Shifter’s Baby (Alpha Fantasy Paranormal Billionaire Shifter BBW Romance) (55 page)

The Cherrif’s Mail Order Bride

A Western Romance

By: Lisa Cartwright

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Copyright 2015 by (Lisa Cartwright) - All rights reserved.

In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in 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.

She had to step on it, clamp down on this feeling in her stomach. Dahlia Wilkins watched Sheriff Matt Stone walk down the wooden sidewalk in the town of Rifle Springs, Colorado in the year 1870. He made her feel kind, feminine, yielding. She hated kind, feminine and yielding. Dahlia’s main handle on her life was glacial coldness and control of everything and everyone who touched her.

Like a tongue that continually seeks out a painful tooth, her mind went back to the weekly social held in the town hall. She had attended because she could meet a man there who owed her money. Otherwise, she wouldn’t go to a social event if her eternal salvation depended on it. She stood along the wall with the other unattached women waiting for a man to get up the courage to ask for a dance.

She saw Sheriff Matt Stone and her knees felt weak. Her heart beat faster. She felt a slight coat of perspiration cover her body. Had she been able to look at herself in a mirror, she would have been surprised by the dilation of her eyes.

She waited until she had control of herself then walked over to him. She said, “Good evening, Sheriff.”

“Good evening, Miss Wilkins. Are you enjoying yourself?”

“Yes. I wondered if you would like to dance?”

Matt spotted a man wanted on a burglary charge. “I would, ordinarily, but I have to arrest someone.” He walked off with purpose.

Unfortunately, his target choose that moment to disappear down a hallway. Dahlia turned to see whom the Sheriff wanted to arrest and saw only women. She turned white and held onto a chair to keep herself from falling. She muttered, “He rejected me. He left me standing here in front of the entire town.” She walked slowly out of the hall. It took all of her considerable self-control to keep from running like a school girl.

All the way home, she called up every womanly impulse and emotion and banished it from her personality. She arrived at her house, completely under her own iron discipline. No tears on her cheeks. No pain in her heart.

A man she knew stood on her porch waiting for her. She said, “Yes?”

“The Senator wants you.”

“Good. I’d like to talk to him.”

They walked a hundred yards to a non-descript house. The man waited outside while Dahlia went inside.

Senator Horace Townsend wasn’t the normal kind of Senator. He was tall, fit and as rapacious as a marauding wolf. He looked out the window instead of turning to greet Dahlia. He said, “Yes?” in exactly the same tone as Dahlia had greeted his messenger.

“You sent for me. Should I take my clothes off?”

“No. This is a planning meeting. I have a problem. You wanted more responsibility I’m giving it to you.” He turned around. He looked at her for a minute, enjoying her icy good looks. She didn’t move. He continued, “I need the town of Rifle Springs. I have plans for moving people and product through here in a big way. Unfortunately, someone stands in my way. He’s incorruptible and too well known to kill. Tell me what you’d do to remove him.”

“Who is it?”

“Sheriff Matt Stone.”

“Oh.” She smiled. “As it happens, I have a reason for wanting the same thing. It’s a personal reason and not germane to your needs.”

“Do you have a plan?”

“Oh, yes. The Sheriff is a man’s man. He plays hard, drinks hard and works hard. He doesn’t allow women to enter his life. We need to saddle him with a dead weight of a woman, someone who’ll nag him and pester him. This will continually distract him from his job. Then you can have someone plant evidence of a crime on him, and we’ll get him convicted and thrown into prison.”

“You have two attempts. Fail and bad things will happen to you.”

A few days later, Dahlia sat at her desk looking at a charming, but tentative face in a brochure. She muttered, “Perfect. Absolutely perfect.”

Dahlia’s smile as she watched Sheriff Stone from her office window would have made women scream and put children into catatonic shock. She turned to the man in her office. She liked him. He never spoke, never had a suggestion, and never made a comment. He listened to her like a properly trained Collie.

She said, “You remember my dislike of the Sheriff? Today, I begin the process of his ruination. I’ve laid something in his lap that he can’t handle. I’ve sent him the most ineffectual, weak-willed stilted little girl I could find. Her name is Emma Tillerman. I’ve carefully matched her prejudices with his enjoyments. My special friend, the Senator, will force him out of office. And I will get to play with him like a toy. When he’s been properly chastened, I’ll rescue him from her needy little fingers. I’m going to enjoy this.” She paused. “He isn’t.”

