Brides of Grasshopper Creek Read online

  When the new family arrived back at the house, the children all rushed to the windows to watch as it started to snow. Sophie admired how nice the tree looked, surrounded by children and snow coming down behind it. Randy went out into the back yard and returned a few moments later with arms full of logs for the fireplace. He started a fire going and sat in front of it with Sophie.

  “You look absolutely beautiful, Mrs. Parker,” he told her, gazing at her as she was lit up by the light cast from the fire.

  “Why, thank you, Mr. Parker,” she replied, smiling at him. “You are very handsome.”

  Randolph took her hand and kissed it.

  Before long, the children begged to go sledding outside in the fresh snow. Mr. Parker chuckled and was quick to acquiesce, even though he would have happily stayed by the fire with his lovely new bride.

  Sophie stood up. “I will go with you,” she said. “Please allow me to change into something more appropriate.”

  Randy gave her one last look in her wedding gown before hugging her. “I love you,” he said softly into her ear. Then he pulled back, admiring her with smiling eyes. “Let’s go on an adventure!”

  He entertained the children with stories about reindeer and snowmen while Sophie excused herself, going up to her bedroom to change into a warm, green dress. Since it was now snowing, she put on her thick coat and she decided to bring along a fur muff to keep her hands warm.

  “Are you coming with us, Mrs. Pierce?” she brightly asked the nanny as she passed her in the hall.

  Mrs. Pierce shook her head, though she smiled at her. “I will stay inside where it is warm. After all, today is your day.” She went to her place on the couch and took up her knitting. Sophie went to her and hugged her around the shoulders.

  “Thank you for all you have done.”

  Randy extended a hand to Sophie and she gracefully took it, going outside with the children to play in the snow and keep them from getting into too much mischief. Teddy pulled a sled around with the girls and sounds of shrieks and laughter filled the snowy air.

  “What would you like this Christmas?” Randolph asked Sophie, holding her hand as they walked along, watching the children and admiring the thick blanket of snow as it formed and grew around them.

  She gazed at him lovingly. “You mean besides being your wife?” she asked him pleasantly.

  He chuckled. “Yes, besides that. Is there something else that would make you truly happy here?”

  Sophie brought her hand back into her muff as she thought about her answer. “Well,” she said. “I have been thinking that I would like to have a school here. It does not have to be fancy, but it could be someplace where I can teach the children… maybe even some other children in the town would like a school house. Mrs. Pierce could teach there with me. I can see that she is very skilled.” She looked from him to Gwendolyn to prove her point.

  Randy beamed at her. Sophie was relieved to see that her idea did not upset him. She of course would not let her work take her away from the home and being with him, but teaching made her happy and he had told her that he wanted to give her something that brought her happiness.

  “You would like me to build you a school house?” he asked her, smiling widely. “I would be more than happy to. Why, we can design it together. My men and I can get started on it right away.”

  She smiled and gave his cheek a kiss. “Thank you, Randy,” she said. “I love you. What would you like me to give you for Christmas?”

  He stopped walking and turned to face her, gently placing his hands on her shoulders. “You have already given me what I wanted,” he said. “I am now the happiest man in Washington.”

  Sophie smiled and cuddled against him. “That makes me the happiest wife.”

  THE END

  Mail Order Bride Lizzie

  Sisters Of Binghamton

  Charity Phillips

  Binghamton, New York - 1871

  It’s the spring of 1871, and seventeen-year-old Lizzie Perry is in love with a shop boy named Henry. She must uphold her end of the pact she made with her sisters, however, so, begrudgingly, Lizzie begins corresponding with Fred, a twenty-five-year-old sheep rancher from Cheyenne, Wyoming, but maintains her relationship with Henry as well.

  Things change when Lizzie realizes just how impoverished her ailing parents really are. In an effort to help, she resolves to head out west and get to know Fred, though she tells him she won’t marry him until she feels she knows him. Once in Wyoming, Lizzie pines for the city, her shop boy, and her general sheep-free lifestyle back in Binghamton.

