Badlands Bride Read online

  Hallie raised a brow in question.

  "Come." Cooper gestured and led her outside the door with one hand on her upper arm. "There are the other men, Hallie. Once they know you're alone at night…"

  She saw the picture. Remembering the way they'd ogled her at the trading post with lecherous eyes, she didn't need any more convincing. "I'll take a few things and stay with Chumani." The warmth of his hand burned through her sleeve. "Thank you," she said. "You always think of my safety."

  His eyes dropped to her mouth, and she caught her breath at the heat she read in their depths. His other hand raised her face to his.

  Hallie's heart set up a flutter. "What—?

  "You could talk a man blind, Hallie."

  Her eyes widened and his face lowered.

  "I don't think—"

  "I don't care if you think or not. Just don't talk…."

  Badlands Bride

  by

  Cheryl St. John

  CHERYL ST. JOHN

  is a peacemaker, a romantic, an idealist and a discouraged perfectionist. The author of both historical and contemporary novels says she's also been told that she is painfully honest.

  Cheryl admits to being an avid collector of everything from dolls to depression glass, brass candlesticks, old photographs and—most especially—books. She and her husband love to browse antiques and collectibles shops.

  She says that knowing her stories bring hope and pleasure to readers is one of the best parts of being a writer. The other wonderful part is being able to set her own schedule and have time to work around her growing family.

  Cheryl loves to hear from readers. You can write her at P.O. Box 24732, Omaha, NE 68124.

  This book is dedicated with appreciation and recognition to the distributors and booksellers who promote romance and romance authors, especially:

  Nelson News, Omaha/read all about it! bookstores;

  Kim Huebner, Terri Foster, Rosie Christensen,

  everyone in the book room and all the drivers;

  read all about it! bookstores, Nebraska and Iowa;

  Karen Lafler, Jennie Mathison, Clay Nottleman,

  Robbi Pozzi,

  Matt Rohde, Laura Tadlock, Linda Theile,

  Sue Turner, Kirk Utley,

  Pam Williamson and the staff at each store;

  Debi Jo Miner, 3R's, Omaha;

  Linda Muller, Waldenbooks, Sioux City;

  Terry Showalter, Lee Books, Lincoln;

  Sherry Siwinski, Waldenbooks, Grand Island;

  Penny Spoerry, Waldenbooks, Des Moines;

  Kathy Uttecht, The Book Center, Norfolk;

  Jo Lent, Waldenbooks, Mall of the Bluffs;

  my friends at Baker Place, Omaha; and

  Donita Lawrence, Bell, Book, & Candle, Del City, OK.

  To all of you who order my books and recommend them to the readers, keep my backlist in stock and host signings, this doesn't begin to cover it, but here it is:

  Thank you

  Chapter One

  Ignoring the reflection of the businesses across the street behind her and the words The Daily meticulously painted in gold and black lettering on the glass, Hallie Claire Wainwright observed herself in the window of her father's news­paper office. She adjusted the jacket of her carefully chosen two-piece fitted dress and smoothed a hand over her dark hair, fashioned into an uncharacteristically neat bun.

  "I think I've earned the responsibility of reporting on the boxing matches," she said to her reflection. The sporting event would make the front page every day for weeks, and Hallie could think of nothing more exciting than seeing her name beneath the headline.

  "I'm sure I could get interviews with the participants," she said convincingly. "Perhaps they'll share insights with me they wouldn't give the men." Forest green curtains ob­scured the interior of the newspaper office, but she didn't need to see in to picture her oldest brother, Turner, setting type and her father in the office beyond.

  "I've been doing the menial jobs without complaint. It's time you gave me a chance. I'll do my best." Hallie gave her likeness a last confident nod and opened the door.

  The reassuring smells of ink, paper and grease, which she'd grown up with, boosted her confidence. Turner didn't glance up as she strode pass the Franklin press to her fa­ther's office. She rapped twice and opened the door.

  Samuel Wainwright glanced up and immediately returned his attention to the papers on his desk top.

