A Creed Country Christmas Read Online Free PDF Page B

point, she could send Joseph and Theresa home by train to their family in North Dakota.
    But what of Daisy and Billy-Moses? They had nowhere to go, besides an orphanage or some other “school.”
    In her more optimistic moments, Juliana could convince herself that some kindly couple would be delighted to adopt these bright, beautiful children, would cherish and nurture them.
    This was not an optimistic moment.
    Poverty was rampant among Indians; many could notfeed their own children, let alone take in the lost lambs, the “strays,” as Clay and others like him referred to them.
    A lone tear slipped down Juliana’s right cheek, tickled its way over her temple and into her hair. She closed her eyes and waited, trying not to consider the future, and finally, fitfully, she slept.
     
    T HE COLD WAS BRITTLE ; it had substance and heft.
    Lincoln had carried in an armload of wood and laid kindling on the hearth of the big stone fireplace directly across from his too-big, too-empty four-poster bed that morning before dawn, the way he always did after the weather turned in the fall. He’d gotten a good blaze crackling in the little stove in Gracie’s room, so she and Theresa would be snug—he’d seen children sicken and die after taking a chill—but that night he didn’t bother to get his own fire going.
    He stripped off his clothes and the long winter underwear beneath them, and plunged into bed naked, cursing under his breath at the smooth, icy bite of the linen sheets. It was at night that he generally missed Beth most, recalling her whispery laughter and the warmth of her curled against him, the sweet, eager solace of their lovemaking.
    Tonight, it was different.
    He couldn’t stop thinking about Juliana: her new-penny hair; her eyes, blue as wet ink pooling on the whitest paper; the way she’d rested against his side, under his coat, soft with the innocent abandon of sleep, on the wagon ride home from town.
    He reckoned that was why he wouldn’t light a fire. He was punishing himself for betraying Beth’s memory in a way that cut far deeper than relieving his body with dance-hall girls in other towns. God Almighty, he’d had to study the little gilt-framed picture of his late wife on Gracie’s night table earlier just to reassemble her features in his mind. They’d scattered like dry leaves in a high wind, the memory of Beth’s eyes and nose and the shape of her mouth, with his first look at Juliana that afternoon, in the mercantile.
    Beth would have understood about the loose women.
    Even a mail-order bride.
    But he’d vowed, sitting beside this very bed, holding Beth’s hand in both his own, to love her, and no one else, until they laid him out in the cemetery alongside her.
    Lincoln’s eyes stung as he remembered how brave she’d been. How she’d smiled at his earnest promise, sick as shewas, and told him not to close his heart, for Gracie’s sake and his own.
    She hadn’t meant it, of course. She’d read a lot of novels about love and chivalry and noble sacrifice, that was all. A woman of comparatively few flaws, at least as far as he was concerned, Beth had nonetheless been possessive at times, her jealousy flaring when he tipped his hat to any female under the age of sixty, or returned a smile.
    He’d been faithful, besotted as he was, but Beth’s wealthy father had kept a mistress while she was growing up, and her mother had withdrawn into bitter silence in protest, becoming an invalid by choice. Though the instances were rare, Beth had fretted and shed tears a time or two, certain that it was only a matter of time before Lincoln tired of her and wanted some conjugal variety.
    He’d reassured her, of course, kissed away her tears, made love to her, sent away to cities like New York and San Francisco and Boston for small but expensive presents he hadn’t been able to afford, what with beef prices bottoming out and his mother spending money as if she still had a rich husband, and his brother Wes