Jillian Hart – Snowflake Bride (страница 1)
Love Lost—and Found
Grateful when she’s hired as the Davises’ maid, Ruby Ballard vows to help save her family’s farm. There’s just one problem: the boss’s handsome son, Lorenzo. He makes her forget family duty, forget her lowly place, even forget her friends who are in love with him! But his love is a gift that could never be hers—not even for Christmas.
Lorenzo knows Ruby is the only woman he could marry. Yet the quiet beauty refuses his courtship. As the holidays approach, he will make both their wishes come true, when he claims her at last as his snowflake bride.In northwestern Montana, these friends stitch together their happily-ever-afters
She could feel the tug of his gaze and the gentle insistence of his presence.
She wanted to look at him. She really did. She wanted to gaze into his eyes and feel that click of closeness to him. To let him look deeper and let herself dream of having handsome Lorenzo Davis fall in mad love with her.
It wasn’t going to happen.
“Next harvest will be better,” he promised. “I’ll put it in my prayers.”
His smile drew her once again. Unable to resist, her eyes met his and the world faded. The jarring of the sleigh ceased. The cold vanished and there was only his sincerity, his caring and the quiet wish in her soul she could not give in to.
“We’re here.”
JILLIAN HART
grew up on her family’s homestead, where she helped raise cattle, rode horses and scribbled stories in her spare time. After earning her English degree from Whitman College, she worked in travel and advertising before selling her first novel. When Jillian isn’t working on her next story, she can be found puttering in her rose garden, curled up with a good book or spending quiet evenings at home with her family.
Jillian Hart
Snowflake Bride
Therefore…put on tender mercies, kindness, humility, meekness, longsuffering; bearing with one another and forgiving one another…but above all these things put on love.
—Colossians 3:12–14
Contents
Chapter One
December 1884
Angel County, Montana Territory
Snowflakes hovered like airy dreams, too fragile to touch the ground. They floated on gentle winds and twirled on icy gusts. Not that she should be noticing.
“How long have you been standing here, staring?” Ruby Ballard asked herself. Her words were too small to disturb the vast, lonely silence of the high Montana prairie or to roust her from watching the beauty of white-gray sky and dainty flakes. They reminded her of the crocheted stitches of the doily she was learning to make.
“Your interview. Remember?” She blinked the snowflakes off her lashes and hiked up the skirts of her best wool dress. Time to give up admiring the loveliness and get her head in the real world. Pa often told her that was her biggest problem. Could she help it that God’s world was so lovely she was mesmerized into noticing it all the time?
“Focus, Ruby. You need this job. Badly.” Enough that she’d hardly prayed about anything else for days, ever since her dear friend Scarlet had told her about the opening. She quickened her pace up the Davis’s long, sweeping drive because Pa hadn’t been able to get any work in town so far this winter and her family was desperate.
Ping! The faint sound was at odds with the hush of the flakes plopping gently and the crunch of her shoes in the snow. A very suspicious sound. She glanced around, but there was nothing aside from fence posts and trees. The wind gusted and knifed through her shoe with the precision of a blade. Fearing the worst, she looked down.
A spot of her white stocking clearly peeked between the gaping leather tongue of her black left shoe. Her stomach dropped in an oh-no! way. She had lost a button. What kind of an impression was she going to make when Mrs. Davis, one of the wealthiest women in the county, noticed?
Ruby hung her head. She would look like the poor country girl she was. Not that she was ashamed of that, but she didn’t think it would help her get the job.
“Don’t panic. Stay calm.” First things first. She needed to find the button. How hard could it be to locate in all this white snow? It would surely stand out; she could pluck it up and sew it back on her shoe. Since this wasn’t the first time this sort of thing had happened, she carried thread and a needle in her reticule for emergencies. Problem solved. Job interview saved.
Except she couldn’t see the button—only pure, white snow in every direction. There was no sign of a hole where it had fallen through. Nothing. Now it was time to panic. If she couldn’t sew it back on, she needed to come up with another plan.
“Looking for something?” A warm baritone broke into her panic.
Ruby froze. She knew that voice. She’d heard it before when she’d overheard him talking with his family before or after church. She remembered that deep, kind timbre from the previous school year as he would answer the teacher’s questions or chat with his friends during recess.
Lorenzo Davis. Her heart stopped beating. Her palms broke out in a sweat. The panic fluttering behind her ribs increased until it felt as if a hundred hummingbirds were trapped there, desperate to escape. What did she do? She straightened, realizing she must look like an idiot.
A snow-covered idiot. She swiped the damp stuff off her face and spun to him. Try to be calm, Ruby, she told herself. Be dignified.
“Ilostashoebutton,” she said, the words tumbling off her tongue as if she were no more than a dummy. Honestly. The words had sounded just fine in her mind, but the instant they hit her tongue, they bunched together like overcooked oatmeal, and now she looked twice as stupid to the most handsome man in the territory.
Brilliant, Ruby. Just perfectly brilliant.
“Sorry, I missed that.” Lorenzo tipped his hat cordially, disturbing a slight layer of snowflakes that had accumulated on the brim. He looked like seven kinds of dashing as he rose from his sleigh. He had a classic, square-cut face, impressively wide shoulders and enough quiet charm to send every single young lady in town to dreaming.
That was one thing she was not dreaming about—Lorenzo Davis. She might not be as well-schooled as her friend Meredith or as well-read as her friend Lila, but she knew a man like him would never be interested in a plain girl like her or one who could embarrass herself so easily. Not only did she have a button missing, but she had to explain it to him—again—and pray this time she regained the power of speech, or he would think she had something terribly wrong with her.
“Oh, you have a button missing.” He strode toward her, a mountain of powerful male concern. She’d never realized how tall he was before, as she’d never been this close to him before or alone with him. She swallowed hard, realizing there was just the two of them and the veil of the falling snow for as far as she could see.
“Do you have any idea where you lost it?” His deep blue gaze speared hers with something that could have been friendly, but it was far too intense. “It’s a long way between here and your farm.”
“Ah, over here.” Thankful her command of the English language had returned, she felt silly pointing in front of her, where she had been looking when he’d driven up. His horse watched them curiously, blowing air out his nose and sending snowflakes whirling. “I’m afraid it’s gone for good.”
“I’m afraid you’re right. You may have to wait until spring to find it.” A slow grin accompanied his words. There was a reason most of the young ladies in Angel Falls had a crush on the man. When he smiled, good humor warmed a face that was already perfection and gave heart to his intense, dark blue eyes, the straight, strong blade of his nose and the hard, lean line of his mouth. His cheekbones were sharp enough to cut glass, and the uncompromising angle of his square jaw spoke of strength and character. He didn’t need his heart-stopping dimples, but they made him mesmerizing. Incomparable. The most handsome man ever.
“I better not wait until April for a button,” she quipped. “I should be going. Thanks for stopping.”