Mail Order Bride and The Mix-up (A Western Romance Book)(COMPLETED)

Chapter 17

Belle sat on the edge of the bed in the hotel room they had placed Ira in, glaring at Tabatha who paced the room nervously.

"I'm sorry," Tabatha said for the umpteenth time. "He was attacking you, what was I supposed to do?"

"He wasn't attacking me," Belle said. "He was kissing me. If you don't know the difference, then I must truly worry for you."

Cadence and Gertrude sighed. "You can't blame Tabatha entirely," said Gertrude. "When he first grabbed hold of you, it didn't look as though you were particularly enjoying the kiss."

Belle blushed and said, "If that was the case, then someone should have acted even sooner than Tabatha lest he molest me before breakfast was even over."

"Is it your intention to make things as confusing for us as possible?" asked Cadence. "One minute you love him, the next you loathe him. You're making our heads dizzy."

"It is my intention to..." She fumbled with her words a bit, realizing she had no clear intention regarding Ira. When he first showed up in Angel's Reach yesterday, she'd wanted nothing more than to see him go. Now, she was not sure what her heart wanted. To make matters worse, she was not at all sure that her heart and her mind wanted the same thing.

Gertrude and Cadence looked at her with raised eyebrows. "You know the women here think you're crazy to turn down Ira's proposal."

Belle laughed. "I doubt very much that the majority of women in Angel's Reach believe I should marry Ira, or any man for that matter, given that the majority of women in town do not even think men ought to be allowed to live here."

"Maybe the majority of women living here see something in Ira which you do not, or perhaps which you are not yet ready to admit to," said Cadence.

"And what is that?" Belle asked, her dress suddenly feeling too tight and her collar too warm.

"Ira loves you, and you love him," Cadence said.

"He lied to me," Belle said, pleading for them to understand. Though how they could understand her feelings when she scarcely understood them herself, she didn't know.

"You keep saying that," said Gertrude, "but the lies he told do not strike us as particularly cruel. Nor are they difficult to understand. He's been hurt before as well, so he lied when he first met you. Then he realized he loved you and was worried he might lose you, so he continued to lie."

Belle looked at Ira, who stirred on the bed. For a moment, she thought he might open his eyes, but they remained shut and he rolled over on his side. Tabatha had hit him hard enough with the butt of her gun to leave a good-sized knot on the back of his head, though Velma had looked at him and pronounced he would be fine in another hour or two, except perhaps for the headache he would have. At least Tabitha had not shot him.

"Do you see how you look at him?" Gertrude said. "You clearly feel for him as he does for you, yet you insist on stopping yourself from gaining happiness by being with him. Why?"

Belle licked her lips, wondering if she ought to tell them the one thing which had continued to prey on her mind since first coming to Angel's Reach. The one thing from her past she continued to hide, even from the people she trusted most. "You both know I was married before," she said and they nodded. "You know my husband died shortly before my coming here." They nodded again, waiting.

Belle looked up and realized she could not get the rest of her words out. They had stuck in her throat and would have to remain there for the rest of her life. She could not risk losing her friends. Were they to look at her as the people in her old town had—with suspicion and uncertainty—she did not think she could bear it.

She rose quickly from her seat at Ira's side and headed for the door.

"Where are you going?" asked Gertrude.

"For a walk," she told them. "I must clear my head."

Cadence and Gertrude exchanged a look. "Don't wander too far," said Cadence, always the cautious one. Belle assured her she would not and left the room.

Outside, the fresh air felt good as it blew against her skin. She walked past the hotel, past the post office, and out to a grouping of trees almost thick enough to be a forest which led towards a distant mountain.

She had no particular destination in mind, she only wanted to get her feet moving. There was a particular path here she liked to follow, and the action of doing so was enough to take her mind off of things, at least for a short while, which was all she wanted.

She forced herself to focus on the birdsong around her, the sound the leaves made as they rustled in the wind, and the way her footsteps crunched against the earth as she stepped over twigs and dirt. She closed her eyes as she walked, tipping her head back towards the sun so that it fell across her face, warming her.

One of her feet sank suddenly into the dirt as though the ground itself were giving way under her. Belle's eyes flew open and she looked down just in time to see it was not her imagination. The ground itself actually was shifting under her.

The dirt began to fall away, and a minute later she found both her feet, as well as the rest of her, were flying through the air. Or perhaps falling through the air would have made more sense, but Belle had little time to make sense out of anything that was happening. She did not even have time to shout out.

Dirt flew out at her, hitting her cheeks and scratching her eyes. Her feet landed against something hard and her right ankle twisted in on itself, causing her to cry out. She inhaled a mouthful of dust and dirt and coughed it back out. When everything around her had finally settled, she looked up and saw the sky above her through an opening in the ground.

It was a hunter's trap. A hole dug into the earth and covered back up with tree branches and dirt and other such things so as to give the appearance of solid ground. She had walked right into it, literally.

The sky overhead was a bright blue; it was a cloudless day and there was a chill in the air. She stretched her hands out on either side of her and could touch both ends of her cell. The top was perhaps six or seven feet out of her reach, and Belle began to panic.

"Hello?" she cried. "Can anyone hear me?"

She waited for a response, and when none came, Bella began to scream.

*   *   *