Alma's Mail Order Husband (Texas Brides Book 1)
Read Alma's Mail Order Husband (Texas Brides Book 1) Online
Authors: Kate Whitsby
Tags: #mail order husband, #mail order bride old west romance, #mail order bride western romance, #mail order brides western romance, #mail order western romance
Alma’s Mail Order Husband
Texas Brides: Book 1
Kate Whitsby
~~~
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2014 by Kate Whitsby
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may
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This is a work of fiction. All characters, names,
places and events are the product of the author's imagination or
used fictitiously.
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Thank you for reading and joining me on this
road.
1
“I’ve gotta tell you something.”
Alma Goodkind poked the fire with a stick.
Her sister, Amelia, leaned against the mesquite tree shading them
from the ferocious Texas sun. Amelia gazed toward the south Texas
horizon, where dust devils spun over the hard-baked earth and
occasionally whizzed up into the sky.
Her sister, Allegra, squatted on the other
side of the fire. “What is it?”
Alma took a deep breath. “I’ve made a
decision. I’m getting married.”
Amelia’s head jerked around and her eyebrows
flew up, but she fell back into her remote brooding and stared off
into the distance again.
Allegra, on the other hand, laughed in Alma’s
face. “How do you plan to do that?” She pretended to look around
her. “Where are you going to get the man from, I’d like to know.
You don’t have one hiding under your bed, do you?” She laughed
again.
Alma waited until she stopped laughing. “No,
I don’t have one hiding, and I don’t even have one around here. But
I’m getting one. I’m getting a mail-order husband.”
That really brought Amelia’s head around
fast. She actually gasped in shock. “What? What on earth possessed
you to do a thing like that?”
“I told you,” Alma replied. “I’ve decided to
get married. I had to get a man from somewhere, and they have this
mail-order matrimony service going on, matching people up all over
the country. So I wrote in, and I’m having a husband sent out.”
Allegra laughed again. “You’re having a
husband sent out? You make it sound like you ordered a hot water
bottle out of a catalog. You sound like you’re getting in a new
breeding mare or something.”
Alma smiled. “It’s something like that.”
Allegra couldn’t stop laughing at the idea.
Amelia took her eyes and her mind back off to the far distant
reaches of the desert. Her eyes roamed the shimmering mirages where
the red desert soil met the sky.
Allegra chuckled. “So when are you getting in
your new hot water bottle?”
“We’ve agreed to meet at the church in Eagle
Pass at the end of the month,” Alma told her. “He’s going to make
his own way down, and we’ll meet there on the thirtieth of July and
get married. Then we’ll come back home as man and wife.”
“Just like that, huh?” Allegra asked. “And
how have you managed to arrange all this, right under our
noses?”
“I told you,” Alma repeated. “It’s all done
by mail. Haven’t you noticed that I’ve been receiving letters from
him recently? We’ve arranged everything in our letters back and
forth. It’s all set up, and we agree on how we’re going to do
everything.”
“You mean,” Allegra asked. “You agree on how
you’re going to run the ranch and where you’re going to sleep?
Don’t you think some of that concerns us?”
“I know what you’re thinking,” Alma returned.
“You’re thinking that, because the three of us have run the ranch
by ourselves for the last five years, how is it going to work with
a man around who will want to have a say in it, too. Isn’t that
what you’re thinking?”
“You’re right,” Allegra admitted. “He’s a
man. He’ll want to be involved in running the ranch. He might even
want to take over from a bunch of women. I’ll tell you right now, I
don’t plan to give up without a peep. As long as I’m here, I’m
going to work the ranch and I’m going to have a say about how it
runs. As long as you and your man understand that, I don’t
mind.”
“No one’s asking you to give up without a
peep, Allegra,” Alma murmured. “No one could expect you to do
that.”
Allegra smiled. “And how is it going to work
with you sleeping with a man in a one-room shack in the middle of
nowhere with your sisters and your father in the beds just next to
yours? Did you think of that?”
“I thought of it,” Alma told her. “But I
think we can work all that out without too much trouble. After all,
we aren’t going to be raising the rafters with you and Amelia and
Papa watching. We’ll keep all that private, of course.”
“And does this mystery man have a name?”
Allegra asked.
“Of course he does,” Alma replied. “His name
is Jude McCann, and he’s a cowboy from Amarillo. His parents still
live up there. He has a brother in the rodeo circuit and a married
sister in Silver City. Does that satisfy you?”
Before Allegra could answer, Amelia turned
her penetrating eyes around. Both Alma and Allegra fell silent when
she spoke. “And have you talked to Papa about this? What does he
think of your plans?”
Alma blushed. “I haven’t told him yet. I
wanted to tell you two first.”