Sheriff Matt Stone walked out of his office in the Jail/Sheriff’s Station. He saw a young woman sitting on one of the chairs in the waiting room and paid her no attention. She was dressed modestly in muted colors, sitting with her knees together and her hands folded in her lap.

She stood up as he came closer and looked at him, expectantly. He thought about going around her, but she stepped directly in his path. He had to stop.

She was around five feet six inches tall. Her face had quiet beauty and direct honesty. From what he could see of her figure in the heavy clothes of 1870, she had the required curves.

Sheriff Stone was big, heavy and powerful. Slightly over six feet and well over two hundred thirty pounds of muscle and toughness. He was 28. The woman appeared to be around 23.

She looked him in the eye, but her voice was small and mild. “Sheriff Stone, I’m Emma Tillman. You chose me as a bride. Thank you for paying my way out from Kansas City. I am ready to be your wife and accept all of my duties including intimate relations.” She stepped back from him and turned around. Her voice shook when she said the next words. “Do I pass inspection? We can do another one without clothes if you’d like.”

She said her words softly and with kindness, but also as if she’d said them in her mind a hundred times. She waited for his answer with bright, hopeful eyes.

Matt didn’t talk for a moment. Finally, he said, “Miss Tillman, I’m afraid you’ve been the subject of a cruel joke. I didn’t send for you. I know nothing about it.”

Emma’s face fell. She was lost and embarrassed. “I...I’m sorry.” She looked around for a way out. There wasn’t any. She said, “Why would anyone do this?”

“I don’t know.” His law enforcement training took over. Somebody went to trouble and expense to complicate his life. “Please stay here for just a moment. I’d like to know how this happened and figure out how to deal with you.” The Sheriff looked down into her intense blue eyes and felt an unusual stirring in his chest.

The stirring was unpleasant. Matt Stone had been a widower for two years. He lost his wife in a bank robbery. Madelyn had gone to the bank to open a savings account for their unborn child. Three men with hidden faces stormed into the bank and shot her dead. He’d been in public mourning for less than a month and private mourning for every day and night from that day forward. He was offended by Emma’s intrusion in his on-going grief and alarmed that she made his heart throb.

Emma felt doubly injured. Not only was she intensely embarrassed, but also she’d just seen heaven and lost it within seconds. She’d looked at the Sheriff’s face and his broad shoulders and felt definite heat in her lower body. She liked it and wanted it to happen again. Then her interest had been torn away. It made her feel empty.

She sat down. “I’ll wait. I have no where else to go.”

Her statement worried Stone. As he walked away, he mumbled to himself, “She’s going to be a problem I can’t get rid of.” He went back in the cells and signed some documents with his jailer.

Emma was still sitting when he came back. She stood up quickly when he walked back in. He said, “Let’s go into my office.” He led her into a back office. It was decorated in basic male; big desk, wanted posters on the wall, no drapes on the single window, a rack of serious looking pistols and rifles on the wall and two chairs.

Sheriff Stone held her chair. She caught a whiff of his smell and her body quivered.

The Sheriff said, “Tell me how this all began.”

She conquered her momentary desire to sit on his lap and curl up against that heavy, comforting chest. She said, “I received a letter from someone purporting to be you telling me that you’d chosen me out of all of the women in “Mother Ellie’s Guide to Unmarried Young Women”. I was surprised and pleased. Some of the ladies in that catalog are stunning. Your letter included a train ticket out here and a note inviting me to travel here to Rifle Springs to meet you.”

The Sheriff frowned at the top of his desk. “Do you have the letter?”

Emma dug around in her purse and produced a well-worn envelope. Matt opened the envelope and looked at the enclosed letter. It was a man’s hand, not a woman’s. It said;

Dear Miss Tillman,

I felt very hopeful when I saw your picture and read about your life. I think we would do well together. I am six feet two inches tall and proportionate in my weight. I have sandy hair and blue eyes.

I’ve enclosed a train ticket and traveling money. Please come at your earliest convenience.

Sincerely,

Matt Stone,

Sheriff, Rifle Springs, Colorado.

Matt said, “Written by an educated man. His vocabulary is better than most and the letter is punctuated correctly. We don’t have that many men who can write, much less do it properly. I’ll look into this. It’s serious, not only for you, but for me as well.”

