Christmas Mail Order Bride - A Historical Mail Order Bride Novel (Western Mail Order Brides: Book 1) by Kate Whitsby Page B

infuriated that I was the one to bring you back. He won’t be happy at all that we spent any time together away from him.”
    “I hadn’t thought about that,” Penelope pondered.
    Caleb continued to speculate. “He’ll be full of all sorts of crazy ideas of what you did while you were away, and what we did together on the way back. He’ll be that much more insistent that we never set eyes on each other again.”
    “Do you really think he’s that unreasonable?” she wondered.
    “Never mind,” Caleb turned away and began unlacing his boots. “We’ll be back soon enough, and I guess you can talk to any of these people that you want to, now that I’m here.”
    He set his boots side by side next to her bed roll and wiggled his toes inside his socks, settling into the scene in the house. Everyone else around them carried on with their normal activities. Some of them smiled at him but for the most part, they accepted his presence as perfectly normal. She remarked on how much more casually he behaved here than at the West ranch, where he stiffened his shoulders every time anyone spoke to him, and where his eyes darted continually from side to side, always alert to potential danger. Here, he smiled in return to one and all, and his conversation flowed more naturally.
    “Do you come here much?” she asked.
    “Not much,” he confessed. “Every now and then. My mother comes here more than I do. I used to come with her when I was younger, but since I started working for the Wests, I don’t get a chance anymore. But these people don’t care how frequently you come. When you come, you’re family. It’ll be the same for you now, too. Now that they’ve spent time with you and brought you into their homes, you’ll be welcome any time you want to come back.”
    “I don’t think I’ll ever come back,” she declared.
    “Why not?” Caleb demanded. “Weren’t they kind to you? Didn’t they take good care of you?”
    “Yes, they did,” she admitted.
    “Of course, they did!” he snorted. “Hospitality to strangers is everything to them. They take great pride in it. It’s very important to them that a helpless person found bleeding and unconscious on the side of the road, with one dead body and two screaming horses tangled up in the shafts of a carriage, be taken in and tended to and restored to their own people. You should be grateful they found you the way they did.”
    “But I didn’t know!” she wailed. “I didn’t know it wasn’t the same people who attacked the carriage. I thought they took me a captive. I thought I was a prisoner here. I wouldn’t want to come back to a place where I thought I was a prisoner.”
    “Well, that’s one way of looking at it,” he considered. “I guess if you didn’t know the difference between the two people, you wouldn’t want to come back. To me, this place feels a lot more like home than anywhere else I’ve ever been. I can be myself here. No one expects you to be anything else. They’re the kindest, most considerate people on the planet, if you ask me. A lot more considerate than the Wests.”
    “Even George?” she suggested.
    “Well, George is the salt of the earth,” he conceded. “I think the sun rises and sets on George. But, like I told you the other night, he doesn’t go out of his way to help people. He helps people when he can, but he never sticks his neck out. He would never help anyone if it meant making Anders mad at him. He protects his own, and that means Anders. Anders, and only Anders.”
    “You really don’t like the Wests, do you?” she marveled.
    “I like them just fine,” he argued. “I just know them a lot better than you do. You’ll see. When you get to know them better, you’ll see I’m right.”
    “I certainly hope I can prove you wrong,” she contradicted. “I would hate to think of anyone that way.”
    “But you think that way about these Shoshones,” he pointed out. “ and you have been proven wrong about them.