Mail Order Annie - A Historical Mail Order Bride Romance Novel (Mail Order Romance - Book 1 - Benjamin and Annie) Read Free Page B

Around the side of the building, Moran stopped next to a wagon hitched to a single horse, which champed placidly at its nose bag and shifting patiently from one foot to the other. When Anne arrived beside the wagon box, Moran seized her around the waist with his wide paws of hands and hoisted her up into the seat without a word of permission. Anne yelped in surprise just as her feet landed on the foot rest, and the next moment, Moran unclipped the horse’s nose bag and jumped up into the seat beside her. With a slap of the reins on the horse’s back, the wagon lurched forward and rattled away up the nonexistent street and into the bare countryside.
                  Anne couldn’t figure out if the shaking of the wagon soothed her shaking limbs or made her trembling worse, as Moran drove away from Eckville down a dusty track that appeared to Anne little more than an opening in the sagebrush. The dust rose in a plume behind the wagon wheels, and the tiny shred of civilization that was the Eckville Hotel and its Post Office faded to a miniscule speck behind them, before dropping out of sight into the sea of wilderness. Anne held her handkerchief in a death grip, so tightly that her fingernails dug into her palm, but the pain only provided her with a point of focus to distract her from the horrible reality of driving off into oblivion with a strange man she had never met before, and about whom she had so recently received the most appalling report. Was going off with Moran really any more respectable than going off with Webster Forsythe? She wasn’t married to either man, and she had only Moran’s assurances that he would marry her if she came to him. At least she knew that the characterization of the life Moran offered her did not differ much from the one described by Forsythe. He himself told her that he didn’t hold much store by religion. Would going instead to a real house, with servants and food on the table and crystal glasses full of claret on the table really prove such a great scandal, after everything else she had been through in recent years? Did driving off into the trackless frontier really redeem any of the mistakes she sought to leave behind her? All the misgivings and uncertainty, all the dread and upset of leaving home forever with no way back, that she never permitted herself to entertain in the weeks of preparation and travel, and the horror of the gunfight she witnessed, now presented themselves before her with nothing else to prevent them from impinging on her thoughts. For the first time, she faced the inescapable fact of the decision that she had made, and the undeniable, irrevocable permanence of it. She felt herself traveling to her death, to a tomb where no one who loved her would know where she was buried, where the enshrouding wool of obscurity would mummify her in an eternal hell of stifled hopes and excruciating drudgery. And now, on top of everything else, she felt the impending danger of Benjamin Moran about which Webster Forsythe tried to warn her. Maybe he planned to drive her out into the wilderness, murder her, and dispose of her somewhere out there in the great nothing of the place.
                  In a ferment of anxiety, she started babbling ridiculously to Moran about the first thing that popped into her head. “I apologize again for not waiting for you on the platform. I was so surprised when I saw Eckville! It is not what I expected at all!”
                  “It’s not the biggest town in the territory, that’s for sure,” Moran admitted. “But it serves the purpose. It’s the only rail stop for a couple hundred miles, and having the only post office in the area makes it a pretty important place in this type of country. Just about every meeting or important event around here happens either at the post office or at the hotel. Weddings, funerals, elections—all that happens there. It’s the only place folks can meet. I’m sorry if I gave