  "Father, I—"

  "No."

  Her mouth dropped open. "How do you even know what I was going to say?"

  "You have that stubborn look on your face."

  "I want to cover the boxing matches." She placed her fists on her hips. "Evan—" her lip curled around the name of the new apprentice "—gets all the good stories."

  Samuel shifted his smoking cigar stub from one side of his mouth to the other and leaned back in his creaky leather chair. "Now, Hallie," he cajoled. "Don't get in a huff. You know it wouldn't be acceptable—or safe—for you to take up with that rowdy crowd in the Piedmont district. Any female in Boston with half a brain in her head wouldn't set foot within a mile of the place."

  She rolled her eyes. "That's all the brain you give any woman credit for having."

  He harrumphed, then shuffled through a stack of papers, finding one he wanted and ignoring her while he checked the list in his other hand against the sheet.

  "Hello, Precious," Turner said, entering.

  Hallie winced inwardly.

  He'd rolled his white shirtsleeves back, and his dark hair stood up on his head in finger-combed waves. He handled the office work, overseeing the typeset and presses. "I want to check this against your copy," he said to their father.

  Samuel extended a paper, and the two men concurred. Used to being ignored, Hallie sat on the corner of the ink-stained oak desk and crossed her arms over her chest, un­willing to acknowledge her father's wisdom in this partic­ular case. So what if he was right for once? Her father and brothers, Charles and Turner, always came up with some inane reason that she couldn't handle a story, and ninety-nine out of a hundred times the real reason—the infuriating reason—was that she was a female.

  Turner reached for a strand of Hallie's hair that had fallen loose. "You're a sight."

  She batted his hand away.

  "What are you pouting about now?"

  "I'm not pouting."

  He laughed. "You're mad as a March hare. Still in a fix over Evan? He says he can't sleep nights for the ringing in his ears. For the last week at supper, you've managed to discredit everything about the man, including his parent­age."

  Hallie uncrossed her arms and shot a glance at her father. He wore a smile of bored amusement. "I keep hoping some­one around here will notice that he's not any more capable than I am."

  "And as we've told you a thousand times," Turner said, raising a superior brow, "Father needed Evan."

  She tried her best to swallow her resentment. Her father did need help, and she'd worked so hard to prove herself. Samuel had hired the young man to assist Charles with the reporting, so he could devote himself to the book work and editing. It hurt immeasurably that none of them had consid­ered her for the position. And it frustrated her beyond words that they refused to listen to her reasoning.

  It was one thing to constantly defer to her brothers, but now an outsider had displaced her! "Perhaps if I put on a pair of trousers, the lot of you will notice I have a whole brain in this head."

  Turner scowled. "If you put on a pair of trousers, the men around here will notice more than that. And I'll have to turn you over my knee and discipline the object of their attention."

  Hallie resisted the urge to stick her tongue out. Just be­cause they treated her like a child didn't me
an she'd give in and behave like one.

  "Did you turn in the piece on the quilting society?" Turner asked.

  "Now that was an unequaled challenge," she replied, tracing a worn scar on the desk top with an index finger. "Think it'll make the headlines tomorrow?"

  "Look," her father said, interrupting. "Remember those classifieds we ran a while back? Here's more of the same."

  Turner bent over the desk and read aloud. "'Bride wanted.' Another one—'Wife wanted to cook, do laundry and care for children.'"

  "What kind of self-respecting woman would answer an ad like that?" Hallie asked, frowning her distaste.

  "A woman who wants a husband," Turner replied, di­recting a pointed glance at his sister. "Unlike you."

  She ignored the familiar taunt. "It's barbaric."

  "But newsworthy," her father added. He caught his cigar between two fingers and squinted at her through curls of blue-gray smoke. "Some of the young ladies at Miss Abernathy's Conservatory answered the last ads. Why don't you do a story on them, Hallie?"

  "Really?" she asked, jumping up.

