A Wild Adventure Read online

  A WILD ADVENTURE

  MERRY FARMER

  A WILD ADVENTURE

  Copyright ©2017 by Merry Farmer

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

  Cover design by Erin Dameron-Hill (the miracle-worker)

  ASIN:

  Paperback:

  ISBN-13: 9781978141988

  ISBN-10: 197814198X

  Click here for a complete list of other works by Merry Farmer.

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  Created with Vellum

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  BRYNTHWAITE, CUMBRIA – 1878

  Rose Rawlins considered herself lucky. After everything she’d been through and all the mistakes she’d made in the past few years, she’d been given a new purpose: a quiet life as a maid at Ivy Cottage in the picturesque countryside of northern England. After years of insecurity, she was determined to put down new roots serving Miss Elaine Bond and acting as a nurse for her ailing father, Mr. William Bond. She intended to make Bonnie Horner, Elspeth Strong, and Theophilus Gunn—three of Haskell, Wyoming’s premier benefactors and changers of lives— proud with a single-minded purpose. No distractions, like the ones that had made for such wild nights back in Haskell.

  The town of Brynthwaite was as different from Haskell as her life growing up was from the life she’d ended up in out West. She’d been at Ivy Cottage with the Bonds for two months already, but she still found herself stopping by the window in the downstairs parlor—where poor Mr. Bond spent most of his time—staring out at the lush, green hills and the glittering lake nestled in the Cumbrian valley.

  “Feeling homesick for your Wild West?” Mr. Bond asked from his chair near the fire.

  “No,” Rose answered, laughing more than a servant should. She made up for her burst of emotion by turning away from the window to bring Mr. Bond the hot water bottle for his feet. “It’s just so green and blue here. And hilly. And there are so many trees.”

  She crouched to position the hot water bottle so that Mr. Bond could rest his slippered feet on it with a sigh. The fact that it was getting on toward summer and the days had grown sunny and balmy, but Mr. Bond was still cold all the time worried Rose to bits. She had a little experience nursing the girls at Bonnie’s through various maladies—another reason she had been chosen to cross the ocean and take up a position with the Bond family—and knew lack of circulation was a bad sign.

  “Ah,” Mr. Bond sighed, though whether from the warmth on his feet or her explanation, it was hard to tell. “You did tell me there wasn’t much color in Wyoming.”

  “There isn’t,” she said. At least not in nature. The brightly colored petticoats she and the other whores working for Bonnie had worn were another story. “Haskell is in the middle of the high desert.”

  “Full of wild Indians and daily gunfights, no doubt,” Mr. Bond said with a wink.

  Rose laughed, shaking her head. “Haskell is a very tame town surrounded by ranches.”

  She knew it wasn’t her place to laugh with her employer—or to feel such affection for him—but she couldn’t help it. Ever since she’d arrived in Cumbria, the Bonds had treated her more like family than a servant. Elspeth had hinted they might, based on the fact that, before his heart began to give out, Mr. Bond had been outspoken about the evils of the class system and a champion of equality for all. A rare thing indeed for a man connected to aristocratic families. But in spite of his views, maybe because of them, Rose found him to be both regal and personable.

  “I would love to visit the Wild West someday,” Elaine Bond said, sweeping into the room. She carried a tea tray which she set on the table beside her father’s chair, then set about fixing his tea precisely the way he liked it. “I want to don trousers and leather chaps and ride a mustang astride and whoop along with the rest of the cow pokes and savage Indians as we drive the cattle to market.”

  Rose felt even worse laughing at Elaine’s outrageous statement than she did giggling along with Mr. Bond. “I’m afraid the days of cattle drives are all but over,” she said, rising to her feet and checking Mr. Bond’s pillows. “More and more of the ranches are being enclosed now, and with so many railroad lines cross-crossing the West, cattle don’t need to be taken far to be sold.”

  Elaine huffed a disappointed sigh as she handed her father his tea. “I always miss the exciting things in life by a hair.”

  Rose finished plumping Mr. Bond’s pillows—noting the way his hands shook as he raised the teacup to his lips—and sent a sideways look to Elaine. With her father’s tea taken care of, Elaine moved restlessly around the room, straightening the tray that held the collection of her father’s medicines and sending longing looks to the window. Elaine was relatively young, close to Rose’s age of twenty-five. She should have been out attending teas and balls and swanning through social events in the busy town of Brynthwaite. She should have had a string of beaux, each one more in love with her fresh beauty and wit. Instead, she was cooped up in her father’s house, fussing over a man who might not last the year.

  “Why don’t you go for a walk,” Rose suggested, crossing to resume sweeping the floor, as she’d been doing before Mr. Bond complained of the cold. “It’s a gorgeous day.”

  “It is,” Elaine said with a sigh. She gave up all pretense of caring about her father’s medicines and went to plop in the cushioned seat under the window that looked out the front of the house. “I haven’t been out for ages.”

  “Then go, my dear,” Mr. Bond said, as emphatic as he could be in his state. “Go soak up sunshine like a sponge.”

