Free Silver Heart (Historical Western Romance) (Longren Family series #1) by Amelia Rose

welcoming and we'd exchanged a letter or two before I had left the East.  I'd been anticipating meeting Annie and her daughters, Kitty and Sarah, both nearly grown, and her son, Jacob, off at the University of Nevada in Reno, studying mining engineering.
                  She swept me along in her wake, apparently uninterested in her wounded brother back inside the house.  Instead of going in, she guided me a mile to the north, talking along the way and offering me everything from pie to bread to cold chicken to tea.  I was hungry enough just from the conversation to sit without question when we reached her snug house.  Her kitchen was cleaner than Hutch's house even was, with shining wood and copper kettles and a huge wood stove that spoke of the days before her husband had been killed in a robbery. 
                  Annie and her husband had left Alturas after Hutch, made it big briefly in silver and hated mining enough to open a grocery store in Virginia City.  But when times turned hard, a robbery had left Annie's Clifford mortally wounded and Annie, a widow, taking in sewing and raising their three children.
                  The Longren family had endured their share of bad luck.
                  It didn't show on Annie.  She cheerfully made tea, talking nonstop about the families that made Virginia City and Gold Hill, the silver families of Mackay and Bowers and Bradleigh.  She talked about the Sheriff, who she rather thought couldn't find his own nose if someone told him it had gone missing, and who, she intimated, might not be adverse to claiming he couldn't find such nose if he were paid enough.  She talked about Dr. Horton, who she thought fairly skilled and Dr. Young, who had moved on a year early, which had benefited several of his patients but not the tills in the local saloons.  She talked about Matthew and Hutch and her son and daughters, about her parents in Alturas and the two younger brothers still back home in California.  She talked about their parents, who ran a cattle ranch, which I knew as Hutch's letters had been replete with the desire never to find himself on a ranch.  Cows , he'd written, are the dumbest creatures in creation.  They have even less sense than Matthew , which wasn't too cruel, given at the time Matthew was seeing something like half a dozen girls with his usual lack of subtlety. 
                  Listening to Annie talk about family, names slipped into place and the strange I'd been immersed in for the last day began to become familiar.  When I asked her about Mrs. Barnett, she offered that the Barnetts had very little money but were kind, giving, and loving, and that Mrs. Barnett was, indeed, close to her time.
                  "I'll give you a loaf to take with the peaches, and some eggs.  Those children need eggs and it wouldn't hurt her any, either," she said, bustling up to do so right then.  It didn't seem strange to her that I would offer my services as midwife, and so I didn't ask. 
                  I thought I should go then, the day was passing and I wanted to go to the Barnetts' and I shouldn't impose overly on my new sister, if only because her company was so comforting I already knew I would hate to lose it, but she started then to ask me about Boston, about street cars and theaters and fashion and news, and the more I talked, the smaller the lump in my throat became, the familiar embracing me even in this strange place. And so I stayed, telling her about adventures there, about Harvard, which I'd visited once but which my father had attended.
                  It was later in the day when I set off for the Barnetts and I had an additional mile to walk, but I went smiling and more at ease than I had been since I had come to Nevada and I owed that to Annie. 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

Chapter 6
     
                  Mrs. Barnett