  Is Lizzie doomed to pine forever, or will she give this dashing rancher a chance?

  Chapter 1

  “If you keep rushing ahead like that, we’re going to have to strap a leash on you,” Ann remarked as her little sister Lizzie outpaced her and their elder sister Margaret for the third time at the market that morning.

  Lizzie groaned and reluctantly stopped at a stall overflowing with vegetables. “Fine, but will you two please go faster?”

  “Why are you in such a hurry, Lizzie?” Margaret asked in her soft, gentle voice. She was as sweet as Ann was prickly.

  Ann cut her eyes at Maggie to let her know that she knew precisely why Lizzie was in a hurry. Ann was too smart for her own good, and certainly too smart for Lizzie’s own good. Though Margaret was the eldest of the three of them, Ann loved to act like she was. She’d even done that back when their eldest sister Sarah had still lived at home, and Sarah was a full ten years older than seventeen-year-old Lizzie.

  Lizzie felt the familiar twist in her heart she felt each time she thought of Sarah. Five years after Sarah’s first husband had died in the war she’d answered the personal ad of a handsome Scottish gentleman named William. His letters had swept Sarah off to San Francisco on the other end of the country. It had been nearly six months since Lizzie had seen her eldest (but somehow closest) sister and she missed her terribly.

  Lizzie shook those sad thoughts away. She couldn’t have a frowning face, not now. She needed to be at her most beautiful, her most charming.

  Margaret dawdled at the vegetable cart to fawn over some butternut squash while Ann stood by and simply smiled at Lizzie knowingly. But then Ann got distracted talking to one of her former teachers and Lizzie seized the opportunity to make her escape. She knew it was risky, but she had to see him. She just had to.

  As Lizzie made her way through the marketplace, she untwisted the bun at the nape of her neck and let her long, dark hair tumble free nearly down to her waist. Over and over, Lizzie’s mother Ada, Sarah, and Ann had all told her that proper young ladies wore their hair up, and only their husbands got to see them with their hair down. But where was the fun in that?

  Men’s heads turned left and right as Lizzie walked. Margaret, who was beautiful in her own right, blushed and cowered when this happened. But Lizzie only stood straighter and smiled all the more. She knew she was beautiful, but that didn’t mean she didn’t like being reminded.

  Boys and men followed her with their eyes all the way to his stall. It wasn’t his stall at all, of course—he just worked there, shoveling nuts into sacks for customers. But whenever Lizzie arrived at this particular stall at the market, Henry was all she could see.

  Lizzie had known the moment she’d first set eyes on Henry three months ago that she loved him. How could she not? His face looked as though it had been so lovingly sculpted that the artist responsible had never sold his masterpiece, settling instead to bask in the riches of his sculpture’s gorgeous face. His dark, decisive brows arched over even darker, nearly black eyes that Lizzie felt herself falling into whenever Henry glanced her way. He had beautiful full lips and wavy dark brown hair that she repeatedly had to remind herself it would be wholly inappropriate for her to touch in public.

  Other men couldn’t get enough of Lizzie, but Henry couldn’t have cared less when she first started stopping by the nuts and preserves stall at every available opportunity. He hadn’t even l
ooked at her as she’d offered up her wittiest jokes, her loveliest smiles, and her flutteringest of lashes.

  He was looking at her now, though. Ever since Lizzie had started wearing her hair down around him, Henry had started to notice her. He was still a boy of few words, but who cared? It seemed a waste to use lips as gorgeous as those for something as boring as talking.

  Lizzie sidled up to a table filled with large glass jars of nuts. “Could I have a pound of almonds, please?”

  Henry nodded and poured out the almonds then weighed them. As he tied twine around the sack, he looked back and forth, then gave Lizzie one of his rare smiles. “I’ll be on break in just a few minutes,” he whispered. Then he handed her the almonds. “That’ll be free of charge, ma’am.”

