With This Ring? by Karen Witemeyer & Mary Connealy & Regina Jennings & Melissa Jagears & Karen Witemeyer

Author:Karen Witemeyer & Mary Connealy & Regina Jennings & Melissa Jagears & Karen Witemeyer [Witemeyer, Karen, Mary Connealy, Regina Jennings, and Melissa Jagears]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC042030, FIC042040, FIC003000
ISBN: 9781441229267
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2015-11-23T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter One

HOUSTON, TEXAS

MARCH 20, 1879

Quiet, she had to be quiet.

It was the darkest hour of the night. She had a while before the sun came up and Mother would start fussing at her, needing a cool cloth for her fevered brow. Then Carrie would need to cook breakfast. With one maid coming in weekly, all the daily chores fell to her.

Isaac.

She packed more for him in the valise than she did for herself. He knew tonight was the night.

Carrie listened at the door, then slipped into the hall and rushed on silent feet to her brother’s room. She opened the door only inches, and he was there. She thought she’d have to wake him and nag him to dress, but he’d taken his part of this with dead seriousness.

He jerked his chin at her, careful not to even whisper. They turned to the back stairs, farthest from the rooms her mother and father slept in, and tiptoed down, flinching at every creak.

Father came to bed late, and Mother got up early. There wasn’t much time when one or the other wasn’t awake and demanding something.

They reached the landing at the bottom of the stairs and went out through the kitchen. Still, without speaking for fear a window was open on an upper floor, Carrie reached in the pitch-dark of the minuscule backyard and brushed Isaac’s hand. He clasped it, and she realized that this wasn’t a child’s hand anymore. Her little brother was growing up. In fact, having him along was more comfort than burden.

They left the yard behind and rushed down the alley until they were a good distance away. But it wasn’t just Mother and Father who had to be fooled; the neighbors too couldn’t know of their passage tonight.

They needed to vanish without a trace.

It was either that or agree to Father’s loathsome plans.

Audra had promised to come, and Carrie trusted her, but they’d left it too late. The wedding, announced just days ago, was scheduled for tomorrow. And the man terrified her. He was old, although that alone wouldn’t send her running into a treacherous world. It was the gleam of cruelty in his eyes that had shaken her, the sense that he was buying her. And he’d do as he wished with what he owned. Father must have lost too much, and he was paying his gambling debt with his own daughter.

He’d done it before.

The night held a thousand dangers, and Carrie knew she was risking her life, or worse, her little brother’s life, by going out like this. She had squirreled away money and could buy horses—not good ones but good enough. They’d ride so that no one would see them at a train station or a stagecoach stop. And there was only one place she wanted to be. Halfway across the continent.

Death lurked at every turn. But it more than lurked at home. It was there, in the flesh. She didn’t believe she was overreacting to her marriage. She believed it would lead inevitably to her death.