Red Snow Bride (Wolf Brides Book 2) (3 page)

“She does, and if you ask my opinion, I think you should too.”

“Well, I didn’t ask your opinion.”

“Suit yourself.” Analise opened the door. “I’ve done my duty, now good luck in your endeavors, Ms. McGregor.” A whoosh of tepid air blasted against my face as she slammed the door.

A mail order wife? Was that what the Countess really thought my life had come to? I’d only been scandalized last night. Surely everything would calm down and I’d move on with my life. I wasn’t getting pushed out of my city that easily.

Determined, I stomped down the street to the poultry house. The smell assaulted me long before I saw it, and a sign on the door had a picture of a chicken with x’s for eyes. Even if the smell wasn’t nausea inducing, I supposed the illiterate could guess what it was. My knuckles wrapped against the thin wood of the door but no one answered. Just as well, I wouldn’t be easily deterred. “Hello?” I called as I swung it open.

The building seemed to be one giant room with rows of women seated and plucking white feathers from deceased chickens. Up in a loft, a group of freely sweating ladies pulled a line of poultry from a giant, steaming pot. Rows of hooks held featherless birds hung upside down and crates of clucking chickens donned the back wall. The only light in the musty room was the rays of brave sun that burst through the waves of cheap paned glass, and tiny down feathers dusted the air like swirling snowflakes.

“You’re late for a job today,” a sneering man said through a discolored smile. Tresses of greasy hair hung down the sides of his face and the short man was filthy from head to toe. Even the whites of his eyes were more of a yellow color.

I swallowed the lump in my throat as he approached, dragging a bad leg behind. “Please, Sir. I’ll do any job you have. I need the money.”

Tilting his chin, bottomless gray eyes raked across the length of my body. The breath froze in my throat, like it simply refused to inhale the odor this man no doubt emanated. “Maybe I have something for a lady pretty as you. You’ll only get paid for half the day for being so late. Follow me.”

He led me to a row of plucking women and stopped in front of a portly lass whose nose was too big for her face but whose eyes were kind enough. “You, up to the steamer.”

She froze with a fingerful of feathers. “I’m sorry sir? Have I done something wrong?”

“Off with you, you little gobshite! I said I wanted you steaming those damned birds and I meant it. If you have questions, you can leave.”

“Yes, sir,” she whispered and dropped her chicken into a bucket.

I watched her hustle up the stairs with wide eyes. “I didn’t mean to steal her spot.”

“You want the job or not?” he asked.

“Yes, but I—”

“Sit down!” he roared.

My hands flew to my ears like it could protect them from the man’s angry bellow. I sank into the woman’s seat and absorbed the looks of disdain from the ladies around me. Each downturned mouth smirked its own practiced flavor of bitter, and each wave of the women’s animosity hurt in a different way.

The foreman stomped away and I picked up the half-plucked chicken by the stiffened foot.

“Not like that,” the dark haired woman next to me said. “Like this.” She gestured a quick ripping motion and feathers flew from the bird into the bucket in front of her.

Wiping an already moist forehead with the back of my sleeve, I leveled that poor bird with a look of rampant determination.

I, Lorelei McGregor, was going to prove I could make my own way in the world.

Boston had defeated me in two days. It had to be some sort of record. My fingers were clawed and stiff and didn’t want to move after two almost full days of backbreaking chicken plucking. I stank of dead animal and I’d never get all of the white feathers out of my hair. The pidley amount I’d been paid for all those tedious hours of work had turned my stomach. At this rate, I’d be able to pay rent but only if I never ate again for the rest of my life.

For the tenth time I unfolded the advertisement kept safely in my pocket. Jeremiah Dawson did sound like a fine name. It rolled off the tongue in an attractive way. Even if he was some horrid looking man, or dwarf, or cripple, who was I to be picky? I’d married a beautiful man with a heart of black. Maybe the other way would work in my favor this time around. And more importantly, I would be far away from all of the horrid things people whispered as I walked by.

