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A Home Of His Own
Judith Bowen
A secret marriagePhoebe Longquist and Lewis Hardin got married on impulse, without a fancy wedding, without family, without fuss. Phoebe wants to keep things quiet and uncomplicated…for a while, anyway.A family secretLewis would rather not deceive their families. But he'll do it if she really wants…for a while, anyway. He might be a Glory boy made good, but he's also an ex-con and hardly what Phoebe's parents have in mind for their daughter.A glory ChristmasThen Lewis learns something shocking about his own family, about who he is. And it makes him take stock of what he has.
“I want to get married, Lewis.”
“Are you sure about this, Phoebe?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” she answered. She looked at him. “Are you?”
He nodded. “Yes. I love you. I’d do anything for you. Anything.”
She’d lost him for years and now she’d found him again. She wasn’t letting him go back to Edmonton and maybe find some other woman. Besides, she was tired of always being the good girl in her family, tired of always having to be sensible.
But how to explain this sudden urgency? The sudden overwhelming desire she’d felt this morning, watching him sleep, to be his, really his. In the most sacred, profound way. Marriage. “I know it seems kind of crazy, but doing it like this cuts out a lot of trouble. You know what I mean?”
“Uh-huh. Your folks.” His dark eyes were steady on hers.
Phoebe glanced away. “Them. And everyone else. They don’t know you the way I do. They’d bring up all kinds of complications. They’d think we should get married in a church. All that fuss. Weddings are stupid, anyway! Being married is what counts.”
“Is it?” He turned to study her. “You know I’ll do anything you want, Phoebe, even sneak off like this and marry you. But we can’t hide forever.”
“It’ll just be a secret for a while,” she told him. “Ours!”
Dear Reader,
Writing a collection of books set in and around the small town of Glory, Alberta, has been a challenge and a source of joy for me. I have lived in so many small towns myself that Glory has come to reflect everything I like and dislike about small-town living. No one can say there aren’t disadvantages—lack of privacy, interfering neighbors, limited shopping. But there are great advantages, too—a sense of community, parents looking out for their neighbors’ children, knowing that you’ll always find help if you ask for it.
Lewis Hardin, a young man in trouble in my first MEN OF GLORY book, The Rancher’s Runaway Bride, has always longed for something we all cherish: a home of our own. In this story, with childhood sweetheart Phoebe Longquist’s help, Lewis discovers his special place in more ways than one.
I hope you’ll enjoy the love story between Lewis and Phoebe. It was a wonderful book to write, and brings the folks of Glory full circle, back to the beginning. The place we call home.
Judith Bowen
P.S. Let me know how you’ve enjoyed the MEN OF GLORY books and thank you for your many, many letters over the years. You can reach me at P.O. Box 2333, Point Roberts, WA 98281-2333. Or check out my MEN OF GLORY web page at www.judithbowen.com.
MEN OF GLORY titles in Superromance:
739—THE RANCHER’S RUNAWAY BRIDE
791—LIKE FATHER, LIKE DAUGHTER
814—O LITTLE TOWN OF GLORY
835—THE DOCTOR’S DAUGHTER
872—HIS BROTHER’S BRIDE
900—THE RANCHER TAKES A WIFE
A Home of His Own
Judith Bowen
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE (#u4ac79b84-1653-5dee-8171-42828b60ad8c)
CHAPTER TWO (#u5271a298-d8be-531a-b138-be38bea22632)
CHAPTER THREE (#u2cc18562-4c5d-5613-8328-5f173a439c5f)
CHAPTER FOUR (#u5e8c7477-3a56-5dc3-a12f-c1cc7510dc53)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
THE FIRST TIME Phoebe saw Lewis Hardin she was maybe ten. She’d gone out to the Hardin place, at the top of Bearberry Hill, with her mother to deliver some parceled-up goods from the parish. The Hardins weren’t Catholic, as far as Phoebe was aware, but that didn’t matter: they were poor.
That afternoon, bored with the adults’ visiting, Phoebe had climbed a massive poplar in a copse near the Hardins’ old post-and-beam barn, then had daringly crawled onto a ledge that led to the loft. The loft contained very little hay. The roof, under the rafters, was thick with the nests of barn swallows; it echoed with the squeaky shrills of the parents swooping in to stuff their offspring’s bellies with mosquitoes, then out again. There were no animals in the barn, only a few badly rusted farm implements. She’d heard a rhythmic rap-rap sound below somewhere and had crept from one side of the loft to the other, peering through the square holes in the floor cut out for hay and straw to be thrown down to horses or cows.
She was afraid, but she was thrilled, too. This was an adventure. Even dangerous, up here with the stinky hay and the uncertain footing. By herself, too—no Jilly tagging along. The fun of having a new little sister had worn off long ago.
