juliana at a somewhat awkward angle, but he didn't care. He'd have driven right past the ranch, just so she could go on resting against him like that for a little while longer, if he hadn't been a practical man.

The wind picked up, and the snow came down harder and faster, and when he looked back at the kids, they were sitting stoically in their places, bundled in their blankets.

The best part of an hour had passed when the lights of the ranch house finally came into view, glowing dim and golden in the snow-swept darkness.

Lincoln's heart beat picked up a little, the way it always did when he rounded that last bend in the road and saw home waiting up ahead.

Home.

He'd been born in the rambling, one-story log house, with its stone chimneys, the third son of Josiah and Cora Creed. Micah, the first born, had long since left the ranch, started a place of his own down in Colorado. Weston, the next in line, lived in town, in rooms above the Diamond Buckle Saloon, and published the
Courier
—when he was sober enough to run the presses.

Two years younger than Wes, Lincoln had left home only to attend college in Boston and apprentice himself to a lawyer—Beth's father. As soon as he was qualified to practice, Lincoln had married Beth, brought her home
to Stillwater Springs Ranch and loved her with all the passion a man could feel for a woman.

She'd taken to life on a remote Montana ranch with amazing acuity for a city girl, and if she'd missed Boston, she'd never once let on. She'd given him Gracie, and they'd been happy.

Now she rested in the small, sad cemetery beyond the apple orchard, like Josiah, and the fourth Creed brother, Dawson.

Dawson. Some times it was harder to think about him and the way he'd died, than to recall Beth succumbing to that fever.

Juliana straightened against Lincoln's side, yawned. If the darkness hadn't hidden her face, the brim of her bonnet would have, but he sensed that she was embarrassed by the lapse.

“We're almost home,” he said, just loudly enough for her to hear.

She didn't answer, but sat up a little straighter, wanting to pull away, but confined by his arm and the cloth of his coat.

When they reached the gate with its overarching sign, Lincoln moved to get down, but the Indian boy, Joseph, was faster. He worked the latch, swung the gate wide, and Lincoln drove the buck board through.

His father and Tom Dancingstar had cut and planed the timber for that sign, chiseled the letters into it, and then laboriously deepened them with pokers heated in the homemade forge they'd used for horseshoeing.

Lincoln never saw the words without a feeling of quiet gratification and pride.

Stillwater Springs Ranch.

He held the team while the boy shut the gate, then scram bled back into the wagon. The horses were eager to get to the barn, where hay and water and warm stalls awaited them.

Tom was there to help unhitch the team when Lincoln drove through the wide doorway and under the sturdy barn roof. Part Lakota Sioux, part Cherokee and part devil by his own accounting, Tom had worked on the ranch from the beginning. He'd named himself, claiming no white tongue could manage the handle he'd been given at birth.

He smiled when he saw Juliana, and she smiled back.

Clearly, they were acquainted.

Was he, Lincoln wondered, the only yahoo in the country side who'd never met the teacher from the Indian School?

“Take the kids inside the house,” Lincoln told Juliana, and it struck him that rather than the strangers they were, they might have been married for years, the two of them, all these children their own. “Tom and I will be in as soon as we've finished here.”

He paused to lift the two smaller children out of the wagon; sleepy-eyed, still wrapped in their blankets, they stumbled a little, befuddled to find them selves in a barn lit by lanterns, surrounded by horses and Jenny Lind, the milk cow.

“I'll tend to the horses,” Tom told him. “There's a kettle of stew warming on the stove, and Gracie's been watching the road for you since sunset.”

Thinking of his gold-haired, blue-eyed daughter, Lincoln smiled. Smarter than three judges and as many
juries put together, Gracie tended toward fretfulness. Losing her mother when she was only five caused her to worry about him whenever he was out of her sight.

With a ranch the size of his to run, he was away from the house a lot, accustomed to leaving the child in the care of his now-absent mother, or Rose-of-Sharon Gainer, the cumbersomely pregnant young wife of one of the ranch hands.

The older boy's gaze had fastened on Tom.

“Can I stay here and help?” he asked.

“May I,” Juliana corrected with a smile. “Yes, Joseph, you may.”

With that, she leaned down, weary as she was, and lifted the littlest girl into her arms. Lincoln bent to hoist up the smaller boy.

“This is Daisy,” Juliana told him. “That's Billy-Moses you're holding.” The girl who'd spoken of working for her keep at the Diamond Buckle ducked her head shyly, stood a little closer to her teacher. “And this is Theresa,” she finished.

Leaving Tom and Joseph to put the team up for the night, Lincoln shed his coat at the entrance to the barn, draped it over Juliana's shoulders. It dragged on the snowy ground, and she smiled wanly at that, hiking the garment up with her free arm, closing it around both herself and Daisy.

They entered the house by the side door, stepping into the warmth, the aroma of Tom's venison stew and the light of several lanterns. Gracie, rocking in the chair near the cookstove and pretending she hadn't been waiting impatiently for Lincoln's return, went absolutely still when she saw that he wasn't alone.

Her corn flower-blue eyes widened, and her mouth made a perfect O.

Daisy and Billy-Moses stared back at her, probably as amazed as she was.

“Gracie,” Lincoln said unnecessarily. “We have company.”

Gracie had recovered by then; she fairly leaped out of the rocking chair. Looking up at Juliana, she asked, “Did you answer one of my papa's advertisements? Are you going to be a governess, a house keeper or a wife?” Lincoln winced.

Understandably, Juliana seemed taken aback. Like Gracie, though, she turned out to be pretty resilient. The only sign that the child's question had caught her off guard was the faint tinge of pink beneath her cheekbones, and that might have been from the cold.

“I'm Miss Mitchell,” she said kindly. “These are my pupils—Daisy, Billy-Moses and Theresa. There's Joseph, as well—he's out in the barn helping Mr. Dancingstar look after the horses.”

“Then you're a
governess!
” Gracie cried jubilantly. Young as she was, she could already read, and because Lincoln wouldn't allow her to travel back and forth to school in Stillwater Springs, she was convinced that lifelong ignorance would be her lot.

“Gracie,” Lincoln said, setting Billy-Moses on his feet. “Miss Mitchell is a guest. She didn't answer any advertisements.”

Gracie looked profoundly disappointed, but only for a moment. Like most Creeds, when she set her mind on something, she did not give up easily.

For the next little while, they were all busy with supper.

Tom and Joseph came in from the barn, pumped water at the sink to wash up and joined them at the table, while Gracie, who had already eaten, rushed about fetching bread and butter and ladling milk from the big covered crock stored on the back step.

His daughter wanted to make Miss Mitchell feel welcome, Lincoln thought with a smile, so she'd stay and teach her all she wanted to know—and that was considerable. She hadn't asked for a doll for Christmas, or a spinning top, like a lot of little girls would have done.

Oh, no. Gracie wanted a dictionary.

Wes often joked that by the time his niece was old enough to make the trip to town on her own, she'd be half again too smart for school and ready to take over the
Courier
so he could spend the rest of his life smoking cigars and playing poker.

As far as Lincoln could tell, his brother did little else but smoke cigars and play poker—not counting, of course, the whiskey-swilling and his long-standing and wholly scandalous love affair with Kate Winthrop, who happened to own the Diamond Buckle.

Gracie adored her uncle Weston—and Kate.

Casting a surreptitious glance in Juliana's direction whenever he could during supper, Lincoln saw that she could barely keep her eyes open. As soon as the meal was over, he showed her to his mother's spacious room. She and Daisy and Billy-Moses could share the big feather bed.