I’d made the decision today, as it became apparent the foreman was more interested in me than the other girls who sat around me. He’d whispered foul things into my ear as his rank breath brushed my face and lifted the dark tendrils of hair that had fallen in front of my eyes. The man gave me chills and not just because of his odor. It was because behind his emotionless gaze was something that terrified me. He was a man who’d do anything to get what he wanted. My rebuffs were only proving a delightful challenge for him—a piece of red meat added to the hunt.

Decidedly, I scribbled across the last piece of fine paper in my possession before I could change my mind.

Dearest Mr. Dawson,

I write to inform you of my interest in an advertisement you placed in a paper some months ago. For reasons I can’t quite sort through right now, I have a mind to consider your offer. You have written of your want for a proper wife, and I assure you my high bred pedigree stretches for generations. As I’ve fallen on misfortune, I don’t have any dowry to offer or material possessions to give if that is what you are looking for, but I’ll be easily companionable and diligent in my wifely duties. I have to admit, as I would feel terrible for pursuing you under false pretense, that I have been a victim of a serious scandal here in Boston recently and won’t bring any prestige to your lineage. However, if you are willing to overlook all of that and still would consider me a candidate for your arrangement, please contact me in Boston.

Yours,

Lorelei McGregor

I scurried to the post office as fast as I could dodge the rank mud puddles in hopes of making it before the post man flipped the handwritten sign to ‘closed.’ Just in time, I swished in through the door, smearing muddy water over the wooden planks beneath my feet. “I need this mailed to Jeremiah Dawson of Colorado Springs, Colorado,” I said breathlessly.

He took the letter from my outstretched hand and with a grumpy frown said, “It’ll go out with tomorrow’s post.”

A sense of relief I didn’t quite understand flooded me as I left my letter there in the care of the post man. Maybe it was because it was out there in the world now and out of my hands, or maybe because the stranger, Jeremiah’s, answer would be a chance to feel something other than rejection. Whatever it was, I sat in my tiny room and read his advertisement over again, and this time I felt a sense hopeful fear.

My path in life had been altered by the cruelty of my husband, and now Mr. Dawson’s answer would be my destiny.

****

Jeremiah

The sting in my cheeks attested to how bitterly cold it was. The snow had finally stopped falling last month, but the wind remained to remind a man winter wasn’t done with him yet. The black horse under me snorted, and steam blew out of his nostrils in front of us like the Denver train as we picked our way through the woods. In the next month, my brother and I would have to prepare the land, as we did every year, to plant the crops but for now, the weather was too volatile to do anything other than survive. I wasn’t even to the clearing our cabin had been housed in before it was burned by Hell Hunters a couple of months ago but still, my sensitive ears picked up the sound of my brother and his wife talking. Arguing was maybe a better word.

Shrugging through the last tree line defense that separated our home from the wilderness, my horse snickered out a greeting to the winter coated mare in the corral. The view of the clearing after a long day always stirred a feeling of sadness. Hell Hunters intent on burning my brother’s wife, Kristina, and hanging Luke and I from the big tree out front had tainted this place. The old house stood in a pile of burned rubble, dilapidated and abandoned. With it, the fire had taken everything we owned and now we were forced to live in the barn or in a rough camp in the woods.

Usually the clearing made me sad, but today it stopped me short. Piles and piles of fresh cut lumber cluttered the ground and Luke stood in the middle of the chaos with a letter clenched in his white knuckled grip.

“What’s all this?” I asked as I steered my horse through the maze of different sized wooden planks.

Kristina stood with her fists clenched at her sides and her cheeks so red they could rival the tomatoes in our summer garden. “Apparently,” she snarled, “your brother became great friends with the man who ruined me!”

A wise man stayed out of marital affairs but this bait was too tempting. “You met with Barron French while you were in Chicago?”

Luke threw his hands up in the air. “You too? Look, I had to do something in order to get close to his mother, and meeting him was my move. I wasn’t drinking buddies with the guy or anything. The man was a cockchafer and I threatened him within an inch of his life until he gave me the information I needed!”

I narrowed my eyes at his use of curses in front of a woman, but his foul language only managed to inch a tiny smile from Kristina. Luke often forgot the manners Ma had instilled in us. Luckily, he’d found him a woman as crass as him. “What does Kristina’s ex-lover have to do with the wagon loads of lumber on our land?”