Finally, almost on top of the rap-rap sound, Phoebe cleared the hay cautiously from the place where the wall of the barn met the floor of the loft and peered down. She spotted a boy, about fourteen or fifteen, hammering on a homemade punching bag made from an old feed sack, it looked like, filled with straw. He jabbed at the bag, grunting at the effort, his skinny body gleaming with sweat in the shafts of afternoon sunlight that lazily probed the deep gloom of the barn’s interior. The punching bag hung in one corner of a box stall that had been fixed up with a bed and pallet and a rickety-looking table and bench. There were candles set into pop bottles, on the table, a knife, chunks of wood and several plastic bread bags. Was there food in them? It seemed that the boy lived in the stall, or at least slept there part of the time. A few boards pried out of the barn siding provided an exit.
Phoebe held her breath, rapt. Finally, with a last vicious series of jabs and a shout that thrilled her blood, he swung away from the bag and sank heavily onto the wooden chair. After a few moments of hard breathing, he retrieved his T-shirt from the adjoining pallet and put it on, then picked up the knife and a piece of wood from the table and began whittling.
She was certain he hadn’t seen her, not with the racket from the birds above. She was just thinking of how she could inch her way back, desperately afraid she’d sneeze or something, when he looked up and grinned. “Here you go, you little peeper!” He tossed something at her and she ducked. When she raised her head again, he was gone. She felt around in the hay until she found what he’d thrown. It was a small wooden frog, crudely carved.
Five years later…
SHE’D THOUGHT it was beautiful and had kept it on her windowsill ever since. She’d gone back up to the house to join her mother and the Hardin women that day, but the boy had not appeared.
Now, at nearly fifteen herself, on another such mission of charity, with her mother and her aunt Catherine this time, Phoebe thought about that silly wooden frog. It was grubby from handling, and once she’d actually thrown it away; the next day, she’d dug through her bedroom trash basket and retrieved it. It brought her luck. Or happiness. Something that didn’t bear thinking about.
Saint Augustine’s kept a list of the families they helped in the area, and Bearberry Hill was within the parish. Nothing remained there but a white-painted clapboard church with a windblown cemetery at the brow of the hill and the ramshackle settlement that marked the Hardin place. If there’d been a husband for the older woman, Mercedes Hardin, he was long gone and forgotten by the community. Her daughter, Billy, lived with her, a young-old woman of perhaps forty. She was not right in the head, some said, and others said she was peculiar by choice. Mercedes looked older than her sixty-some years, with flyaway white hair and watery blue eyes. Because of a hip broken years earlier, she favored one leg and walked with a cane, which had always made her seem older. There was another member of the family, Phoebe knew—the son, Lewis. He was in jail.
Ever since Lewis Hardin had gone to jail for rustling cattle the year before, Cal Blake, the rancher who lived up the road a few miles, had kept the Hardins supplied with beef and firewood. He’d promised Lewis they’d be taken care of, according to a neighbor, which was strange, considering it was Cal’s beef that Lewis and a gang of n’er-do-well cowboys had stolen.
“I hear Mercy still keeps a fine garden,” her mother said, from the driver’s seat. “And no one can say they’re afraid of work, the two of them, living like they do.”
“Nan,” her aunt sniffed. “Be sensible. It’s no way to live, two women out here alone. They ought to move to town.”
“Mercy was born on the place and she’d told me once the only way she’ll be leaving is feet first,” replied Phoebe’s mother.
Feet first, Phoebe knew very well, meant dead. Phoebe sat in the back, between two large sacks of used clothing from the parish thrift store, which had been chosen with the Hardin women in mind, and a box of groceries on the floor of the station wagon, which had come from the Glory food bank. Canned goods, mostly—ham and soup and condensed milk—although Phoebe could see several boxes of pasta and, oddly, a flat, paper-wrapped tin of anchovies. Anchovies!
A view of the azure blue Pacific off Peru, silvery with the tiny fish, flashed through Phoebe’s mind…
“And that boy of hers—ooh!” Her aunt shuddered and made a face Phoebe could see in the rearview mirror. “Thank goodness he’s where he belongs—in jail! He’s been nothing but trouble since he was born. Imagine another one coming so long after Billy? It makes a body wonder who the father was…”
“Oh, Catherine,” her mother murmured, driving slowly and carefully. “I don’t suppose anyone cares about all that. Not now. Not after so many years.”
How many years? About nineteen or twenty, Phoebe guessed later when she came across him at the bottom of the orchard—mainly twisted crab apple trees and blighted russet pears. He frightened her, sitting there on a long-downed tree trunk, so still and so alert at the same time. He blended into the dry grass. If she hadn’t smelled the cigarette smoke, she might not have seen him at all. And that thought scared her more.
