Free Sleigh Bells & Mistletoe: A Short Story (The Brides Series 1.5) by Lena Goldfinch

guttural even. She blushed fiercely, and he suspected she was embarrassed by the sound of her own voice. Maybe she’d been mocked as a child. People could be cruel.
    “Then get on board,” he said. “I’ll pay your fare when the porter comes around.”
    She scooped the puppy into her arms, and Jem helped her up the stairs, putting a hand under her elbow. Well, as best he could with Mae squirming and asking again about food.
    The rancher was still standing there watching them, watching the train, unhappy and possibly feeling the need for vengeance. Jem wouldn’t put it past him to come after them later. Maybe get him alone, ambush him. Take Annie and the dog. It seemed a bit overdramatic, perhaps, but Jem had seen worse things in his life. Men who’d done far worse to their own kin.
    Food would have to wait.

TWO
                 
     
    T he train closed in on Annie. It was like being wrapped up. But not like the warm comfy feeling of a blanket coming around her on a cold night—more the suffocating kind. It wasn’t the walls or the ceiling, not anything like that. She was used to riding the train by now, having followed Daniel Griggs, the “preacher,” around for the past few weeks.
    The man across from her—her husband—had leaned back in his seat, the brim of his hat pulled down low over his eyes like he was fixing to take a nap. Not looking at her at all, so it wasn’t his gaze she felt on her. It was everyone else’s. All the other passengers in the car were looking right at her. There weren’t that many of them, but what there were, they were all looking at her. She squirmed in all her filth. She’d gone a week or more without bathing, but with good reason. Daniel liked things clean. He liked things clean so much, he barely looked at her if she had a speck of dirt on her or a hair was out of place.
    She couldn’t be blamed for not wanting him to look at her.
    She hadn’t wanted him to touch her either. He’d tried that one time—not married up with her in the least—and she’d struck out at him. Gave him a good black eye too. He’d deserved it. Hypocrite. Liar.
    Oh, he preached salvation and faith and all that, but after his revivals, he liked to take up with the young teenage girls behind the tent—the ones with the moon eyes, looking up at him like he was God himself in a black coat and tie. She’d seen him out back doing... things ...and more than once. Sickened her.
    He was handsome enough, she supposed, but in a too-slick kind of way. Not suitable for the preaching life. More suited for a gaming hall. Something like that. She’d seen the type. And she’d tried to stay out of his way from the first moment she laid eyes on him.
    Which was why she was a dirty as a pigpen now, and around all these decent people. Seeing one middle-aged woman and her husband talking in hushed tones and looking her way, Annie tried to scrub her face clean with the sleeve of her dress. Problem was she suspected her dress was even dirtier than her face. She didn’t have a single thing to clean up with or change into, and she couldn’t very well ask the man across from her for anything. One, because she couldn’t ask him a thing—not speaking out loud anyway. And, two, because he wasn’t looking at her. Sometimes if someone was looking at her, she could get her meaning across, but most times people just avoided looking at her altogether. The man across from her—James, he’d said, or Jem—seemed that sort of person. He’d rather look right through her. She knew the type. She was an embarrassment.
    The only problem was, she was tied to him for life now.
    Because she was his wife . It seemed so unreal, like it had happened to someone else. Or it hadn’t happened at all.
    Except she’d seen him stuff the marriage certificate down the front of his shirt, and she could see the bumps the folded paper made against the blue fabric of his shirt.
    A “mail-order” bride. That’s what Daniel had called