  “Why, thank you, Henry,” Lizzie replied, hoping she wasn’t blushing too hard.

  A few minutes later, Lizzie and Henry were kissing behind the hardware store that stood next to the marketplace. Lizzie had never experienced anything quite like kissing Henry. She had secretly sneaked a few kisses with boys before, but they had been so chaste—so respectful. Henry, on the other hand, seemed like he wanted to devour her with his kisses. Henry stopped for a moment and looked up at Lizzie, whose fingers were tangled into his thick hair, when he said, “I want to see you tonight.”

  “What?” Lizzie asked, out of breath. Neither of them usually talked during these secret moments together.

  “Tonight,” he said. “I’ve got to get back to work now, but I want to see you tonight. Come to Maggie Adler’s property, near the briar patch.”

  “Henry, that’s trespassing…” Lizzie said hesitantly.

  He started to kiss her again. “The old bird never stays up past eight o’clock. No one will ever know.

  She nodded quickly. “I’ll make it happen. Say nine?”

  He gave her a quick but satisfying kiss on the lips. “Nine it is, Liz.”

  Lizzie leaned back against the building as he jogged back toward the market. She usually hated it when people called her anything but “Lizzie” (and Henry knew this), but somehow even “Liz” seemed endearing coming out of his incredible lips.

  Her sisters were miraculously still at the vegetable cart and had barely noticed that Lizzie had been gone, though Ann did give Lizzie yet another of her knowing smiles. Even Ann’s smugness couldn’t drag Lizzie off of the cloud she was floating on, though, and she remained two feet off the ground the whole way home.

  Lizzie smiled up at her family’s cream-colored, two-story house when they arrived home. It would be difficult for her to leave when she and Henry got married. He hadn’t proposed to her yet, but it had to be coming, right? Then their main challenge would be proving to her too-proper parents that a shop boy was a good match for Lizzie.

  She frowned when she saw their mother waiting outside the front door with her arms crossed. That was Ada’s disappointed pose. Had someone seen Lizzie and Henry together?

  Their mother gave each sister a firm-lipped kiss and beckoned them inside to sit at the kitchen table. The kitchen smelled wonderful, as always. Even without most of her sight, their mother still managed to be one of the finest cooks in Binghamton, if not the world in general.

  Ada cleared her throat. “I’ve asked you girls in here because I want to speak to you about something. Your father and I have been very lenient with you—Ann with your books, Margaret with those children you look after… but it’s time you settled down. I want to make sure you’ve found respectable husbands while your father and I are still around.”

  Lizzie opened her mouth then closed it. Henry wasn’t respectable by any means. He also hasn’t proposed, a voice in her head reminded her. As if she needed reminding.

  Ada stood and retrieved a big stack of newspapers from the counter. She set an issue of the paper in front of each daughter and explained, “You’ll have to be careful to look at the dates on the ads, as some of these papers are months old, but I’m sure you’ll be able to find at least a few prospects.” She set one of the papers in front of Lizzie. “Especially you, my beauty. Any of these young men will snap you right up once he sees a photograph of you.”

  Lizzie looked down at the paper. It was San Francisco’s Matrimonial News, the paper that all four sisters had pooled their money to subscribe to over a year ago after their father had been diagnosed with consumption. It was the paper where Sarah had found her husband. Their mother must have renewed the subscription at the start of the year—none of the girls had done it, not that Lizzie knew of. They’d all assumed that there was no rush for them to get married, not now that Sarah could send money home from William’s enormous inheritance.

  Lizzie knew that at twenty-three, Margaret was verging on spinsterhood, but Lizzie and Ann still had time, didn’t they?

  “Do you really want us to move West, Mama?” Lizzie asked. “We would be so far away.”

  Margaret nodded, surprising Lizzie. She tended to just go along with whatever their mother wanted. “Wouldn’t you rather we met nice, respectable men right here in Binghamton? Then we could still help you and Papa out when you need it.”