She’d asked Mercy Hardin if she could go and see the sheep that she’d noticed from the road when they turned into the lane. Since that first long-ago visit, the Hardin women had acquired a scruffy clutch of sheep, black and brown and white, that they kept for who knew what reason. Meat, perhaps. Or wool.
Two of the Hardin dogs, who’d barked madly at the car as they drove up to the house, lay at the man’s feet.
“Come here,” he said quietly. At first she didn’t realize it was Lewis. He was supposed to be in jail. “Are you afraid of me?” His eyes narrowed through the cigarette smoke. He wore an old shirt and jeans, no jacket, even though it was cold enough that Phoebe had worn the new wool coat her mother had bought her for school in September. His boots were black, sturdy and plain. Government issue.
“I’m not afraid,” she said, picking her way toward him through the fallen branches and frozen windfall fruit. It was true; she wasn’t. She stood in front of him. “You shouldn’t smoke. It’s a filthy habit.”
He laughed and threw the stub of a cigarette away. It smoldered in the frosty grass. “Who’s up there?” He frowned and hunched one shoulder toward the house.
“And you shouldn’t throw away lighted butts like that. You could start a forest fire.”
“Aw, can it, kid. Who’s up there?” he repeated.
She frowned. “At the house, you mean?”
He nodded impatiently.
“Just my mother. And my aunt Catherine.”
“That’s all?”
She nodded and he patted the log he was sitting on. “Have a seat. I’m not gonna bite you.”
She sat beside him. He edged closer to her, against her, and she realized he was shivering. “How’re Ma and Billy?”
“Why? Haven’t you seen them?” She was thoroughly confused. What was he doing here in the orchard, anyway?
He glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the house. “Naw. Not yet. I’m supposed to be in jail, didn’t you know?” He smiled briefly. His features were harsh and pinched. All these years she’d remembered a dark intensity, a passion, to his thin face; what she now saw was hunger and a certain grim determination.
“Well, why aren’t you?” Later, when she thought about it, she wondered at her nerve.
“I left. Got tired of the food they shove at you in there.” He winked and put his arm around her shoulders in a sudden, impulsive gesture, and held her close against him. “Man, it’s cold! I could use a cup of coffee and a bellyful of beef stew. Some nice warm Parker house rolls. Ma done her baking today?” He had a wistful look in his eyes, then came the knowing, self-deprecating laugh again.
Phoebe stared at him. She shook her head. “I don’t know.” She unwrapped the scarf from around her neck, the one her grandmother had knitted, and gave it to him. “Here, this will make you a little warmer.”
He buried his hands in the scarf. “You’re a good kid, you know that?”
Phoebe shrugged. “Well, I guess I’d better go back to the house.” She made a move, as though to get up, but he bumped her with his shoulder, on purpose. She could feel her thigh warm against his. Her thigh and her arm and her shoulder.
“You won’t say nothing?” He shot her a penetrating look. “About me down here?”
She hesitated. “They’ll get you, you know. Eventually, you’re going back to jail. For even longer.”
He laughed again. “Yeah, yeah, I know that. I just needed a break, y’know? Little holiday. I wanted to see how Ma and Billy were getting on. When your ma leaves, I’ll go up to the house, say hello.” His face was so close to hers. He hadn’t shaved in a while. She couldn’t think of any of her friends who wouldn’t have been scared to death in her situation. Natasha Jarvis, her best friend, would have died. Imagine—she was talking to an escaped convict!
“I— I hate it there,” he burst out. “You can’t understand, a kid like you, what it’s like to be trapped, spied on—” He clamped his jaws closed, as though he’d stopped himself from admitting something. That he missed home. That he longed to be free. Then he shocked her. “Listen, you ever kiss a man?”
“N-no,” she said slowly, shaking her head. She began to get up. He grabbed her arm and she shook him off.
“Boys? You ever kiss boys?”
Phoebe decided to lie. “A few,” she said airily.
He stood up suddenly and put his arms around her. “Kiss me.”
Then his face was right up against hers, and he nuzzled her nose and forehead, as though she were a kitten. He kissed her, softly at first, and then more and more intensely, and she felt rivulets of something weird shoot through her body, through her legs and arms, through her stomach. His mouth was wet and soft and faintly, disgustingly, smoky from his cigarette. But oh, so warm and exciting! Phoebe kissed him back, as well as she knew how, which wasn’t very well at all.
His arms were tight around her, iron bands. Then she felt his hands, cold and hard, under her coat and slipping up under her sweater against her hot skin. She moaned and shivered and pressed herself against him. Suddenly he released her and she nearly fell backward. His eyes were dark and flat. He pulled her sweater down and fastened her coat. “You’d better go, kid. Before we’re both in trouble.”
She began to make her way, stumbling, across the orchard. He called after her, “Hey, kid!”
She stopped. She needed to, anyway, her heart was pumping so hard.
