Carla Kelly - Western Christmas Proposals

“Nothing here for you,” he commented, mostly just to fill an empty space.

“No, sir,” she agreed promptly.

“Christmas is coming,” Ned told her, then felt like a complete idiot. Of course it was coming! So was the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. New Year’s, too.

His chore girl saw right through his lame attempt at conversation. “That’ll do, Mr. Avery,” she said so kindly in the accent he was finding more charming, by the minute. “I don’t require idle chat. I’ll be your chore girl. You don’t need to worry any more.”

Maybe it was the saying of it, her quiet sort of confidence that intrigued him almost as much as her accent. He sat back, inclined to think she was right.

Chapter Three

Katherine Peck was not a talkative woman. He pulled out a copy of Roughing It he had bought in Cheyenne, but she had nothing to read. He stopped the candy butcher who came swaying down the aisle as the train picked up steam, and asked about his magazines.

“What would you like to read?” Ned asked.

Miss Peck shook her head. “No money.”

“I have some. What would you like?” He leaned closer. “You can read.”

“Ayuh,” she said, a little starch in her voice.

Ned picked out a copy of Ladies’ Home Journal, paid for it and handed it to her. “This do? May I call you Katherine? Most people call me Ned. A whole winter of you calling me Mr. Avery just might give me a case of the fantods.”

“Fantods?” she asked as she carefully placed the magazine on her lap, almost as though it were valuable beyond comprehension.

“What? No fantods in Maine?”

“Not that I know of.”

“The creeps. The heebie-jeebies. The fantods,” he explained. “When people call me Mr. Avery, I just naturally look around for my father. Call me Ned.”

“I will, if you’ll call me Katie,” she told him.

Her hand caressed the magazine. He could tell she was eager to start reading, but she was also polite, and he was her boss. “Katie? I thought you preferred...”

“I want a different name. Am I allowed?”

“Certainly. Many shady people come West and change their names.”

“I am not shady,” she told him. He thought he saw amusement in her eyes for the first time.

“Didn’t think you were, Katie.”

She turned her attention immediately to the treasure in her lap. He couldn’t help watching her from the corner of his eye, how she caressed the magazine, then turned the pages so slowly. Her satisfied sigh touched his heart.

He couldn’t help smiling through the first few chapters of Roughing It. He gave himself over to the story and had just finished the fifth chapter when the conductor shouted, “Laramie!”

He put down the book and stood up. “I’ll be right back,” he told Katie. To his amusement, she barely glanced up from the magazine.

He dashed into a hardware store on the block next to the depot and bought a doorknob with a key and two hinges. A quick lunge for a bag of lemon drops completed his stampede through Laramie. He made it back to the train just as the conductor was calling, “This train is ready to depart!”

He handed her the parcel. Without a word, she untied the twine that bound it and spread out the hardware.

“I can knock together a wall and a door,” he said. “Until your room is done, my brother and I will sleep in the barn. Shouldn’t be more than a day.”

Katie ducked her head, staring hard at the parcel in her lap. “When I was ten, my stepfather started to beat me,” she whispered. “When he thought to do other things more grievous, I ran away. I was twelve.”

God forgive me when I whine, Ned thought, appalled. “Won’t happen here,” he told her. “Have a lemon drop. Things are going to get better.”

Eyes still lowered, she took a lemon drop from the proffered bag. “You still want me to work for you?”

“Yes. Girls of ten or twelve don’t have much say in things, do they?”

She shook her head. “I walked to Massachusetts, sleeping in barns and doing odd jobs, and became a mill girl. I’ll be a good chore girl and I won’t run away.”

Kate put aside the magazine, and looked out the soot-grimed window, as if searching for scenery.

“You’re looking in the wrong direction, if you’re after scenery,” Ned told her, impressed with her bravery. He pointed across the aisle. “That seat’s empty. Take a look.”

Intrigued, she did, and was rewarded with an eye-filling view of a mountain rising out of all that empty space.

“Elk Mountain,” he said, coming across the aisle to sit beside her. “It’s the northernmost mountain in the Snowy Range. My ranch is by that river over there. We’re seven miles from Medicine Bow.”

“Practically next door to a town,” she added.

He liked her smile and her handsome high cheekbones. He liked even more that she thought to tease him. “Out West, that’s the truth,” he replied. “Pa was here early, so we have river acreage. He came with a railroad crew, laying this track that we’re riding on. He liked what he saw, and stayed.”

“How many acres?” she asked.

“Better question is, how many cattle do we run?”

“Well, then...”

“One thousand, all behind bob wire, because we learned our lesson sooner’n three years ago, when we had a bitch of a winter and the cattle all drifted and died. Pardon my language.”

She made a little gesture with her hand, and he continued. It still wasn’t a good memory. “Some of the ranchers twitted us earlier about fencing our property. Sure we lost cattle in ’87, but not as many as the stockmen whose beeves drifted.”

“What happened?”

“They’re mostly gone.”

“The tough survived?”

Just like you, he thought, impressed. “Guess so. You should do fine, Katie Peck.”

Chapter Four

To Katie’s eyes, Medicine Bow looked no better and no worse than Laramie, only smaller. She let Ned Avery take her tin trunk and followed him from the train. She waited on a bench by the stable while he and the liveryman hitched one horse to a small wagon, such as she had never seen back East.

“It’s a buckboard,” he said, as he helped her in. “One stop and we’ll head home.”

He pulled up in front of Bradley’s Mercantile. He must have ordered everything before he left Medicine Bow, because he came out in a few minutes with more wrapped packages, plus a paper bag, which he set in her lap.

“Pirozhki,” he said. “Some Roosians moved here from Nebraska and we can’t get enough of them. Two for each of us. Hand me one, once I get us over the tracks.”

She did as he said, enjoying her pork roll while he coaxed the horse across the railroad track. She handed him one, which he downed quickly, then the other, which disappeared about as fast. He protested when she offered him her second one, but not for long.

“Apples in the barrel behind you,” he said, and she produced two. “Barrel at home is nearly empty.” One satisfied her, but Ned needed two more apples.

“Just seven miles, so we’re practically in town,” he told her as they bumped along. She tried to brace herself so she wouldn’t nudge his shoulder, but the seat was so narrow. “I wanted to take my pa to Medicine Bow, where he could stay with the doctor and get better care, but he won’t have it.”

“Yours must be a nice place, if he won’t leave it.”

He shrugged. “Pa fought for the Confederacy, and came out here with nothing.”

“Your mother, too?”

“A little later. I was born in Mississippi. As soon as he had a holding out here, he sent for us.”

“Mr. Ave...”

“Ned.”

“No, it’s a Mr. Avery subject,” she insisted, which made him chuckle. “Mr. Avery, I can probably manage without a room of my own. I’m asking too much.”