Mail Order Bride Mishap (Into the West #3)

Chapter 1

A/N: Finally! Here's the first installment of my new story. Hope you enjoy what I hope will be a very entertaining read, and, as always, vote, follow and comment.

“I’m terribly sorry, Miss, but the Boston City Bank does not provide business loans to unmarried ladies of a certain…status.” 

 Fiona O’Toole raised pleading, deep green eyes to the speaker, a man only a few years older than herself, though a chasm as wide as the Atlantic Ocean separated them from any other similarities.

 “Meaning, I’m Irish?” Fiona sneered, her lilting accent strengthening along with her burgeoning indignation.

The bank clerk, safely ensconced behind the polished, waist-high counter with its iron bars conveniently separating him from the begging middle classes, smoothed back his already pomaded hair and speared Miss O’Toole with an uncharacteristically direct look.

“That would be correct, Miss, though not the only reason.”

 “That’s rubbish, and you know it!” Fiona vibrated with the unfairness of the man’s simple words, and the little bird nestled amongst the folds of netting upon her hat seemed to agree. It quivered as if ready to take flight, and even the haughty clerk spared the decoration an appraising glance before returning his impassive gaze to the young woman before him.

She wasn’t the most attractive woman he’d ever met, that was for sure. That milky complexion, alluring on another woman perhaps, only emphasized the smattering of freckles across her nose and gave her a washed out appearance. Her eyes, a vivid green and framed with thick, red lashes, tip-tilted at the corners and, at the moment, shot darts of emerald enmity into his expressionless orbs. The young woman’s hair, wavy and long though miraculously tamed beneath that garish concoction she was trying to pass off as a hat, guaranteed to be shockingly red and positively unruly if not constantly twisted into submission. And that mouth, wide and supple-lipped, might promise heaven to a man if he could look past its owner’s heritage and hair color, currently spewed an indignant diatribe garbled within a thick Irish brogue.

“Where I was born has no bearing on how I pay my bills! I’m sure you have plenty of upright, Anglo-Saxon patrons who don’t give a tinker’s damn if they pay what they owe on time or not!”

 “Excuse me, Ma’am; the bank does not tolerate that sort of language!” The clerk squared his shoulders while sputtering his reproof, but gaped in surprise when the young woman before him did the same. Noticing other patrons starting to glance over at his window and its currently angry customer, the bank teller hastened to put a lid on the young woman’s tirade.

“Perhaps you could ask your husband, or father or brother, to request this loan you desire--”

“I do not just desire this loan, as you so delicately put it; I need a loan! I have no way to make a living if I cannot get any money to launch the millinery business I wish to start! And I have no father, or husband, or brother. I have no one. What would you wish me to do? Go live on the streets?”

Avoiding the young woman’s angry countenance up to this point, at last the clerk favored her with a direct gaze, and a definite solution to her problem.

 “Perhaps you could find employment at Madame Rostov’s Emporium in the West End--”

 Fiona O’Toole blanched. As the color first left the Irish woman’s face and then came flooding back in an unattractive, mottled red, the clerk’s unctuous smile slipped. Her mouth opened and closed on inarticulate sputters, while her eyes watered up with unwelcome tears. The little bird in her hat threatened to dive right off the brim in similar outrage.