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  "As your prisoner no doubt," she said dryly.

  "Not that, never that Cora O'Malley." He bowed his head then looked up again. "I respect you for who you are, an independent and strong woman full of courage and boldness. You've proved to me that you're better than a good number of men and that's something I will never take lightly. I am happy for you, that you are good at what you do and are capable of making a living on your own." He gave her a lopsided smile. "It's just my desire and hope that you will never change Cora, never try to be who you are not."

  "You really mean that?"

  He nodded. "From the bottom of my heart. One lady in my life is quite enough for me to deal with, not that I'm saying you aren't one, but you are an exceptional one. However, if you are happy to continue running your own business after we are married then I'm happy too."

  "I've not said I will marry you, you presume too much Jeremy Josiah Paine."

  "My mother seems to have rubbed off on you," he said and received a playful cuff for his admission. "Cora," he turned serious once again. "I know that I can't hold you here against your will and that it's your decision to accept my apology, forgive me and grant me a second chance. It is my prayer, however, that you'll have pity on me and put me out of my misery."

  "I'm not domesticated and I hate working indoors," she blurted out without thinking.

  "I'm fully aware of that, and if you are willing, I'll be happy to let mama run the house while you and I pursue out outside interests. What do you say Cora?"

  Cora sat in silence for a while, thinking about Jeremy's words. This is what she'd been praying for, a man who wouldn't relegate her to the misery of a kitchen, making quilts, but rather, one who would not be threatened by her independence, and allow her to ride as far and hard as she wanted, working out on the range. This was the man her heart had been yearning for and she decided immediately to end his misery.

  "You Jeremy Josiah Paine are a good bargainer." She giggled. "You've told me all that you want but I've not heard you saying the important words that every woman wants to hear."

  "I love you Cora O'Malley, so deeply and completely that I am afraid I may be dreaming, and will wake up to find I'm still locked in my dreary existence."

  "Oh Jeremy," his words broke down the final walls. "You're the man I've always longed for, even when I was still a young and romantic girl."

  "You still are."

  "Did I give you permission to speak?"

  "Why does everyone have to keep saying that to me?" He wailed and for his efforts was rewarded with a glare. He held up his hands. "I won't interrupt you again ma'am, go on."

  Life with Jeremy was going to be a great adventure, one Cora didn't want to miss out on. "You have assured me that I can continue with my business." He nodded. "Thank you, that means so much to me Jeremy." She smiled sadly. "You see, when I was married before I worked hard for my husband, but all the money we made went into the family kitty and I was never given a single penny. His mother did all the household shopping and even when I needed something she went out and bought it for me, regardless of the fact that I was the one making the money they were spending."

  "I am sorry my darling." He got up from his knees and sat down beside her, taking both hands in hers.

  "When I came to Tipton I made a vow that I would never put myself in that position ever again. Bart's death left me penniless and homeless, and that is not something I ever want to go through again." She sighed. "Having my own money has empowered me and if you are willing to let me continue my partnership with Richard, and work alongside you, then being married to you will not be too bad after all."

  "Yes I will marry you," Jeremy said and Cora frowned at him, expecting him to be the one to ask the all important question.

  "Isn't that what I am supposed to say?" she quipped.

  "I think it's fitting that a highly independent woman like you should be the one to propose to me, a man who can't live without you. It's perfect for us to be partners, but there is one thing I need to request."

  "What's that?"

  "I will provide for all your needs Cora," and when she opened her mouth to protest, he touched her cheek gently. "Please hear me out my precious one. You see, my father brought us up to always provide for our women. All the money that you will make in your business will be for you and our children if you so wish - and of course, spending it on me in any way you see fit," he grinned at her and she thought he had never looked so handsome. "But when it comes to providing for your food, clothing, shelter and every other need, please let me be the one to do it."

  No arguments there. "Yes my darling." She cupped his face with both palms. I will marry you on those conditions and I need to add one of my own."

  "Anything for you my love."

  "That you will never stop loving me."

  "Of that, you have my definite promise. I will never stop loving you. Now, we have a wedding to plan, unless you'd like my mother to see to all the details."

  "I can think of nothing I'd like more, and no-one who would do a better job of making sure I spend the rest of my life with you. I love you Jeremy Josiah Paine."

  He pressed his lips gently to hers and held her close, never wanting to let her go.

  THE END.

  The Widow

  and the Widower

  A Clean Historical Mail Order Bride Romance

  WYOMING MAIL ORDER BRIDES

  ~ BOOK 3 ~

  TRINITY BELLINGHAM

  Chapter One

  Like most slum dwellings, the bed chamber was cold and dark, and the only light came from a long thin candle standing on a small table in one corner of the room. The mattress on the shaky bed was lumpy and one sole chair held dirty clothes that smelled, adding to the putrid stench that permeated the small room. There was a window that someone had attempted to clean at one time but the effort must have been too much because it was covered in sooty streaks. It had rained last night and rivulets of water ran down the dirty glass.

