Her Safe Harbor: Prairie Romance (Crawford Family Book 4) (18 page)

Jennifer reached up and pushed his hair from his face. “You
are so very handsome.”

“I know you’re beautiful, but there are some parts you’re
hiding with this silky nightie. Let me help you take it off,” he said as she
sat upright beside him.

Zeb pulled the silk nightgown over her head, leaving her
bare. She resisted the urge to cover herself with the sheets as he stared at
her and hissed between his teeth. He lifted her breast in his hand, kneading
her and touching her nipple with his thumb. She steadied herself on her arms
behind her and watched him make slow circles, not touching her anywhere but
where his palm held the weight of her breast.

She touched her lip with her tongue, and watched his sex
harden. She leaned down and kissed him then, there, on the tip of his cock,
running her tongue around the ridge. He dropped back on the mattress with a
shudder and groaned. What power she had! She licked the length of him and
watched his chest rise and fall, finally taking him in her mouth slowly.

“Come here,” he whispered. “Please.”

She climbed atop him, already warm and pulsing between her
legs. She sat up on her knees, her hands on his shoulders, as he rubbed the
head of his sex against her until she was moaning and wet and gyrating against
him.

“Please,” she said.

Zeb entered her with one, long, smooth motion, bringing a
cry from them both. He worked in her, holding her hips still, as their eyes
met, half-lidded and far gone in sexual passion. Jennifer dropped onto his
chest, her breasts against his hot, wet skin. She felt the spasm of his last
thrust and heard a grating cry from his chest. He shook a final tremor, and she
stretched out on him languidly, unable to summon her limbs to move.

He rolled her onto her back, looming over her and touching
her face softly with his fingertips. “I love you, Jenny. I always will.”

“I love you, Zebidiah. With every bit of myself, until we
are old and infirm. Until the only thing left is love.”

Epilogue

Boston 1894

“How sad father looks,” Julia said. “He
has barely eaten all day.”

Jolene lifted Andrew onto her lap and kissed his forehead.
“He is sad. Not matter what she had done, no matter how angry or disappointed
he was with her, he still loved her. Desperately.”

“It has been a long, unpleasant time for the last few months
until she passed on,” Jennifer said.

“It is still very difficult for me to feel any sympathy for
her, even in her suffering,” Julia said and dabbed at her eyes. “But I still
feel terribly guilty that I did not visit her before she died.”

Jolene, Julia, and Jennifer, the Crawford sisters, sat
together at a table in the vast ballroom of Willow Tree set up for hundreds of
mourners to dine on the day of Jane Crawford’s funeral. Guests were still
trickling in the door, although their father had said he would continue to
greet late arrivals and that they should spend their time together.

“Guilt is not productive, I’ve found,” Jolene said, and
handed Andrew off to his nanny. “Don’t indulge yourself, Julia, past a few days
of moping. Our mother was never a happy woman, devious in her prime and
dangerous as she was slowly swallowed up by her mental incapacities. But our
past does not define our future.”

“True. Look at us,” Julia said and squeezed Jolene’s hand.
“We have all been tested by some degree of fire and come out the victor, but
more importantly we have found love.”

Jennifer turned her head to gaze in the direction that her
sisters looked. Their husbands stood together as a group, Jake with Mary Lou on
his shoulders and Jillian and Jacob by his side, and Max taking little Andrew
from the nanny’s arms and tossing him in the air. She could hear his baby
giggles from where she sat. Zeb smiled and watched Andrew, up and down, up and
down, his arm around Melinda’s shoulders.

“What do you think Father will do, Jennifer, now that Mother
is gone? Will he stay here and rattle around this massive house alone? Are you
and Zeb going to live with him?” Julia asked.

“We discussed that but neither of us wants to live here, in
this grand of a house. We have recently spoken to Father about moving somewhere
smaller or with us when Zeb and I find a home,” she replied.

“Maximillian gives Zebidiah unheralded credit for living
under the same roof as Mother,” Jolene said. “I told him he did it for you.”

“He did. He didn’t like the idea at all and on the rare
occasion he needed to find me when I was helping Mother eat or reading to her,
he would be angry at the sight of her. She called him Jeffrey once.”

Julia covered her mouth with her hand and Jolene’s eyes
widened.

