Well, she certainly wasn’t going to find out standing here befriending the stranger’s horse. And so she climbed the three stairs that led to the wide front porch of the house her parents had built and entered the front door.
There, sitting on her favorite wing chair in the parlor, was a man with hair the color of oaken wood and a frame so tall he nearly didn’t fit into the chair. When he looked up at her, Josie’s breath caught in her throat.
The man stood, and Josie‘s brother George turned in the opposite chair as the stranger ambled over toward Josie. He moved with the grace of a deer and the confidence of a wildcat stocking its prey. Despite the slight limp in his right leg. Josie had never seen a man so comfortable in his own skin. Or one so blessedly handsome, for that matter.
He eyed her from head to toe with an expression that sat somewhere between concerned to bemused.
“Mrs. Josephine Gresham?” he inquired, his voice just as low and musical as Josie had imagined.
All she could do was nod in return.
He raised his eyebrows. “Well, your brother indicated you had a bit of a wild streak. But I must say, I find it refreshing.”
Josie wrinkled her brow. Handsome face or not, why did this man feel free to remark upon her appearance? And why had George been speaking of her to him?
“Pardon me, sir,” she said as primly as possible. “But I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.” She cast an irritated look at George, who at least had the decency to appear somewhat ashamed.
At that, a lazy grin stretched across the stranger’s face. It only served to make it even harder to look away from him, although Josie tried mightily.
“Arlen Thomas, recently of Albany County, Wyoming Territory,” he said with an incline of his head as if she’d recognize the name. When she blinked at him, he added, “I’m here to marry you, Mrs. Gresham.”
Josie’s mouth fell open.
George had ordered her up a husband. A husband she neither wanted nor needed. She clenched her hands at her sides, eying each man in return and trying to determine which one would feel her wrath first.
Because there was no chance under the great big Nebraska sky that Josie Cummings Gresham wouldevermarry again.
Chapter Three
Arlen wasn’t one totake a step back from trouble, but the look of sheer anger the woman in front of him gave both him and her brother made him do just that.
“How dare you,” she fairly seethed at Cummings. Her face had gone a furious shade of red, and in that moment Arlen knew that the dirt on her clothes, her disheveled men’s shirt, and the tendrils of brown hair that had come loose from under her old hat weren’t because she was clumsy or careless.
Instead, this was a woman to be reckoned with.
“I work every bit as hard as you, George,” she said as she took a step toward the man Arlen was beginning to pity. “Half of this ranch is mine. And you arenotmy father. You do not get to decide the twists and turns of my life.”