  Rita O'Malley sat on her lumpy bed and looked around her in resignation. This was her life, one of misery and drudgery and she blinked rapidly to prevent the tears from falling. Her whole body ached and she wished she could go back to sleep but her children needed her. There was a scuffle under the bed and she shook her head sadly. She shared the bed chamber with big rats that seemed more at home in this dreary room than she was.

  "Is this all there is to life?" She asked herself, rising painfully and wincing at the agony she felt. Her back and arms were covered in bruises and she did as much as she could to cover them up, putting on a thick long sleeved dress. One day this man would probably end up killing her but there was nothing she could do, nowhere to go.

  She opened the door and stepped out into a small hallway and supporting herself along the wall she made her way to the end of the corridor, bypassing two open rooms. Like the rest of the house, these too were shabby and for the hundredth time she wished Cora were here. Cora, her twenty two year old daughter had been the light of her life, bringing joy into this otherwise somber house. She could hear murmuring from the kitchen and knew that Marie and Joanna her teenage daughters were preparing the evening meal.

  Marie O'Malley took one look at her mother and her lips tightened. "He will kill you for sure one of these days mama," the fifteen year old said, her green eyes flashing angrily. "Why do you let him do all that to you?"

  "Hush child," Rita licked her lips. She was very thirsty and Joanna noticed her mother's parched look and poured her some water in a tumbler. "Sit down mama, we have everything almost ready now," she said in a soft voice. She was a year younger than her sister.

  Rita nodded and sat down at the roughly made table which served as their dining table around which sat six rickety chairs. The O'Malleys rarely had meals together for which Rita was glad. Her husband and sons were almost always drunk and easily picked fights with each other, often turning the whole house upside down. When they were away from home peace
reigned for a little while.

  "Where are Samuel and Luke?" Rita asked about her youngest sons who gave her hope and she prayed daily that they would not turn out to be like their elder brothers and father.

  "Samuel is in the backyard cleaning some fish that he caught and Luke is helping him."

  Rita smiled sadly. It was a pity that her thirteen and twelve year old sons were more responsible than their father and three elder brothers. Samuel often went to the river that flowed a short distance away from their house, where he would catch fish for their meals.

  Since they lived in one of the slums at the edge of a small wood sometimes he brought fowl or a hare home. Theirs was a tough life but Rita bore it, glad that her eldest daughter had found a way out of this hopeless existence. Even though Rita had paid for Cora's leaving with beatings she received from her husband, she had no regrets. She was even more determined now that Marie and Joanna would not end up the way she had.

  Rita lay in her cold bed later that night waiting for her husband to return home. Her children were asleep in their rooms and as usual she had checked on her daughters before retiring to her own room. Their door was locked securely, just the way Cora had taught them.

  Cora, her beautiful but headstrong daughter, who had dared to do the impossible and left home, traveling out West to marry a rancher. In her last letter Cora had mentioned that her husband had died and she had moved to Tipton to live with her friends and now owned her own business. Rita smiled in the darkness, willing herself not to fall asleep because if her husband returned and had to knock twice she would receive another beating. Her body was too sore to take any more beatings and so she decided to walk back to the kitchen and wait for him. Carrying her candle she softly walked to the kitchen and sat down.

  Had she known that this was the life she was coming to, she would never have left Ireland. Even though the famine of 1879 had hit their province of Connacht hard, it had not been as bad as the previous two which had left too many people dead. The people called it the An Goerta Beag or the mini famine but this time the government had subsidized and provided for the people so that there were comparatively few deaths. Still, Tom had convinced her that America was the land of promise and they would live well. Their children would go to school and have better lives than them.

  Armed with nothing but hope and four children, Rita followed her husband to Boston and the first two years of their lives in America were happy ones because Tom was hard working and brought all his wages home. Then slowly, little by little, he began to change from the man she'd loved and married so that by the time she was pregnant with their fifth child, he began to hit her. He had taken to drinking and so did not bring enough money home, but when she'd told him she needed more money for food, he had turned on her.

  "You sit here getting fatter everyday and I have to go out to the docks and slave, then you have the audacity to ask me for more money?"

  Rita had never seen her husband behaving in this way and she tried to soothe his anger, but the children chose to wake up at that time and began crying. They were hungry and there was no food in the house. Irritated by the noise, Tom took off his leather belt to flog the children but Rita would not allow it, so he ended up beating her so badly that she suffered a miscarriage.

  From then on it was as though the gates of hell had opened in the O'Malley household. Rita decided that the only way she would be able to take care of her children was to find some work herself. She chose to go to the affluent section of Boston where she was lucky to get work as a washerwoman and once in a while, she would be allowed to clean the large kitchens. She would always take Cora with her and when she realized that her daughter was learning how to speak the language of America, she was secretly glad because it meant that she would find her way in life. Because of Tom's attitude, the lessons had to be done in secret but Rita was happy for her daughter and took care to hide her feelings.