“You may laugh if you wish. I did when he met me in our
bedroom later.”

“I would never laugh,” Julia said and touched her hand. “Knowing
how evil and horrible that man was. How you barely escaped and how grateful I
am and was. I prayed every night for you after I got Jolene’s letters.”

Jennifer shrugged and smiled. “There was certainly nothing
humorous about my dealings with Rothchild, but you must admit Mother thinking
that Zeb was he, and calling out to him that evening, was, if not funny then
certainly ironic.”

Jolene leaned forward in her seat and covered Jennifer’s
hand with her own. “You are over it then. You have come to terms with . . . all
of it.”

“No more or less than you have come to terms with Little
William’s death, or Julia with being parted from Jillian all those years. But
we battle on, don’t we? If we hadn’t we would not have found our husbands, the
loves of our lives. You two would not have your children and I would not have
my nieces and nephews and another addition to our family that will present him
or herself in seven months or so,” Jennifer said and touched her stomach.

“Congratulations!” Jolene said and leaned forward to kiss
her cheek.

“What wonderful news!” Julia cried. “What will the bank do
without you?”

“The Crawford Bank will soon have new blood. Zeb will begin
working with Father in less than three weeks. He will finally be done traveling
back and forth to Washington helping Max get settled with a new chief of
staff.”

“Perfect,” Jolene said. “An honorable man to carry on our
family business for the next generation.”

“None of it would be possible without these wonderful men in
our lives,” Julia said. “Your husbands are as dear to me as my own.”

“Nor without the strength and courage of the women in this
family,” Jolene said and held her sister’s hands.

Jennifer held Julia’s hand then, completing the circle of
family, and looked at the two women beside her. “Nor without love. Love does
not end, even with tragedy and sadness, and has given us the will to go on.”

Hello Readers!

Thank you for purchasing
Her Safe Harbor,
Crawford
Family Book 4.  I hope you enjoyed Zeb and Jennifer’s story. Please share your
thoughts with friends and family and with others on review sites and social
media. The first book in this series is
Train Station Bride
, the second
book is
Contract to Wed
, and
The Maid’s Quarters
Crawford Family
Book 3, is a novella featuring a character from
Contract to Wed
.

Follow me on Face Book at Holly Bush, at hollybushbooks.com,
or on Twitter @hollybushbooks to hear all the latest updates. I love to hear
from readers!

You can also read excerpts from my other Prairie
Historicals,
Romancing Olive, Reconstructing Jackson,
and Victorian
Romances,
Cross the Ocean
and
Charming the Duke
at my website.
Red,
White and Screwed
, a Women’s Fiction title, is a new category for me and
I’m hoping you’ll give it a try! Find these books at Amazon, Barnes &
Noble, Kobo, and Itunes.  Thanks again for your purchase! A sample of
Romancing
Olive
is below.

Romancing Olive -
Excerpt

Spencer,
Ohio 1891

Ol
ive Wilkins found the sheriff’s office as promised, beside
a busy general store. The walls were thick stone, and the bars at the windows
cast striped patterns on the floor. A weary-faced man with sun-toughened skin
sat behind the desk.

“Just a minute . . .” the sheriff
said.

Olive waited dutifully as he
wrote, letting her eyes wander from the cells in the corner of the room to the
gun belt looped over the hook near the door to the sign proclaiming Sheriff
Bentley the law in this small Ohio town.

“What can I help you with, ma’am?’
he asked, as he looked up from his papers and tilted back his hat.

“My name is Olive Wilkins, and my
brother, James Wilkins, and his wife, Sophie, lived here in Spencer. I am here
to take his children back to my home in Philadelphia, but I am not quite sure
with whom they are staying. The note from my sister-in-law’s family is
unclear,” Olive explained as she pulled the oft-folded and unfolded letter from
her bag.

The sheriff sat back in his chair
and tapped his pencil stub against his mouth. “John and Mary are staying with
Jacob Butler.”

“How are the Butlers related to my
brother’s wife?”

“They’re not,” Sheriff Bentley
replied.

“Then how did the children come
to——”

“None of Sophie’s family, the
Davises, would take them in,” he interrupted.

“Oh.”

“Jacob Butler couldn’t abide two
children living on their own in that shack, so he took them home. He was your
brother’s closest neighbor,” the sheriff explained.

