Train Station Bride Read Online Free PDF Page A

black trunk sat there. Good God. She’d been standing on a trunk. This couldn’t be Inga Crawper. Who in the hell had he just married?
    * * *
    Julia woke up slowly as the air around her cooled. At first she hadn’t the foggiest notion where she was. Then she thought she was having her favorite dream. Waking up in the arms of a handsome man. But she wasn’t in her bedroom in Boston. She was in South Dakota.
    Everything tumbled back in to her mind. The dreadful shouting and noise that had kept her from hearing her own wedding words were now distant. Her wonder as to why Mr. Snelling had changed his plans, marrying her here and now and not waiting a week as he had written her. Her shock when she got her first look at her husband to be. He would have been a giant had she not been standing on her trunk. The train had pulled away, and the platform where her trunks sat was near empty.
    Julia was too petrified too move. Her husband wore a hat so she could did see his balding head. He was much more handsome than she’d expected. And big. How could have his own mother worried he were too thin? He looked as though he could lift the train from the tracks had he wanted. He wasn’t fat but he was nothing like the spindly, shy man she had envisioned. And to her gross mortification she had fainted in his arms.
    “Mr. Snelling?” she asked.
    “It’s Jake Shelling. Who the hell are you?” he replied.
    “Mr. Snelling, you mean. Mr. Jacob Snelling. My fiancé. Why I’m your bride,” Julia said. He was staring down at her and then turned with a monstrous look to the minister.
    “Give me that license, Pastor,” he said.
    The man in black pursed his lips and shook his head. “Nope. I married ya right and proper, Jake. This here’s your bride. For better or worse.”
    Julia turned her head and he did as well when they heard shouting from the train depot house. “Miss Crawford. Miss Julia Crawford?”
    Julia fluttered her hands against his chest. “Please put me down. Someone’s calling my name.”
    “Julia Crawford,” he said.
    “Yes,” she replied as her husband lowered her to the wooden platform. She lifted her hand in a wave. “I’m Julia Crawford. I mean, I was, I mean …” A thin, balding man was hurrying to her. Julia looked at her giant of a husband and back to the man calling her name frantically. When she saw an aging woman trailing behind the man, recognition occurred.
    “Mr. Snelling,” she whispered. As the man came towards her motioning the older woman along she realized he was the man she was to have married. Julia looked up to the man beside her and back to the thin man holding his hat and calling her name.
    “Oh, dear,” she said.
    The giant blew out a breath. “We got a problem, Snelling.”
    “What problem, Jake? Other than you seem to be standing awful close to my fiancé,” Mr. Snelling said. He smiled wistfully. “I’d recognize her anywhere.”
    “Jake here’s right, Jacob. There’s a problem. You see I already married this woman to Jake,” Pastor Phillips said.
    Jacob Snelling’s smile dropped as his hat fell out of his hand.
    The old woman peered around her son’s shoulder. “I told you, Jacob. You can’t trust those city women. Married the first man she saw when she got off the train.”
    Julia had no idea what to say. The old woman was right. She looked up at her husband. “What did you say your name was, sir?”
    “Jake Shelling.”
    Julia turned to the minister. “There’s been a mistake. The names are similar and over the crowd noise, I thought he said his name was Snelling. Mr. Jacob Snelling. You’ll have to void or do whatever you must. I was to marry this gentleman here,” Julia said and looked at the forlorn man standing in front of her.
    “Only way to undo a marriage, Ma’am, is death or divorce. You can file down at the courthouse. Might take a year or so to get, though,” he said.
    “A divorce,” the old woman shouted. “No son of mine is marrying used