Deborah Hale - The Bonny Bride

Harris traded her glare for glare.

Then, unexpectedly, one corner of his wide, mobile mouth curved into an irresistible grin. “Since we’re each bent on driving the other mad, maybe we ought to find a nice cozy lunatic asylum and settle down.”

“This is nothing to joke about.” The unbidden chuckle that burst out of Jenny belied her words. “We’re at each other all the time. Ye and I never would have made a happy match, even with all the money in the world.”

“Don’t ye believe it, lass,” Harris replied in quiet earnest. A stray ray of rising sun pierced the foliage, burnishing his hair like new copper and lighting the rich warmth of his hazel eyes.

It cost Jenny every crumb of her self-control to keep from bolting straight into his arms….

Dear Reader,

In The Bonny Bride by award-winning author Deborah Hale, a poor young woman sets sail for Nova Scotia from England as a mail-order bride to a wealthy man, yet meets her true soul mate on board the ship. Will she choose love or money? Margaret Moore, who also writes mainstream historicals for Avon Books, returns with A Warrior’s Kiss, a passionate marriage-of-convenience story and the next in her ongoing medieval WARRIOR series. Theresa Michaels’s new Western, Once a Hero, is a gripping and emotion-filled story about a cowboy who rescues a female fugitive and unexpectedly falls in love with her as they go in search of a lost treasure. For readers who enjoy discovering new writers, The Virgin Spring by Golden Heart winner Debra Lee Brown is for you. Here, a Scottish laird finds an amnesiac woman beside a spring and must resist his desire for her, as he believes she is forbidden to him.

Whatever your tastes in reading, you’ll be sure to find a romantic journey back to the past between the covers of a Harlequin Historicals novel. We hope you’ll join us next month, too!

Sincerely,

Tracy Farrell,

Senior Editor

The Bonny Bride

Deborah Hale

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Harlequin Historicals

My Lord Protector #452

A Gentleman of Substance #488

The Bonny Bride #503

In memory of my great-great-great-grandparents,

John and Ann Graham, who also fell in love on their way

to the Miramichi. And my grandfather, Edwin Graham,

who told me their story and many others, igniting my

enduring passion for the past.

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Epilogue

“Where can they be? They should be here by now.” For the tenth time in half an hour, Jenny Lennox turned from the quay of Kirkcudbright’s small harbor. Her anxious eye scanned the slate-roofed buildings of the town, searching for some sign of her traveling companions.

“Wist, wist ye now.” Jenny tried to calm herself. “I ken they’ll be here soon enough. Mr. Walker never believed in getting anywhere too soon, and his wife isn’t a hustler, either.”

Indeed, it was a running joke in Dalbeattie that the family should change their surname to Plodder. Still, on this of all days, couldn’t they have come a few minutes early?

“They should be here by now,” she insisted yet again, as though her words were an incantation to conjure the tardy Walkers out of thin air. “The tide’s coming in fast. We’ll have to board before long.”

Salty Atlantic waters swelled into the mouth of the River Nith, covering Kirkcudbright’s muddy tidal flats. A hundred and fifty years earlier, Covenanter girls no older than Jenny had been tied to stakes and drowned by the inexorable Solway tides as punishment for their religious beliefs. To this day the gulls grieved those martyred souls, wheeling and diving in the clear June sky. Their shrill keening struck a mournful counterpoint to the bass dirge of the sea.

Not I, thought Jenny, as she watched a boom of timber being floated ashore from one of the ships moored out in the channel. I’ll not be martyred—tied to some bleak upland croft and slowly drowned by a life of drudgery. From the time she could hold a broom, Jenny had taken on the work of a grown woman. Toiling side by side with her mother, she’d cooked, cleaned, spun, churned, washed and mended. Not to mention minding the ever-increasing tribe of boys her parents had bred in their high box bed. Since her mother’s death, full responsibility for the Lennox household had fallen on Jenny’s slight shoulders. Today might be her only chance to escape.

The lighter barges were already beginning to ferry cargo out to the barque St. Bride. Word had come ashore that her master meant to weigh anchor when the tide shifted, roughly two hours hence. In two hours Jenny would be on her way to the New Brunswick colony and a new, better life. If only the Walkers would hurry up and get here!

She peered up the street again. Where could they be? A huge knot clenched in Jenny’s stomach, as indigestible as her stepmother’s oatmeal porritch. It had been many hours since she’d worried down a bowlful and taken tearful leave of her brothers. The older ones had masked their moist eyes with manly gruffness. Warning her not to fall into the ocean during the crossing, they’d begged her to write often—forgetting she didn’t know how.

Wee Malcolm had clung to her skirts wailing fit to wake the dead, until manhandled into the cottage by their stepmother. If only she could have taken him with her, the babby she’d cared for like a mother ever since her own mother’s death. Sinking down onto her new brass-bound cedar trunk, Jenny bit her lips together hard between her teeth. If the Walkers didn’t soon come, she feared she might start bawling herself, pleading with her father to take her home again.

Unwelcome tears were just forming in Jenny’s eyes when she spotted a familiar figure among the Kirkcudbright townsfolk. It was not Mag Walker, a big sowdy woman who outweighed her husband by nearly two stone. Rather a slender girl, wearing a gay bonnet and fashionable traveling outfit.

“Kirstie!” Jenny hailed her friend as she dodged through the crowd on the quayside. “Ye’re a sight for sore eyes,” she exclaimed. “Don’t tell me ye’ve come all the way from Dalbeattie just to see me off?”

Kirsten Robertson was as close a friend as Jenny had made during her hardworking, restricted youth. Though her prosperous father owned Dalbeattie’s granite quarry, Kirstie was not one to put on fine airs. One day, many years back, the Robertsons’ housekeeper had brought the child along on her routine visit to buy eggs from Jenny’s mother. After the two little girls struck up an acquaintance, Kirstie insisted on coming every time. When she got older, she took over the chore herself. Jenny had always looked forward to Kirstie’s visits. They were practically her only chance to hear about school and town and the wide world beyond the Lennox farm.