Amelia shook her head. “You should have told
him first. Better yet, you should have asked his permission before
you went ahead and made your plans. That wasn’t right of you.”
Alma waved her objections away. “That’s
exactly why I didn’t tell him, because I didn’t want to ask his
permission. That might be the traditional Mexican way of doing
things, but none of us is our dead mother. None of us is the
dutiful Mexican housewife who bows to the wishes of her husband and
her father. We’ve been running this ranch on our own ever since
Papa broke his back falling off that horse. He can hardly walk
anymore. We make our own decisions, and this is no different.”
“We might not be Mama,” Amelia agreed, “but
Papa is used to a certain kind of behavior from women. You know how
he is. He doesn’t even like us wearing pants to ride horses. The
only reason he puts up with it is because he has no choice. He has
to let us do things our way or the ranch would fail.”
“And this is no different,” Alma shot back.
“He married Mama because he knew a part Mexican, part Apache woman
would never stand up to him or raise her voice to him. He wanted a
woman he could order around, and that’s what he got. But none of us
signed up for that. He knows he has a different kind of woman to
deal with in the three of us, and he accepts that.”
“You should have taken his feelings into
account,” Amelia insisted. “You’re gonna break his heart when he
finds out.”
“I don’t think so,” Amelia maintained. “I
think he’ll accept it, just like he had to accept everything else
we’ve done. He knows better than to fight us anymore. He knows
we’re going to do whatever we want, no matter what he does. It’s
better that way.”
2
The three sisters finished their midday meal
and Allegra kicked the embers of the fire apart and used the edge
of her boot to scrape dirt over them. Then they untied their horses
from the bushes and swung up into their saddles.
All three sisters wore the same dusty outfit
of canvas pants, rawhide chaps, long sleeved cotton shirts buttoned
up the front, Stetson hats, and riding boots. They all wore gun
belts around their hips with rows of bullets lined up between their
holsters. Alma and Amelia wore leather gloves. Allegra didn’t
bother to protect her hands from the wear of her work.
Many people thought the Goodkind sisters were
triplets. They all carried the same curious combination of features
from their Irish father and their Apache-Mexican mother. Their
black hair shone in the sun, and their sharp, fierce eyes burned in
their faces. Their skin stayed clear and white, no matter how much
time they spent out in the sun, but their chiseled cheekbones and
strong jaw lines reflected their mother’s Native heritage.
Alma wore her hair in a single long whip of a
braid hanging down her back. It hung down so long, she sometimes
tucked the end of it into her belt to stop it swinging. Amelia kept
her hair tied in several braids looped up around the back of her
neck in the style of the local Mexican women. Allegra kept her hair
cropped short, up off her shoulders, like a boy. When scolded about
her appearance, she claimed she didn’t care what she looked like
and this was the easiest way for her to manage. No one, she
reminded everyone, would see her on the range anyway, so what
difference did it make?
The sisters followed their normal daily
routine and filed, in descending order of age, onto the trail to
their grazing cattle herd. Alma couldn’t see her sisters’ faces
behind her, but she envisioned them in her mind’s eye. She knew
well enough what they looked like when they received important
news.
Amelia would cover up her uncertainty with
quiet contemplation, but she couldn’t hide the concern in her eyes
or the repeated pressing together of her lips. Allegra didn’t have
to pretend to be totally disinterested because she was. If
anything, the coming of a new person into their isolated lives
represented an interesting change for her.
They didn’t speak about Alma’s decision again
that day. In fact, they hardly spoke at all out on the range. They
went through their daily routine with an unspoken understanding of
their shared goals and responsibilities.
Only after they got back to their house of
adobe brick did they speak again. Tucked into a cluster of thorn
trees near a spring on the upper flats of the river, the tiny house
offered a welcome relief from the aggressive sun. The sisters
didn’t return until dusk and the air began to cool, so the house
also provided shelter from the cold of the desert night.
Alma sighed as she dropped down from her
saddle. Her boots made two craters in the dust at her feet. “Home,
at last. Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.”
Allegra swung one leg up over her saddle horn
in front of her before hopping down. She laughed at Alma. “What do
you mean, there’s no place like it? There’s only about a million
mud huts across the frontier exactly like it. It’s a dump.”
Clarence Goodkind stooped under the lintel of
the door and leaned against the door post. “I built this house with
my own two hands, young lady. You’d do well to remember that.”
“So you’ve told me every day of my life,”
Allegra shot back. “How could I forget? And if I ever was inclined
to forget it, all I have to do is look at it to remember. It has
‘hand made’ written all over it.”
“That house has kept the sun and rain and
wind off of your ungrateful head since the day you were born,”
Amelia put in. “It’s done the job of providing us with a house all
these years, and it will continue to provide us with a home for
many years to come. So you should keep your remarks to
yourself.”