  “If you did meet nice, respectable men here in Binghamton, I would love to meet them,” their mother replied. “But none of you have.”

  “That perfectly lovely man Bernard asked for Lizzie’s hand,” Margaret began.

  “Mags, he was hideous!” Lizzie interrupted. “I could barely look at him, much less love him.”

  “Arthur and Adam Burrows were both ready to propose to you as well,” Ann contributed, “but you wouldn’t give either of them the time of day.”

  “Ugh, Ann, it’s just like you to bring up the Burrows,” Lizzie fumed. The pair of pasty-faced twins had barely made a peep whenever Lizzie was around, and their silence hadn’t been anywhere near as attractive as Henry’s.

  “Shush,” their mother said, and the girls fell silent. “All I know is that none of you have received a proposal since your sister left for California. Sarah found a perfectly wonderful man by responding to an ad in this newspaper. Don’t you think it’s at least worth trying for all of you?”

  “…No,” Ann said after a moment, voicing the feeling that Lizzie couldn’t. Why was their mother doing this to them?

  “Well, tough,” their mother replied in a firm tone.

  Chapter 2

  Lizzie wasn’t able to go out to see Henry that night. Ada had kept her and her sisters busy with housework all day, then insisted that they comb through the copies of the Matrimonial News to search for viable bachelors. Lizzie tried to pick out an ad as quickly as she could, but her mother found fault with each and every one. Lizzie could feel her heart breaking as the grandfather clock struck nine.

  It wasn’t until nearly eleven that Lizzie was able to find an ad that passed her mother’s standards:

  March 2, 1871

  Frederic Knowles, a twenty-five-year-old sheep rancher of good means living in Cheyenne, Wyoming, seeks a lady with a good face and even better sense of humor with whom he can start a life and raise a family.

  Lizzie had thought her mother would be scandalized by the “good face” comment, but she just chuckled and announced, “I like him. Now go write your reply.”

  Lizzie didn’t know what she had done to deserve this torture. (Well, her relationship with Henry probably would have earned her plenty of Ada’s torture, but Lizzie was quite sure at this point that her mother didn’t know about that.) With a frustrated groan, she made her way upstairs to her room. There was no chance Henry was still waiting for her at this point, but she was tired. So, she decided to keep this short.

  She retrieved her quill and a sheet of stationery from her desk, dipped her quill in a jar of ink, and wrote:

  May 12, 1871

  Dear Mr. Knowles,

  I saw your ad in the March 8th issue of the “Matrimonial News” and I have just one question for you: Do you ever get so bored that you begin talking to the sheep?

  Sincerely,

  Miss Lizz
ie Perry

  For a moment, Lizzie thought about which photograph to include with her letter, but then her lips twisted into a wicked smile. Her mother had told her she had to respond to this man, but she had said nothing about Lizzie including a photograph…

  Lizzie’s mind tried to remind her that in fact Ada had told Lizzie to include a photograph, just not at the same particular moment that she’d told her to write a reply to Mr. Knowles, but Lizzie went ahead and sealed the letter anyway.

  Even in its brevity and lack of photograph, Lizzie still felt she was betraying Henry with this letter. But her mother was still awake and keeping a hawk’s eye on her when Lizzie came downstairs; she had to mail the letter right away—her mother wouldn’t stand for anything less.

  Now Lizzie just had to hope that Mr. Knowles never replied.

  Chapter 3

  Mr. Knowles responded only a month later. Lizzie was sorting through the mail on her way to the house when she saw a letter for her with Frederic Knowles’ name and address written in the upper left corner. The letter felt incredibly light—he was probably just writing to tell her that he had already found a perfect little farm wife since placing his ad.

  Lizzie could only hope.

  Lizzie’s mother was in the kitchen when Lizzie dropped the mail on the counter. Ada was nearly blind but must have heard Lizzie ripping open the letter. “Is that from him?” she asked. Ada had asked that same question each and every time Lizzie had gotten a letter over the last month.