Traveler trilogy Book 2, updates every Friday!
Five years after killing Levi Cornwall, Arthur Morgan is happy. He has a wife who loves him, an honest job he enjoys, and two beautiful children named Sadie and Hiram. All of it is turned on its head, h...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Tori Morgan lay alone in bed that morning, listening to the sound of birds singing outside the windows. As she did most mornings, she stared at the increasingly lightening window shades and greeted the dawn as it broke beyond the room.
Her nose and feet were cold and ordinarily, she'd have pressed them against Arthur for warmth, breathing deeply to inhale the scent of his skin and feel the texture of his body hair as it scratched her face. But alas, the only thing she could do to warm herself this morning was throw a couple of logs into the wood burning stove in the corner to heat the room.
Yawning and stretching, she got to her feet. After getting a fire going, Tori busied herself with dressing.
First, she did her hair. Acceptable hairstyles in this era were very complicated, and Tori was bad with hair on her best days. She usually wore it down or in a messy ponytail, but both styles were frowned upon in this time period, and as a result her usual hairstyle recently was a single, long braid down her back.
With this done, Tori began dressing. Thankfully, she'd had the good sense to wear one of her modern bras to come back here, and as a result, she needed no corset. She'd never worn one before, but they seemed uncomfortable and not at all good for the baby inside of her.
"You little asshole," she laughed, stroking her stomach. The thing had been giving her nothing but trouble since they'd arrived. First it was the nausea, then the night sweats, and now the baby had decided to make her hate anything that smelled even remotely like the herb thyme. It was a common seasoning in cuisine here because it grew wild in large quantities all over the place, and its scent drove her nearly mad every time she smelled it.
Tori removed the cotton shift she'd been sleeping in and clipped her bra on before sliding the shift back over her head. Then came the thick, bulky dress she'd picked out for today. It was blue with a ruffled neckline and high-shouldered sleeves, and in spite of herself, she rather liked it. It was very different from the dress styles in her day, but it kept her warm and got the job done. The only thing she disliked about having to wear dresses all the time was that they made riding a horse difficult.
Not that she rode much anymore. She didn't feel quite safe enough on the morgan mare Arthur had purchased for her, and if she were bucked off or suffered a fall, it could harm her baby, let alone herself. But she was going crazy here in this room in the saloon, a room that smelled of cheap whores and old whiskey. A room that made her sad because her own husband wasn't in it near as often as she would have liked.
But Arthur be damned, she would get out and do something today. He hadn't come up last night, so she reckoned he probably had passed out drunk at the poker table downstairs or something. She had no interest in seeing for sure. He'd fallen back on some old, bad habits since coming here. He was gone on Cheyenne a lot, doing things around the countryside, for starters. He did not do anything illegal, thankfully, but he stayed out hunting pelts many nights, and he'd made a habit of gambling and occasionally drinking himself into a stupor.