Luke handed the letter to me.

Mr. Dawson,

I heard of the misfortune that befell you as a direct result of the unfortunate situation born between Ms. Yeaton and myself. In thanks for fixing the little problem I was having while you were in Chicago, I’ve delivered enough lumber to rebuild your home. Give my regards to Kristina. Tell her I’m sorry—for everything.

Barron French

What the devil? “The bastard thanked you for killing his mother?”

Luke’s green eyes held steady on the distant horizon. “City folks are a different breed. That’s for sure and for certain,” he muttered.

Kristina crossed her arms and from what I remembered with my late wife Anna, that little gesture told a wise man to run. “When were you planning on telling me?”

“Never,” he said remorselessly.

The sound of her smacking his arm echoed through the clearing and I did the smart thing—walk away. That much lumber wasn’t just enough to rebuild our small home. It would provide enough cut lumber to build two small houses and if I was going to bring a wife out here, a house separate from those two rutting newlyweds would probably be a good idea.

In the barn, I pulled my horse into a stall and slid the saddle from his back. The faintest brush of air and a slight movement of straw gave her away. If that didn’t, her smell would’ve done the trick. I liked to let Kristina think she was getting closer to sneaking up on me though.

“What do you want?” I asked, pulling the saddle blanket from the back of the horse.

A frustrated groan came from the vicinity of the barn door and she moped toward the stall I was shutting. “I come here to say my piece and then I won’t bother you no more.”

Uh oh. I eyed an escape route to the door but thought better of it. If she was determined, and the steel in her voice said she was, she’d track me down to the ends of the Colorado territory to talk at me. Stubborn as a boar, that woman was. “Go on,” I said gruffly.

“I know for a fact you haven’t responded to that woman in Boston and it ain’t right. She might be waiting on that answer, Jeremiah Dawson. She might be hard up and needing an escape and you’re keeping her waiting. For all your fancy manners, you’d think you at least would have the decency to tell her yes or no.”

Damn her insight, she was actually right. She fiddled with her sandy blond braid and set her blue-eyed gaze on me. It wouldn’t work as well as on my brother, but we’d been through enough that it’d work just fine on me too. Her whoring days had taught her many a thing, including getting what she wanted.

“You been waiting a mighty long time for a response to that advertisement to just sit on it. What’s going through that head of yours?”

“For one, where am I gonna put a city slickin’ lady? You and Luke live in the barn and I live in a tent out in the wilderness. I have no house to give her.”

“Not yet,” she piped up.

“It still takes time to build a house, Kristina. And what if she reacts to what I am like you did with Luke when he changed in front of you that first time? What if she goes running for the hills?”

“There was always the risk of that. That’s nothing new, now what is the real problem?”

I narrowed my eyes and clenched my teeth. “I don’t want to bring no woman up here to marry and share the secret if she ain’t the right woman.”

Kristina’s eyes flashed with anger. “Are you talking about me? You’re scared because you mail ordered me and I ain’t what you thought you were getting?”

“I advertised for a lady, which you wrote you were, and you showed up in the dress you were whorin’ in not the week before. My concerns are valid.”

“I ain’t a whore no more, Jeremiah! And you’re never going to know if Lorelei McGregor is right for you or not if you never respond. Coward,” she spat before she threw the barn door open to leave.

It was obnoxious that she was right the majority of the time. Educated or no, she had a good head on her. “Wait,” I drawled.

She turned with a furious swish of skirts, but what I’d say next would warm her up to me again fast enough. “I said I didn’t want to bring her out here until I was sure, not that I wasn’t going to respond. We don’t have to put the seeds in the ground for a while yet, and if you and Luke are okay with holding off on building the houses, I was thinking of paying Ma and Da a visit.”

“We’re going to Boston?” she breathed with a look of such hope I couldn’t help the smile that cracked my face.

“We’ll leave tomorrow for Denver and take the train and everything.”

I hunched in on myself and covered my sensitive ears at the shrill shriek of excitement that burst out of my sister-in-law. She was off running and yelling for Luke before I even got a ‘thank you kindly for the invite.’