  "Everyone must be proud of his heritage," he often told his children. "No need trying to learn the language of the Americans and become hoity toity like them folk."

  It was the local priest who brought matters to a head. He insisted that all children should be taken to school or else he would excommunicate the parents who forbade their children from getting an education. To Tom, being excommunicated was like being sent to hell and so he gave in and allowed the children to go to school. The only problem was that as soon as any child turned fifteen Tom found them a job at the docks, but for Cora, since she was a girl, he found her a husband. Cora would have nothing to do with the Irish boys that regularly came by and she was determined to make a better life for herself. No matter how many times her father threatened to whip her, the girl stood firm, until she turned twenty two and left home.

  Now she was out on the prairie catching and taming horses and making money from it. Rita shook her head, smiling sadly. Perhaps her daughter had gone mad, the sun out in the West must have scorched her brains, for who ever heard of a woman running in the wild and chasing after horses? That only happened in dime novels! Even so, mad or not, twice Cora had written to her and sent her fifty dollars each time, enabling her to feed her children.

  ~#~#~#~

  Tom never came home that night and at first, Rita wasn't worried since he often spent the night in one of the saloons drinking and sometimes treated himself with a whore. On those nights Rita was glad because she evaded a beating and the increasingly violent verbal abuse from her husband. Had she not suffered four miscarriages and two still births, she would have fourteen children right now and her life would have been much worse.

  Mid morning when she was helping Marie clean the house she heard someone shouting and she ran out of the house. It was Samuel.

  "Ma, you got to come now," he was breathless and he looked terrified.

  "What's happened, where is Luke?" Her sons had left for school and she wasn't expecting them home before noon. "Where is your brother?"

  "Ma, you have to come now," he practically pulled her and she shouted to Marie to lock the door securely and followed her son. He led her to the police station where a burly policeman looked at her with pity in his eyes.

  "Are you the wife of the dead man?" He asked.

  "Dead man? What dead man?" Rita looked at her son in confusion.

  "Ma'am, is Tom O'Malley your husband?"

  "Yes sir."

  "Then I am afraid I have some bad news." He looked at her, waiting for her to swoon but she looked at him steadily. "Your husband was crushed by a coal cart late last night. We believe he was on his way home but apparently he was completely drunk and stepped into the path of the cart. He was killed instantly."

  Rita waited for sorrow to fall on her but none came. The only thing she felt was a sense of relief so great that she swayed with the giddiness of it. The policeman thought the news had affected her and so he quickly offered her a seat and asked her to be calm.

  "Calm?" Rita almost laughed out loud. Her husband was dead and she was not mourning him. Maybe she was in shock and the reality would hit her later, but for now she could only sit and rock forward and backwards, her hands crossed over her chest. She knew she should be mourning her husband, but the way he'd treated her for the last several years, longer in fact than she cared to remember, effectively put paid to any grief that might have washed over her.

  The sorrow never came, not even when Father O'Brien said the final prayers at Tom's graveside and the gravediggers filled his grave. Rita stood in the falling rain, long after everyone else had left the graveside. Her children were taking shelter in the small church doorway and she knew they were watching her. Her eldest sons were as usual, drunk and Rita knew that unless she did something about her own life, she would end up dead and buried too, and her four younger children would suffer without her.

  The one thing she was glad about was that there would be no more beatings, no more rough handling by her husband, and even though she had no idea how she was going to bring up her remainin
g children, she now felt a glimmer of hope that the future would be better. Their landlord had come by in the three days that the family was in mourning and had asked her how she intended to continue paying rent now that her husband was dead.

  Rita had almost laughed out loud. Tom had stopped paying the rent a long time ago and it was due to her washing, ironing and cleaning other people's homes that they still had a roof over their heads. She couldn't count on any of her sons to provide for her, because like their father, they were dock workers and drank their wages too. They never brought any money home but rather, expected Rita to continue supporting them.

  Things were going to change though. She had no hopes of changing her sons who were aged twenty, eighteen and seventeen but they were going to have to begin looking after themselves. She was tired and it was time she made a life for her younger children who were still teachable. That night she wrote to Cora and informed her of her father's death.

  Two weeks later she received a reply and for the first time in a long while, she smiled, actually even laughed. Marie was in the kitchen and she heard her mother laughing joyfully in the bedroom. The young girl rushed to her mother's room, thinking that perhaps her mother had finally gone mad with grief.

  "Mama, are you alright?"

  "Yes, dear child, where are your elder brothers?"

  "Gone drinking as usual."

  "Good," Rita beckoned and told Marie to shut the door. "Cora has written to me and asked me to move to Wyoming. She is married to a new husband now who she loves very much and who loves her back. She's been building a house which she had intended living in, but since she decided to marry, the house is now standing vacant. She says I can stay there because it's all ready for someone to move in and make a home there. I'm going to do it."

  Marie looked at her mother with troubled eyes. "What about us mama, will you leave us behind?"