Wildflower Bride by Mary Connealy

Author:Mary Connealy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction/Christian Romance
ISBN: 9781607421580
Publisher: Barbour Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2009-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

“I have no wish to see your white village, Wade. I should have stayed with Gertie.”

“I’m sending a telegram to Helena asking about settlers named Lind, from back a few years. They can pass it on to land offices, and maybe we’ll find where your pa lived. Don’t you want to be there if we get an answer back?”

Abby scowled. She’d done more frowning since she’d come to live with the Sawyers than in her entire years with the Flathead. This long trail ride in the predawn darkness was unsettling. She’d smelled something back in the woods. Men. White men. Even riding with this group of them, she knew more were watching from the woods. But white men were always about. She’d learned to fear them, hate them, but mostly ignore them.

They’d taken everything from the Flatheads, all tribes in fact, but her people had found fertile valleys and lived in remote places. They were far from the whites who spread like a disease across this land. Until that massacre of her village, they’d left Abby’s people alone in their rugged mountain valleys.

Wade rode his horse a bit closer to Abby’s side and lowered his voice. “The more I think about it, the more I’m sure that arrow was aimed at you, not me.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Or maybe they were going for both of us. If that arrow was shot by the same men that massacred your village, then they might count both of us as witnesses.”

“You’re just trying to scare me.”

“Maybe you need to be scared. If I’m right, Abby, then we’re dealing with the worst kind of yellow dog.”

“You’ve just described all white men.” Abby waited for Wade to defend his people. When he didn’t, Abby felt bad about it. Wade had been nothing but kind, even sweet, so all white men except Wade.

Instead of defending his honor, he went right on pestering her to be more cautious. “We’re talking about a man who’d shoot at a woman from cover. When you’re in the house with Gertie, I think you’re safe. A coward like that wouldn’t storm the house. But that’s with me and my best hands working close enough to be here in minutes. But today I have to go to town and I needed to take my best hands with me. I didn’t want to ride off and leave you and Gertie without any protection. If they’re really after you, then Gertie’s in danger, too, as long as you’re there. I couldn’t ride off to town without you, so you had to come.”

He’d used this same argument to nag her into going. She had agreed to come along and now she regretted it. Mainly because of that sense of being watched. “Fine, I will see this village and help drive your stolen cattle home.”

His eyes narrowed as if she’d insulted him somehow, but he didn’t say why, and she made no effort to coax his reasons from him or soothe his feelings.

“Let’s pick up the pace now that it’s light.

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