  Elaine twisted in the seat to smile at her father, then hopped up as fast as she’d sat down. “I couldn’t do that, Papa.” She moved to give his cheek a kiss, a genuine smile of deep affection lighting her round face. “I could never leave you all by yourself.”

  “Tush and nonsense.” Mr. Bond waved her kiss away, but encouraging, pink spots rose on his cheeks. “Young women like you two should spend as much time as possible basking in the sunshine,” he said, indicating Rose as well. “And you should be seen by as many young men as possible while you do it.”

  “Papa.” Elaine gave her father a mock scolding frown, but she glowed with the compliment. “I could never love any man more than I love you.” She leaned over his chair and gently hugged his neck.

  “Poppycock! Someday, mark my words, a handsome and heroic man will come along and sweep the two of you off your feet.”

  “Not the same man for both of us,” Elaine exclaimed with mock horror.

  Rose simply grinned and chuckled to herself, and continued sweeping. She knew a little too much about sharing men and how the rougher sex didn’t mind how many women they bedded to
be shocked by Mr. Bond’s slip of the tongue.

  “No, no, no.” Mr. Bond sighed with fake exasperation. “I meant that a worthy man will come along for each of you in good time. Particularly if you go out and find him.” Mr. Bond gave his daughter a sharp look.

  Elaine laughed. “I’m far more interested in books than I am in men, Papa,” she said, pushing away from his chair and moving to the shelf full of dusty old books in the darkest corner of the room. “Although we could do with a few more books in this household as well.”

  “Didn’t a new bookshop just open in town?” Rose asked, finishing with her sweeping. She bent to scoop the dust into the dustpan.

  “Yes,” Elaine said with as much excitement as if she’d been invited to a royal ball. “And I’ve barely had a chance to look at it, much less go inside and peruse the shelves.”

  “Then why don’t you take a trip there now, my dear?” Mr. Bond suggested. “It’s the perfect afternoon for a walk into town.”

  Elaine hesitated, glancing from the shelf of old books in front of her, to her father, to the window. She bit her lip, brow creased as though she wanted nothing more than to spend the entire day in Brynthwaite’s new bookshop, but didn’t feel as though she should.

  Rose stepped out to the hallway, then through the door to the back garden to empty the dustpan onto the back steps. Her heart went out to Elaine. More so than the vibrant young woman would ever know. She knew too well what it was like to long for more than the life she was born into. Unfortunately for her, she had been impulsive enough to do something about it. She’d gone against her Aunt Millicent’s wishes and answered an advertisement for a mail-order bride, placed by a man in Colorado who claimed to be a successful silver prospector.

  Well, upon arrival, she’d seen right away how much of a lie that was. Mr. Hank Prentice had turned out to be a cruel, manipulative man. He’d presented himself as everything his letters had said he was…until they left the courthouse as man and wife. He’d had her on her back the moment they stepped through the door of his crumbling, one-room shack near a failed mine…and at every other opportunity he could steal to lift her skirts and have his way with her. She’d put up with it for less than a month before fleeing in the middle of the night.

  It wasn’t until months later that she’d discovered she was the fourth woman Hank had lured west, and that her marriage was a sham, helped along by Hank’s crooked friend in the courthouse. But by then, it was too late. No one would hire her for decent work, and when she wrote to her aunt to explain what had happened and beg to be taken back, Aunt Millicent had informed her in no uncertain terms that she was a filthy, disobedient whore, and that she had been reported as killed in a train wreck to their friends back in Boston.

  In the end, Aunt Millicent had been right. Rose had had no choice but to become a dirty whore. What was more, she was quick to discover that she had the right skills and temperament to make a good deal of money at the profession. Once she put her scruples and her pride aside, she’d found it far too easy to give the men who paid to be with her their money’s worth. It wasn’t a bad life, really it had just…grown old.

  “Rose, dear, are you all right?” Elaine startled her out of her thoughts as she poked her head out the back door.

  Rose drew in a breath, pressing a hand to her stomach. “Yes, I was just lost in the beauty of this view,” she lied with a smile for the stunning vista stretching down to the lake.

  Elaine hummed and leaned against the doorframe. “Yes, sometimes I wonder what I did to be so lucky as to live in a house like this in an area of such outstanding beauty.”

  Rose tried to keep the irony out of her voice as she said, “Me too.” She never would have imagined living in the peace and tranquility that surrounded her new life.

  With one last look at the deep blue sky reflecting in the sparkling water of the lake, both women turned and headed back inside.

  “Tush! Back again so soon?” Mr. Bond scolded them from his chair. “I was certain the two of you had gone on that walk.”

  “No, Papa,” Elaine laughed. She hurried to his side and brushed back his thinning white hair, then checked his tray of medicines again, as if trying desperately to be useful. “I just went to make sure Rose was all right.”

  “And are you all right, my dear?” Mr. Bond asked her.

  Rose blushed under the perceptiveness of Mr. Bond’s gaze. Surely, Elspeth had told the man exactly who she had been and what her background was. Bonnie had made clear to all of her girls who wished to start a new life in England that their employers would receive full disclosure about the circumstances they were coming from, and that it was up to them whether to divulge that information or not.

