Judith Bowen - A Home Of His Own

“I want to get married, Lewis.”

“Are you sure about this, Phoebe?” he asked.

“Absolutely,” she answered. She looked at him. “Are you?”

He nodded. “Yes. I love you. I’d do anything for you. Anything.”

She’d lost him for years and now she’d found him again. She wasn’t letting him go back to Edmonton and maybe find some other woman. Besides, she was tired of always being the good girl in her family, tired of always having to be sensible.

But how to explain this sudden urgency? The sudden overwhelming desire she’d felt this morning, watching him sleep, to be his, really his. In the most sacred, profound way. Marriage. “I know it seems kind of crazy, but doing it like this cuts out a lot of trouble. You know what I mean?”

“Uh-huh. Your folks.” His dark eyes were steady on hers.

Phoebe glanced away. “Them. And everyone else. They don’t know you the way I do. They’d bring up all kinds of complications. They’d think we should get married in a church. All that fuss. Weddings are stupid, anyway! Being married is what counts.”

“Is it?” He turned to study her. “You know I’ll do anything you want, Phoebe, even sneak off like this and marry you. But we can’t hide forever.”

“It’ll just be a secret for a while,” she told him. “Ours!”

Dear Reader,

Writing a collection of books set in and around the small town of Glory, Alberta, has been a challenge and a source of joy for me. I have lived in so many small towns myself that Glory has come to reflect everything I like and dislike about small-town living. No one can say there aren’t disadvantages—lack of privacy, interfering neighbors, limited shopping. But there are great advantages, too—a sense of community, parents looking out for their neighbors’ children, knowing that you’ll always find help if you ask for it.

Lewis Hardin, a young man in trouble in my first MEN OF GLORY book, The Rancher’s Runaway Bride, has always longed for something we all cherish: a home of our own. In this story, with childhood sweetheart Phoebe Longquist’s help, Lewis discovers his special place in more ways than one.

I hope you’ll enjoy the love story between Lewis and Phoebe. It was a wonderful book to write, and brings the folks of Glory full circle, back to the beginning. The place we call home.

Judith Bowen

P.S. Let me know how you’ve enjoyed the MEN OF GLORY books and thank you for your many, many letters over the years. You can reach me at P.O. Box 2333, Point Roberts, WA 98281-2333. Or check out my MEN OF GLORY web page at www.judithbowen.com.

739—THE RANCHER’S RUNAWAY BRIDE

791—LIKE FATHER, LIKE DAUGHTER

814—O LITTLE TOWN OF GLORY

835—THE DOCTOR’S DAUGHTER

872—HIS BROTHER’S BRIDE

900—THE RANCHER TAKES A WIFE

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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

THE FIRST TIME Phoebe saw Lewis Hardin she was maybe ten. She’d gone out to the Hardin place, at the top of Bearberry Hill, with her mother to deliver some parceled-up goods from the parish. The Hardins weren’t Catholic, as far as Phoebe was aware, but that didn’t matter: they were poor.

That afternoon, bored with the adults’ visiting, Phoebe had climbed a massive poplar in a copse near the Hardins’ old post-and-beam barn, then had daringly crawled onto a ledge that led to the loft. The loft contained very little hay. The roof, under the rafters, was thick with the nests of barn swallows; it echoed with the squeaky shrills of the parents swooping in to stuff their offspring’s bellies with mosquitoes, then out again. There were no animals in the barn, only a few badly rusted farm implements. She’d heard a rhythmic rap-rap sound below somewhere and had crept from one side of the loft to the other, peering through the square holes in the floor cut out for hay and straw to be thrown down to horses or cows.

She was afraid, but she was thrilled, too. This was an adventure. Even dangerous, up here with the stinky hay and the uncertain footing. By herself, too—no Jilly tagging along. The fun of having a new little sister had worn off long ago.

Finally, almost on top of the rap-rap sound, Phoebe cleared the hay cautiously from the place where the wall of the barn met the floor of the loft and peered down. She spotted a boy, about fourteen or fifteen, hammering on a homemade punching bag made from an old feed sack, it looked like, filled with straw. He jabbed at the bag, grunting at the effort, his skinny body gleaming with sweat in the shafts of afternoon sunlight that lazily probed the deep gloom of the barn’s interior. The punching bag hung in one corner of a box stall that had been fixed up with a bed and pallet and a rickety-looking table and bench. There were candles set into pop bottles, on the table, a knife, chunks of wood and several plastic bread bags. Was there food in them? It seemed that the boy lived in the stall, or at least slept there part of the time. A few boards pried out of the barn siding provided an exit.

Phoebe held her breath, rapt. Finally, with a last vicious series of jabs and a shout that thrilled her blood, he swung away from the bag and sank heavily onto the wooden chair. After a few moments of hard breathing, he retrieved his T-shirt from the adjoining pallet and put it on, then picked up the knife and a piece of wood from the table and began whittling.

She was certain he hadn’t seen her, not with the racket from the birds above. She was just thinking of how she could inch her way back, desperately afraid she’d sneeze or something, when he looked up and grinned. “Here you go, you little peeper!” He tossed something at her and she ducked. When she raised her head again, he was gone. She felt around in the hay until she found what he’d thrown. It was a small wooden frog, crudely carved.

Five years later…

SHE’D THOUGHT it was beautiful and had kept it on her windowsill ever since. She’d gone back up to the house to join her mother and the Hardin women that day, but the boy had not appeared.

Now, at nearly fifteen herself, on another such mission of charity, with her mother and her aunt Catherine this time, Phoebe thought about that silly wooden frog. It was grubby from handling, and once she’d actually thrown it away; the next day, she’d dug through her bedroom trash basket and retrieved it. It brought her luck. Or happiness. Something that didn’t bear thinking about.

Saint Augustine’s kept a list of the families they helped in the area, and Bearberry Hill was within the parish. Nothing remained there but a white-painted clapboard church with a windblown cemetery at the brow of the hill and the ramshackle settlement that marked the Hardin place. If there’d been a husband for the older woman, Mercedes Hardin, he was long gone and forgotten by the community. Her daughter, Billy, lived with her, a young-old woman of perhaps forty. She was not right in the head, some said, and others said she was peculiar by choice. Mercedes looked older than her sixty-some years, with flyaway white hair and watery blue eyes. Because of a hip broken years earlier, she favored one leg and walked with a cane, which had always made her seem older. There was another member of the family, Phoebe knew—the son, Lewis. He was in jail.