The Forgotten Bride (Brides 0f Brimstone Book 2) Read online

  The Forgotten Bride

  Brides of Brimstone – Book 2

  Laura Fletcher

  Contents

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  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

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  © 2018 Laura Fletcher

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

  * * *

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  * * *

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  1

  Cici Cope stepped out of the mail coach. Her boots resounded on the rickety wooden porch of the Brimstone Hotel. The guard put her trunk down next to her, and Cici set her carpetbag on top of it. The guard tipped his hat. “Best of luck, Ma’am.”

  “Thank you,” Cici exclaimed.

  The man climbed onto the seat next to the driver and propped his shotgun on his hip. The driver whipped his reins at the horses, and the coach rumbled away out of town. After four weeks in that coach, it vanished out of Cici’s life. It might as well have never existed. It disappeared into the dream from whence it emerged in the first place.

  Cici squinted against dust blowing in her eyes. It came from all directions at once. It plumed out of the ground until she choked. She couldn’t see a thing around her, not even when the coach receded into the distance.

  Another wagon rolled by, and dust rose from its wheels. The horses dragged their feet and sent up even more clouds of the thick, chalk-grey stuff. It covered everything and stuck in Cici’s throat.

  A man in a suit got off the coach with her. He brushed a gloved hand against his suit jacket, but it did no good. The dust covered to everything. It clung most tenaciously to those things anybody wanted to keep clean.

  While she stood there, a porter came out of the Hotel and greeted the man. “You must be Mr. Phineas Exeter. May I take your trunk up to your room?”

  “Why, yes. Thank you,” replied the man in the suit.

  The porter hefted his trunk onto his shoulder. Cici saw her one and only opportunity slipping away. She hurried over and detained the porter. “Would there be a Kelvin Kirk waiting in the Hotel? I’m supposed to meet him here.”

  “Sorry, Ma’am,” the porter replied. “Can’t help you.”

  “Maybe you’ve seen a tall cowboy hanging around,” she ventured. “He has curly black hair and bright green eyes. He has a sharp, angular nose and high cheekbones.”

  The porter laughed out loud. “Oh, I know Kelvin Kirk. I ought to. My brother works on the ranch with him, and he’s always in here for one thing or another. I would know if he’d been here, but I haven’t seen him today. As a matter of fact, I haven’t seen him all week. Sorry, Ma’am. He ain’t here.”

  The porter turned on his heel, and he and Mr. Phineas Exeter abandoned her to the dust. Cici let out a shaky sigh. Where could Kelvin Kirk be? After six months writing to each other, he finally asked her to come out to Brimstone to meet him in the hopes of marrying her. He promised to meet her at the Hotel as soon as she told him when she planned to arrive.

  She wrote him she was leaving her home in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. She told him exactly when she planned to arrive, and she was right on the money, so why wasn’t he here?

  Maybe he had a change of heart and couldn’t tell her by mail after she already left. Never mind. She could take care of herself. She didn’t need to marry him any more than he needed to marry her. If he was going to leave her high and dry like this, she had better things to do than hang around.

  At that moment, a woman stepped out onto the sidewalk of a weathered building slumped across the street. A big sign over the door read, Post Office. She wore a shawl and a bonnet like any other frontier woman. Her long skirts brushed the sidewalk, and she squinted across the street at the same moment. The two women regarded each other for a moment.

  Cici would have turned away, but the woman stepped off the sidewalk into the dust. She marched straight across the street and up onto the Hotel porch in front of Cici. She held out her hand. “Welcome! Did you just get off the coach? You’ll have to forgive me for being so forward. It’s just that there are only three women in this whole town, so I’m always interested when another one shows up. I’m Betsy Wilcox. My husband is the blacksmith in this town. Forgive me. You must be tired. I shouldn’t presume. Just tell me, and I’ll leave you alone. Are you here to meet someone—visiting relatives in town?”

  Cici wilted before her bubbly enthusiasm. “I’m here to meet someone, but it’s not relatives in town. I was going to be a mail order bride. I was going to meet a man here and hopefully marry him. Isn’t that stupid? Whoever heard of marrying a man you never met? Anyway, it doesn’t matter now because he’s not here. I wrote to him, and he didn’t show up. He must have gotten cold feet. I should have known better. Never mind. It doesn’t matter. I’ve got my own life to live. I don’t need any Kelvin Kirk to live it for me.”

  Betsy gasped. “Kelvin Kirk! You’re here to meet Kelvin Kirk?”

  “Do you know him?” Cici asked. “Don’t tell me. He’s a no-account hoodlum who doesn’t know a lady from a hole in the wall.”

  Betsy seized Cici’s hand. “My dear girl! Kelvin Kirk is the nicest, most considerate, most generous, most loyal man you could hope to marry. He’s a real prize, and I’m quite sure if he planned to meet you, there has been some dreadful misunderstanding. He would never arrange to meet you and then back out because he got cold feet. I know him well, and he’s just not that kind of man. There’s a sensible explanation for all this. I can promise you that.”