  “I’m fine.” Rose smiled briefly, then crossed to check on the fire. Mr. Bond followed her with a look that said he’d lived too long and seen too much to be fooled by her answer.

  “Oh dear.” Elaine broke the hint of tension that had bled into the conversation. “Papa, you’re almost out of digitalis.”

  “Am I?” Mr. Bond looked a little too innocent as he blinked at his collection of medicine bottles. “Hmm. I suppose you must go out and fetch some more.”

  “I should say so,” Elaine agreed, either not recognizing her father’s ruse or playing along with it for her own purposes.

  “And Rose should accompany you to Dr. Newsome’s office to get some.”

  “Me?” Fluttering wariness hit Rose like a blast of cold air. Her heart thrummed against her ribs, and she suddenly had a hard time catching her breath.

  “Yes,” Elaine said, her own smile growing to suspicious levels and her cheeks pinking. “I think Rose should definitely come with me to Dr. Newsome’s office.”

  Rose swallowed, trying to fight the heat that rose from her neck to her face. “Oh, I don’t think Dr. Newsome would care one way or another if I go with you.”

  “I’m sure he would,” Elaine contradicted her. She sent her father a look, and skipped to Rose’s side as she tried to set about brushing the curtains. “I think Dr. Newsome would especially like to see you.”

  Rose sent Elaine a look that was half disapproving and half hopeful. Dr. Isaac Newsome was the fly in the ointment of the new life she was settling into. She’d met him within a week of coming to work for the Bonds. He’d arrived one morning to check on Mr. Bond’s health. When Rose had answered the door, it was clear he hadn’t been informed of who she was. His surprise at seeing her unfamiliar face was as strong as the jolt of lust that she’d experienced at the sight of him. In an instant, Rose had been no better than a schoolgirl with a crush. It was a distraction she hadn’t counted on and wasn’t sure was good for her.

  Because Dr. Isaac Newsome was devastatingly handsome—tall with broad shoulders and black hair touched with flecks of white. He had kind, blue eyes, and features that qualified as patrician. And yet, there was a certain sadness about him. If he had walked into Bonnie’s Place back in her working days, she would have fought the other girls to entertain him, and she would have enjoyed every moment that she explored his well-formed body. She would have left him completely satisfied, and prayed that he came back for more.

  “My, my, your face is as bright as an apple,” Elaine teased her.

  Rose shook herself from her wretchedly inappropriate thoughts. She’d come to Brynthwaite as a servant, a nurse, not a debutante looking for a husband. She busied herself with the curtains to avoid the direction her thoughts had gone. “I wish you wouldn’t make more of things than are there.”

  “And why shouldn’t we make something of the spark between you and Dr. Newsome?” Mr. Bond asked, shaking his finger at Rose. “Why shouldn’t you make something of it? You’re young, Dr. Newsome is still young, and young people have every right to fall in love.”

  A sizzle like lightning shot down Rose’s spine. She turned a sheepish look Mr. Bond’s way as she continued with the curtains. “I’m not as young as I once was,” she said. “And my whole reason for being here is to take care
of you. You’re the only man I should have eyes for right now.” She punctuated her remark by stepping over and kissing his cheek.

  Mr. Bond turned pink and snorted. “Tush and nonsense! You’re a fine, pretty young woman. Any man would be happy to have you.”

  Rose sent him a doubting look. Many a man had had her. “It wouldn’t be right.”

  Rather than continue to tease her, Mr. Bond sighed and shook his head as though he understood exactly what she meant. “My dear,” he said. “When you get to be my age and in my state of health, you will look back on your life, as one does. And when you do, mark my words, you will regret the things you didn’t take a chance and do far more than the things you did.”

  Rose lowered her arms and bit her lip. “I’m not so sure about that,” she murmured. She already regretted so many of the things she’d done.

  “Don’t talk like that, Papa.” Elaine spoke louder than her, sweeping back to her father’s side and sitting on the arm of his chair. “You’ve got plenty of life left in you. You’re neither old nor at that time of your life.” She brushed her fingers through her father’s hair, an anxious look on her face.

  Rose and Mr. Bond exchanged a look that said they both knew better. The mood in the room changed in an instant to gloom and tension.

  Rose let out a breath. “Perhaps we should walk down into town to fetch more medicine.” If it meant keeping Elaine cheerful, she would risk running into Dr. Newsome and embarrassing herself with emotions she couldn’t hide.

  “There,” Mr. Bond said. “Listen to Rose.”

  “I still don’t think I should leave you alone,” Elaine said, standing and heading to the hallway, where her bonnet and shawl hung on pegs by the door.

  Mr. Bond made a scoffing noise. “Would you rather stay here and watch me nap?”

  Elaine glanced over her shoulder at her father as she took her bonnet from its peg. Rose moved to fetch her own bonnet and shawl. “No, Papa. I can take your hint. Rose and I will leave you in peace for a few minutes. But we’ll be back before you know it, so don’t get into any mischief.”