Her Safe Harbor: Prairie Romance (Crawford Family Book 4)

Her Safe Harbor: Prairie Romance (Crawford Family Book 4) Read Free Page A

Book: Her Safe Harbor: Prairie Romance (Crawford Family Book 4) Read Free
Author: Holly Bush
Tags: Romance, Historical, Historical Romance, Victorian
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O’Brien began
testing the new adding machine as she was focused on the long column of numbers
before her, and pulled out her tablet and pencil to make some calculations.
    Thank heavens, the Ramsey School for Young Ladies
curriculum included extensive mathematics classes. Jennifer had excelled in
those classes and had been named the top student. Her father had allowed her
access to his office when he was home in the evening and she remembered many
nights standing by his side as a young girl, or sitting on his lap even, and
tallying long lists of numbers, learning division and multiplication. He’d
declared she had “a head for numbers” even better than his own and that it was
such a pity she was a girl rather than a boy. But he’d said it with a smile and
a hug and Jennifer didn’t feel quite as bad as she might at what he’d said,
because there was little doubt she was his favorite, even when Jillian still
lived with them and was a perfect vision of beauty at a very young age.
    A school friend from Ramsey was going to attend Mount
Holyoke Female Seminary to pursue a degree in literature after her years at
Ramsey were completed. Jennifer had asked her father and mother at the dinner
table one evening if she would be allowed to attend with her classmate to
further study mathematics. Her mother had scolded her beyond anything she could
have imagined. Jennifer had been humiliated, and her father had reprimanded her
for even bringing such a subject up to her mother and for making the whole
family subject to Jane’s tirades because of it. And indeed her mother continued
to bring up the subject for years afterwards to relatives and friends,
describing her daughter as having aspirations to be a spinster bluestocking to
anyone who would listen.
    Jennifer’s cheeks colored with the remembrance of those grim
days and what felt like constant embarrassment. But more than that, her
relationship with her father, her stalwart champion and confidante, was
damaged. They were no longer easy with each other in conversation and there was
a coldness from him toward her after that. Jennifer was devastated. Then the
influenza changed all their lives. Jolene’s son, little William, dead from the
disease and her first husband Turner gone as well, and Jolene no longer
interested or able to go to the bank and entertain Crawford Bank clients in the
parlor lobby.
    Last year, an olive branch had been extended when her father
agreed after some persuasion that she be allowed to accompany him to the bank a
few days a week and continue what Jolene had begun. Then one day he’d arrived
in the parlor lobby with a packet and a rather sheepish look on his face. She
remembered the moment as if it were just occurring.
    “I wonder if you’d take a look at this, Jennifer,” he had
said. “The bookkeepers have pored over this and none can find the errors, but
it is a very complicated account.” He looked up at her and smiled. “And then I
recalled you were here in the building, and if anyone can unravel a
mathematical mystery it is you. You’ve always been remarkably clever with
numbers, even when you were a young girl. How proud I’ve always been of you.”
    Jennifer choked back a sob at the time and anytime since
that she’d let herself repeat her father’s words in her head. What a fine day
that had been! She’d looked up at him and stretched out her hands to take the
packet with a wide smile and glistening eyes. He’d hugged her in a loose
embrace with a final pat on her back before releasing her. She’d reviewed the
paperwork and saw within the first hour or so exactly what had happened and where
the error had been made.
    From that day onward, her father had brought her the most
complicated of the account reviews that his staff of clerks and bookkeepers
were unable to balance. She was fairly certain that no one else at the bank
knew she and O’Brien were doing this sort of work. Jennifer did not care, not
one little bit, that she was not

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