  “Are you sure?” Cici asked. “You don’t think I should kick him down the street, ‘cuz I could, you know. I could do it easily.”

  Betsy burst out laughing. “I’m sure you could, and I’m sure you want to when he wasn’t here to meet you. Please, just give the guy a chance and he’ll show you he’s the best you could hope for. As far as a mail order bride being stupid, you’re talking to the wrong woman. I was a mail order bride, and I never laid eyes on my husband before our wedding day.”

  “Really?” Cici gasped.

  “Really. Now tell me everything. How did you arrange to meet Kelvin here? He never said anything to me and Jed about meeting a girl from the Matrimonial Times.”

  “I can understand why not,” Cici remarked. “He probably didn’t tell anybody what he was up to.”

  “He told us everything about what he was up to,” Betsy replied. “He said he was corresponding with a girl he really liked and he invited her out to meet him, but he never said anything about your response.”

  “Oh, I responded, all right,” Cici countered. “After I got his letter, I wasn’t su
re when I would be able to leave Gatlinburg. That’s where I’m from. It’s in Tennessee.”

  Betsy pressed her hand. “It’s so nice to meet another Southern girl. I’m from Greenville, Mississippi. By the way, I forgot to ask your name. You’ll have to forgive me. This is all so much to take in all at once.”

  “It’s Cici,” she replied. “Actually my name’s Cecilia Cope, but everybody calls me Cici.”

  “That’s a lovely name.”

  “Thank you,” Cici replied.

  “You were saying you got his letter and you weren’t sure when you would be able to leave Gatlinburg,” Betsy prompted.

  “Right. I was on my way home from the Post Office with the letter. I always answered Kelvin’s letters right away, but I wasn’t sure what to tell him. I didn’t want to miss out on maybe marrying him, but I couldn’t leave right away. My Daddy was sick and my Mama wasn’t strong enough to take care of him. I was taking care of both of them day and night. I didn’t know how to let Kelvin down so he would understand I wasn’t refusing because I didn’t want to marry him. I did want to marry him, but I couldn’t leave my parents.”

  “So what happened when you got home?” Betsy asked.

  “When I got home, I found my older sister sitting out front,” Cici went on. “She’s married to a nice fella, but it wasn’t like her to come over to our place out of the blue like that. Plus she was crying, and she told me Daddy had passed while I was out, just like that out of the clear blue sky. She said she was taking Mama to live with her, and there was so much back tax due on the farm, the bankers were on their way over next day to take stock of the place. She said I had to find some other place to live.”

  Betsy’s hands fell to her sides. “So that’s when you decided to come out here to meet Kelvin.”

  Cici nodded down at the ground. She hadn’t realized until this moment how much she needed to get that off her chest. “I wrote to Kelvin saying I was leaving right away. I told him when I would be here to meet him.”

  “Your letter must have gotten lost in the mail,” Betsy suggested. “That happens a lot out here on the frontier. Letters are always getting mislaid and misdirected and lost and destroyed. You get used to it. Kelvin never received your letter. If he had, I’m certain he would have told Jed and me about it. We’ve been supporting him in his efforts to find a wife.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  Betsy sprang into action. She seized Cici’s hand again. “Come on. You’re coming over to my house. We’ll send word to Kelvin. I’m sure he’ll come right away as soon as he hears that you’re in town. I’ll give you a cup of tea and a hot meal while you wait for him to show up. When he does, you two can go off to the church and get married before he takes you home to the ranch.”

  Cici yanked her hand out of Betsy’s grasp. “Hold on a second. I’m not going to the church with a man I never met before. Are you out of your mind?”

  Betsy froze. She stared into Cici’s eyes and blinked. “Oh. Sorry. That’s what Jed and I did. I never really thought about it, but if that’s what you want…I mean, if you don’t want to, there’s no reason you should.”

  “I’m not marrying a man sight unseen,” Cici declared. “I’m getting a room in the Hotel, for a few weeks at least until I get to know him. Then I’ll decide whether I want to marry him.”

  “Of course,” Betsy murmured. “How thoughtless of me. Of course. You do what you feel is right. I only wanted to offer you hospitality.”

  Cici pulled herself together with an effort. Her mama always told her she had a tendency to fire off at the mouth without thinking. Cici couldn’t afford to alienate one of three other women in this town. If she chose to stay here, she would need every friend and ally she could get.

  “I’m really sorry,” she exclaimed. “I didn’t mean to shun your hospitality. It’s very kind of you to invite me to your house and to contact Kelvin for me, but I have to do this my own way. I’ll get a room at the Hotel for now. If things work out with Kelvin, there’ll be plenty of time for us to get married later on. Besides, I wouldn’t want to impose on you and your husband.”