  "I haven't seen anything in the other papers," he contin­ued. "Maybe, for a change, we can print a story before they get the idea."

  The assignment filled Hallie with a new sense of impor­tance. The Daily was always trying to get the jump on the bigger papers, and even though the other newspapers always managed to edge them out, the Wainwrights had increased circulation over the past year. Any newsworthy story that first appeared in The Daily was a feather in their journalistic cap.

  "I'll work on it right away." She kissed her father on the cheek and smugly tilted her chin on her way past Turner. Samuel and Turner exchanged conspiratory grins. "How long do you think that will keep her out of our hair?" Turner asked.

  Samuel ran a hand over his balding pate. "Let's hope until Evan has a foot in the door. It's hard enough being a cub, without having to deal with Hallie when she's got her hackles up."

  "Well, then, we'll just have to keep her busy."

  "Isn't it just the most romantic thing you've ever heard?" The young woman with golden hair and ivory skin ignored the cake and tea on the tiny table and stared vacantly across the front of the lace-decorated establishment where the ladies of Boston came to socialize over afternoon tea.

  Hallie thought traveling to God-only-knew-where to marry a man she'd never laid eyes on was the most asinine thing she'd ever heard, but she politely refrained from say­ing so.

  "Where are the northern Dakotas, anyway?" Tess Cordell asked, coming out of her dreamy-eyed trance. "One of the girls said up by the North Pole."

  "I don't think it's quite that far." Hallie tried to recall her geography lessons. "It's far to the west and up north. Quite remote, I'm sure."

  Tess took an envelope from her reticule and carefully removed and unfolded a letter. "His name is Cooper DeWitt. He has a stage line and a freight company, so he must be very wealthy." Her pale blue eyes took on that dreamy quality again. "The only thing he requested in a wife was that she be able to read and write. I think that's good, don't you? He doesn't sound like a demanding sort of fellow."

  "Or discriminating," Hallie added.

  "Right," Tess agreed, the comment apparently sailing over her head. "He's not superficial like most young men who care only that a woman be from a good family."

  Hallie heard the resentment in her voice. Obviously Tess was not from a well-to-do family, or she wouldn't have responded to an ad from a desperate frontier man. "Does he say how old he is?"

  Tess frowned at the paper momentarily. "No." Her ex­pression brightened. "But he does mention that he's never had a wife, so he must be young."

  Or uglier than a buck-toothed mule, Hallie thought more realistically. What was this poor girl getting herself into? She almost wanted to offer her assistance if the girl needed someone to provide for her so badly she was willing to do this. But she held her tongue. Her family had told her often enough that her thinking was not that of a typical twenty-year-old woman. Tess was obviously delighted with her plan. "What else does he say?"

  "Only that the country is beautiful and that I would have everything that I need."

  "How romantic." Hallie made a few notes on her tablet. "Are you worried about being so far from anyone you know?"

  "Well…" Tess chewed her lower lip. "I don't have fam­ily, but a couple of the other girls have accepted positions in the same community, so we'll be traveling together. I'm sure Mr. DeWitt will see that I can visit from time to time."

  Hallie noted the term accepted positions for later refer­ence. "Are the other girls as excited as you?"

  "Oh, yes!" Her pale eyes sparkled. "This is an adventure of a lifetime!"

  "I want to speak with the others, too. Can you give me their names?" Hallie scribbled a list and thanked Tess for the interview.

  Hallie met the other young women, then hurried home to write her article. The enormous, masculinely furnished house was quiet, as usual. She slipped into her father's study and seated herself in his oversize chair, arranging paper, pen and ink on the desk top. She loved the room, did her best thinking among the familiar heavy pieces with the Seth Thomas mantel clock chiming on the half hour.

  Nearly three hours passed before Hallie noticed the time. Double-checking the information, wording and neat print­ing, she blotted the pages. Her father would undoubtedly cut it in half, but, pleased with her work, she delivered it to his office.

  He read the pages while she waited. "This is just what we wanted, Precious," he commended her.

