Mail Order Bride Leah: A Sweet Western Historical Romance (Montana Mail Order Brides Series Book 1) Read Free

at Walter and Jane’s house and read aloud to her ailing father. They were halfway through David Copperfield , although she was sadly sure the man had no idea of the story or characters.
    She prayed he at least found comfort in the sound of her voice, in the tender way she cut up his meat at the evening meal and helped him to a cup of milk as if he were a child. Each day, she checked the post for a letter addressed to herself. On the nineteenth day, a small missive on cream paper, folded and sealed up plainly, came to her.
    Dear Miss Weaver,
    I am called Henry, though my full given name is Josiah Henry Rogers, because I am in a plain-dealing business out West and these frontiersmen brook less nonsense even than your father. As we’re on the topic of names, I’ve a sister called Opal, which ought to tell you that my father, a symphony conductor, who named her, is the impractical one with the head for poetry in my clan.
    I hail from Philadelphia and came West in my youth to find my own way. I have a way with horses and break pairs for driving in my spare time. I am an avid rider and judge of horseflesh, of which my stable has much. Do you ride? Would you learn to ride a horse if you have not had opportunity with your city upbringing?
    While I’ve made my inn and stable a prosperous concern, I’ve not found much in the way of human companionship out here. It seems my subscription to the lending library is not enough of culture or amusement, but it is all that is on offer here.  I am fond of music but there is little opportunity to indulge that interest outside of church hymns, though our congregation has a piano now, a bit out of tune but a piano all the same.
    You say that you are bookish and shy—I am as well, though the people of the town would not know it. My business requires me to know all the news, to be friendly and sociable, but it is not my nature, I believe. I’m of a retiring temperament in that respect and would much prefer a book. I have read Dickens but find his novels a bit sentimental. Do you know Goethe?  What sort of poetry do you enjoy? I confess I do not care for William Blake, and I was a recalcitrant student of Marlowe as a boy as well.
    If the ramblings of a lonesome innkeeper have not alarmed you, do reply to my letter. I would know more of your interests. I do not mind if you call yourself an old maid as I suppose, at 29 years of age, I am a bit of one myself. That is a joke, although on paper it looks odd now. Forgive the familiarity of my making a joke in a letter of introduction. I find I would rather write to you than talk to the men at my inn just now, and I may have let my words run away with me. When you write to me, if you write to me, you may address me as Henry. May I call you “Leah,” or at least “not-Ophelia” as it seems strange to have confided so much in a person I must write to as Miss Weaver?
    With hope,
Josiah Henry Rogers
    Leah was smiling as she folded the letter and pressed it to her heart, shutting her eyes. For nineteen nights as she'd said her prayers, she had asked her mother to send her a husband. She hoped it was not blasphemy to pray to her mother after she prayed to Jesus, but she knew that good, devoted woman was an angel and would be watching over her only daughter. She hoped her mother could see her now; how happy, how hopeful she felt. Leah told herself to be calm, as her father always had when she was carried away by enthusiasm.
    A serious child, she had indulged in occasional flights of fancy that he felt it his duty to curb. Once she had asked him for a hundred composition books from the shop and he’d asked her what they were for…she told him, at age nine, that she intended to copy out the Bible by hand and post the composition books to little children in far-off countries who didn’t know about Jesus. She’d been deeply disappointed when he told her that those little children couldn’t read English and she’d be better off saving her weekly