  Betsy burst into a magnificent smile. “Don’t worry, honey. I respect you for doing this your own way. You don’t have to apologize to me for anything, and you’re welcome at the forge any time you want to come over. You get your room in the Hotel, and I’ll see you around the town in the next couple of days. Maybe when you’re feeling more settled, you can come and have Sunday dinner with me and Jed.”

  Cici smiled back. “I’d like that.”

  After Betsy left for home, Cici took her carpetbag into the Hotel and approached the front desk. A fat man wearing a colored visor stood behind the desk and scribbled in the ledger. “May I help you?”

  “I’d like to check into a room for a week,” Cici informed him.

  He copied her name into his ledger. Then he called the porter to carry Cici’s trunk up to her room. After the porter left her alone, she washed her face, hands and neck in the wash basin on the side dresser. She considered changing her dress, but what was the point? It would only get dusty like this one.

  She opened her carpetbag and took out a large apron. She put it on, but even that depressed her. Her traveling clothes already got dusty. The apron only covered the dust. It did nothing to keep her clean the way it was supposed to.

  She sat down in a chair to mend a sock when she noticed a section of lace coming loose from her apron hem. She fished through her carpetbag. She took out her white thread and reeled off a section when the spool jumped in her hand. That was the last piece of white thread on the spool.

  She set aside her mending and took out her pocketbook. She left the room and paused on the sidewalk outside. The General Store sat right next to the Hotel. She could get another spool of white thread and be back in her room in no time.

  She crossed the sidewalk to the Store. She put out her hand for the door handle when a man emerged from inside. He closed the door behind him and he didn’t move aside the way any normal man would to let a woman pass. He stopped right in front of her, right where he would block her access to the door.

  He towered over her, and his hat covered his short grey hair. He wore a tin star pinned to his coat lapel that read, Sheriff. He surveyed Cici up and down. “Well, well. What have we here?”

  “Excuse me, Sir,” she returned. “If you’ll kindly step aside, I would like to go into the Store.”

  “Where did you come from?” he asked. “Just off the mail coach, are you? Thought so. What brings you to town?”

  “I don’t see how that’s any business of yours,” she replied. “At the moment, I’m going to the Store. That’s all you need to know.”

  He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “At the moment, I’m going to the saloon for a drink. What do you say you join me for the evening?”

  “I do not drink,” she told him. “It’s a filthy, disgusting habit engaged in by low, rude men who appreciate the manners of the pigsty. I’m sure you’re no different, and I wouldn’t spend ten seconds in a saloon with you if you paid me a thousand dollars to do it. Now kindly stand aside. You’re wearing a tin star, but I can see you’re no law man—not one to speak of, anyway. You must be a theatre actor, or maybe a costume merchant peddling his disguises. No true law man would behave in such a forward and uncouth manner toward a woman he never met before.”

  In spite of her acid tongue, she realized in an instant that he was in fact the Sheriff. She calculated her words to inflict the maximum insult she could muster under the circumstances, and she saw her words hit home.

  The Sheriff’s face changed in an instant. The lascivious sneer melted off his face, and black rage took its place. She should have known better than to bait him that way, but she couldn’t stop herself. The words came out unbidden, and she didn’t see the consequences until after she already spoke them.

  He bent forward and snarled in her face. “You’re coming to the saloon with me, and you’re gonna enjoy your
self if it’s the last thing you do.”

  He grabbed her by the arm and started manhandling her down the street. A tailor’s shop sat on the other side of the Store. Beyond that, she beheld the swinging doors of a saloon.

  She couldn’t let him take her in there. She knew very well what happened in there. If she went in there, she was lost—to herself most of all. She dug her heels into the splintered boards of the sidewalk. She raised her voice and screamed. “Let me go! You brute! Let me go! I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  She half-hoped Betsy was still close enough to town to hear her. If she could attract someone’s notice, she might have a chance at escape. Under the circumstances, she could never free herself from this man alone. He overpowered her with no trouble at all.

  His fingers dug into her arm until it hurt. The more she yanked, the tighter he held her. Her heels skidded on the sidewalk. She was losing ground. She had to do something to stop this.

  In a panic, she dug her fingernails into his hand. She buried her talons into his skin until he roared in pain. He spun around and raised his fist to club her to the ground. At that moment, the door of the General Store slammed open. A man hurtled through it onto the sidewalk and lunged between Cici and the Sheriff.

  She got a fraction of an instant to notice the battered cowboy hat perched on his head, the red bandana tied around his neck, and the faded canvas pants atop his beaten leather boots. The next thing she knew, he bowled in between her and the Sheriff to block her from that punch.

  Before Cici could react, the Sheriff’s fist made contact with the stranger’s jaw. The cowboy spun around and staggered into Cici. He tried to catch his balance, but his legs got tangled up in each other. He stumbled and pitched face first into Cici.

  His weight knocked her to the ground and he fell on top of her. He started to rise to get off her. His head next to hers gave her a perfect view over his shoulder of the Sheriff snarling down at the pair.