  Gladdened at the acknowledgment, she ignored the pa­tronizing nickname.

  "Keep on this," he said.

  "You mean…?"

  "I mean follow up. Go with them when they shop for the trip, watch them pack, all that. We'll run a series on the brides, right up until you wave them off at the stage sta­tion."

  Surprised and more than a little pleased, Hallie nodded. "All right." She patted the edge of the desk in satisfaction. "All right."

  Hallie read her articles in print each day, delighting in the fact that her father hadn't cut more than a sentence or two. She was so delighted, she didn't allow the fact that her father's new apprentice was covering the boxing champi­onships and making headlines nearly every other day upset her—too much.

  The day before her subjects were due to leave, she stepped into the office early. On the other side of the par­tially open mahogany door her brothers' voices rose.

  "I'll take this sentencing piece," Charles said. "I'll be at the courthouse this morning, anyway."

  "Right," Samuel said. "Evan?"

  "I still have the lawyer to interview and, of course, the matches tonight. I'll try not to take a punch myself this time."

  Male laughter echoed.

  "That's some shiner!" Charles said.

  "Great coverage, son." Samuel added. "You'll do any­thing to get an unusual angle. That's the stuff good reporters are made of." The aromatic scent of his morning cigar reached Hallie's nostrils, and she paused, a hollow, jealous ache opening in her chest at her father's casual praise of Evan Hunter. "How many more matches?"

  "Another week," Evan replied.

  Hallie reached for the door.

  "What're we gonna do with Hallie?" Turner's voice car­ried through the gap beside the door. "Her brides leave tomorrow."

  Hallie stopped and listened.

  "That turned out to be an excellent piece," Charles com­mented. "We've had good response."

  "Plus we got the jump on the Journal," Samuel agreed.

  "Who'd have thought that when you came up with some­thing to keep her off Evan's back during the matches, we'd actually get a good piece of journalism?" She recognized Turner's voice.

  They laughed again.

  A heavy weight pressed upon Hallie's chest. Hurt and self-doubt squeezed a bitter lump of disappointment into her throat. Of all the patronizing, condescending, imperious—

  They'd handed her the story like presenting a
cookie to a toddler they didn't want underfoot! And now they gloated over their own superiority. Hallie had never felt so wretched…so cheated…so unimportant.

  "Do we have any sources in the Dakotas?" Charles asked.

  "Why?"

  "The real story is on the other end of that stage line."

  A moment of silence followed Charles's comment, wherein Hallie imagined them nodding piously at one an­other.

  "Yes, when the men who sent for those gals set eyes on them," Samuel agreed. "No. We don't have anyone that far west."

  "Too bad," Turner said.

  "Too bad, indeed," Charles said. "We could have had a real follow-up story there."

  "Let's just hope the Journal doesn't think of it." Samuel added.

  Heartbroken, Hallie gathered her skirts and trod stealthily back out the front door. She walked the brick street without direction. It never entered her mind to go home. Her mother would only tell her as she always did that her father and brothers did such things for her own good. Clarisse Wainwright had been born and bred to be a genteel wife and a mother to Samuel's sons. The fact that Hallie had come along had been an inconvenience to all of them, or so Hallie saw it.

  Hallie hadn't been born the proper gender to take a prom­inent place at the newspaper, as much as she wished to, as much as she knew the same amount of ink flowed through her veins as her brothers'. They'd patted her on the head and sent her on her way since she'd been old enough to toddle after them.

  The truth lay on her crushed heart like lead. They would never see her as good enough, as equal, as valuable or nec­essary. Even Clarisse had been necessary only to the point of bringing Charles and Turner into the world. Now her mother lived the life of a pampered society wife, spending her days with her gardening club, at the tearoom and playing the latest vogue card game, bridge.

  Hallie would never accept an invalid life like that. Surely there was some way to prove herself to her father. If only he would give her a chance, he'd see she was as capable as Charles and Turner—and more so than Evan Hunter—be­cause she'd been born to the life.