“Sophie’s family abandoned them?”
Olive asked. Could this man be talking about James’s nearest relatives? Could
there be two sets of orphaned children in one small community? With the same
names? No, there could not be.

“The Davis clan couldn’t tell you
how many children or dogs belong to them, but they sure didn’t want more.”

Olive frowned, certain she had
misunderstood. “My brother’s children lived alone on a farm? Surely Sophie’s
family would have never ——”

“I don’t rightly know I’d call
Jimmy’s place a farm,” the sheriff interjected, and met Olive’s bewildered
eyes. “The worst part is I don’t know how long the children were in the house
with their mother dead and if they saw her murder.”

Olive’s knees threatened to
buckle, and her eyes darted from the sheriff’s face to her handbag to the desk.
“How could that be? The Davises’ letter only said that James and Sophie had
died. I . . . I just assumed that it had been influenza or a dreadful accident
of some kind.”

The sheriff
stood, came around the desk, and seated Olive in a chair. “Jimmy was killed
when he got caught cheating at cards. He wagered the farm, and the man who
killed him rode out and tried to stake his claim.” He looked away and grimaced.
“When I got back to town a couple of days later, I rode out to check on Sophie.
It looked like she put up a hell of a fight.”

Olive clutched the letter from her
brother’s in-laws in her hand. In her mind’s eye she pictured her only sibling
as a young man when she had last seen him. The pride of her mother and father,
a charming and handsome boy who filled their Church Street home with laughter.
At twenty years of age, he had loved Sophie Davis with such abandon; he’d left
all he’d known behind to make a life with his new wife on the plains of Ohio.
Sophie’s kin were farmers, and she wanted no life other than that which the
soil and the tilling of it brought. So James announced his intentions of making
Ohio his new home where he would farm and raise his family.

The death of Olive’s parents, only
a year apart, had left her bereft, but she had cared for them through their illnesses
and had seen their demises inch closer with each day. The news of James’s and
Sophie’s deaths, however, left her grief-stricken. But her misery would
certainly pale in comparison to the devastation John and Mary must feel.
Without preamble, this pair of deaths had orphaned her ten-year-old niece and
four-year-old nephew.

“And the children?” Olive asked.

“Couldn’t find hide nor hair of
them wild things. Searched everywhere. Jacob checked the house about a week
later and found them living there. Mary gave him a fight. She was scared to
death, even though she knew Jacob and his children. And John, that boy hasn’t
spoken a word since,” he replied.

Tears threatened Olive’s eyes. She
could not decide which of all of this horrifying news was the worst.
But it
could not be.
The sheriff must have some of this information wrong,
otherwise . . . “I’ll have to make sure that Mr. and Mrs. Butler understand how
thankful I am someone took in Mary and John.”

The sheriff propped a hip on the
corner of his desk. “There is no Mrs. Butler. Jacob’s a widower. His wife died
a year ago giving birth to their youngest son.”

“How . . . can you tell me how to
arrange transportation to the Butlers’?” Olive asked.

“I’ll be going out that way
tomorrow. I’ll rent a wagon, unless you ride. No? Then I’ll take you out
there,” he offered.

“That’s very kind of you,
Sheriff,” Olive replied. The social courtesies came without thought while her
heart grappled with what the man had said. She pulled her cloak tightly around
her and left the office feeling numb.

Olive found herself walking
aimlessly through town. In her mind she played and replayed the story the
sheriff had told her, and it rubbed raw all that she knew to be true of how she
was raised, how James was raised, how life was to be lived. She glanced down
and only then realized she still held the letter that had brought the
heartbreaking news.

Sophie’s family had written her
that there was no one to take in the two small children after their parents’
deaths, so Olive faced the greatest challenge she had ever known. She would
rescue these orphans, blood of her blood, and love them and take them back to
Philadelphia where she would raise them in their father’s childhood home.

Olive had stared out the train
window on the trip to Spencer, mile after mile, dreaming of Sunday afternoons
at the ice cream parlor, helping John with his studies, and someday leading
Mary into womanhood. What a wonderful continuation of the Wilkinses’ legacy
Olive would be able to bestow. She would be firm but gentle, patient, with high
expectations of these bright shining pennies. She would read them the letters
their father had written, take them to church, and love them, and they would
love her.