Matt stood up, usually the signal to anyone sitting in his office that the meeting is over. She didn’t stand. She looked up at him. The feeling he’d had earlier flared into full-blown resentment. His job entailed the law and the people who break it, not misplaced women.

She continued, “I don’t have anywhere to go. I didn’t see any decent hotels as I walked from the train station. There are gruff men in the street. I don’t think I can expect proper courtesy from them. I don’t have the money to go back to Kansas City. I don’t want to. It would be most embarrassing. My friends all think I’ve found a good man to marry.”

Against his will, Matt felt her pain and her sense of dislocation. He came upon a temporary solution. He said, “Have you eaten, Miss Tillman?”

“No. I had my last meal, last night. I’ve run out of money.”

“There is a respectable cafe next door. Ladies can dine there safely. Let’s give you a meal while I try to find a way to solve your problem. The City will pay for it.”

They walked out of the Sheriff’s office and the Jail and over to Brighton’s Cafe. Matt spoke to the owner for a moment then told Emma. “This cafe supplies all of the food our prisoners eat. It’s good. You may stay here until I return.”

“Thank you, Sheriff Stone. You’re most kind.”

“Until later then.”

He didn’t look back when he left the cafe.

He talked with his source on the underworld happenings in town then toured the five-block stretch that made up the business district of Rifle Springs. He frowned as he ticked off one possibility after another. The Mercantile had a room upstairs, but the owner was a known sex offender. The Rifle Springs Hotel he dismissed immediately. Prostitutes took their male customers to rooms in the Rifle Springs Hotel. The Millinery would have worked, but they had no spare rooms. The Mountain Home Saloon had the same problem as the hotel. He shook his head.

He walked back to the Jail with anger urging him on. The young lady was his responsibility, not legally, but morally. He found that he deeply resented her presence.

She was gone. He felt guilty but relieved.

Half an hour later, it was time for dinner. The jail had a second story that served as living quarters for him and his mother. As he climbed the stairs, he heard something that froze his heart. Feminine laughter came from behind the door to his rooms. He stopped and took a deep breath. He muttered, “Never again. Not now. Not this time.”

He opened the door and saw what he feared most. Emma and his mother sitting together at the kitchen table. They both smiled at him. He tried to smile back and failed.

He said, “I’m afraid I’ve found nothing Miss Tillman. This is a mining town with exactly three women who don’t work as prostitutes. One is our school teacher. She’s married with three kids. One is our librarian and is over seventy and you’re the third. I can’t put you up in a hotel. They’re overrun with prostitutes. None of the other businesses are any better. You need to be protected against the horny... excuse my language, ma’am... overexcited men in this town.”

Emma voice kept it’s pleasant, even tone. “You don’t need to watch your language around me, Sheriff. I worked in the maternity wing of our convent hospital. I’ve seen the results of that horniness of which you speak. Wonderful, beautiful babies, and happy husbands.”

The Sheriff’s mother, Sarah Stone, was in her mid forties, slightly plump and happy to see her little boy. “We’ve been talking, son. Emma can stay with me. She’s safe here.” Sarah held her son’s thick and well-muscled arm. “You don’t have to worry. I’ve told Emma that you like to drink and gamble and that you don’t want any restrictions on your actions. We’ve agreed that; although you make a lovely couple, there’s no way in the world that you’d be considered compatible. It’s a shame, but Emma and I can see that a marriage between the two of you is out of the question. Does that make you feel better?”

Matt mistakenly thought he was out of the woods, away from danger and safe from marauding Emma’s. He breathed easier. “Yes.” He talked directly to Emma. “I have nothing against you, Miss Tillman. You’re quite lovely. It’s just that our backgrounds are so different. I assume that you had the traditional conservative upbringing.”

“That’s correct. No smoking. No drinking. No dancing. No nightclubs. No loud music. I grew up with those restrictions.”

Matt said, “You said you worked in a convent hospital in Kansas City.” He said the words with foreboding. Despite their objections, he saw that his mother and the woman herself viewed him as good husband material.

Emma said, “Yes. I can complete your horrifying view of me. I am a former nun. I left because of the little babies who were under my care. I realized I wanted one of my own. As you said, I am a non-drinker and non-smoker. Now, you’ve learned all of my dirty secrets, are you ready to run away and hide, you big rough, tough bull of a Sheriff.”

“No, ma’am. It would take much more than that to make me run away.”