Marrying Off Morgan McBride - Softcover

Barry, Amy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593335597 ISBN 13: 9780593335598

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

The McBride brothers are in for a matrimonial surprise when an enterprising woman answers their little sister's mail order bride advertisement in this laugh-out-loud historical romance.
 
As the oldest of the McBride siblings, Morgan had to be protector and shepherd since Ma died and Pa ran off. It hasn't always been easy, especially when his heart longs to roam on the trail. But now that his brother Kit is married and settled, the time is right for Morgan to leave Buck's Creek. Little does he know that his hellcat of a little sister Junebug is dead set on keeping him at home and getting more help around the house – all with one honest advertisement in The Matrimonial News.
 
Epiphany Hopgood has always had a gift for doing the exact wrong thing. She’s too tall, too loud, too opinionated, and too contrary for her family and community. Staring down the barrel of spinsterhood, she and her grandmother answer a seemingly straightforward ad for a bride.
 
But when Pip shows up to Buck’s Creek, she finds that Morgan McBride is not the husband she expected. In fact, he doesn’t even want to be a husband. But maybe there’s a way to make everyone happy out on the Montana frontier…

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Amy Barry writes sweeping historical stories about love. She's fascinated with the landscapes of the American West and their complex long history, and she's even more fascinated with people in all their weird tangled glory. Amy also writes under the names Amy T Matthews and Tess LeSue, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Flinders University in Australia.
 

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One

Buck's Creek, Montana, 1887

Junebug drummed her fingers against the trading post counter. She was perched up on the stool, watching the store while her brothers were over in the meadow, building Kit and his new wife a house. Junebug had been banned from the building site, which was just plumb unfair. It wasn't her fault the doorframe got split. Beau should never have left her in charge of it in the first place. He was nothing but a lazy, no-good shirker. Still, Junebug didn't want to be out there in the soggy old meadow nohow, sweating up a stink while they all growled at each other. She was quite happy here, with her pot of coffee and her complaints book. She'd filled up two whole pages with complaints-It makes me sick the way Beau flops out of work like a boneless rabbit; they got no right keeping me prisoner up here and not letting me off down to Bitterroot on my own-why, some gals are married by now and spitting out kids of their own, and I cain't even go for a walk by my ownsome; if I have to do laundry when I don't want to, I don't see why Maddy gets out of it, just because Kit's all kicked-in-the-head over her . . .

Last year, Junebug had got the bright idea of ordering up a mail-order bride to help her with the chores. Hell, she had four enormous hungry men to look after up here-she needed help. And she had found a wife, after some trial and error . . .

Junebug remembered the first woman she'd hooked with her advertisement with no small measure of horror. Willabelle Lascalles had been the wrongest kind of woman possible for a McBride. Especially for Kit, Junebug's great big hulking blacksmith of a brother. Willabelle Lascalles had been like a china doll, all frilled and fancy, with pale pink kidskin boots not at all fit for the muddy mountain meadows of Buck's Creek. Worse, she was a mean china doll. The kind that wanted cosseting. Or else.

Thank goodness Junebug had been able to head that off. She didn't need a china doll. She needed a cook. And someone who could deal with the caterpillars who kept infesting the vegetable patch. And maybe someone to do the laundry too . . .

She'd thought she'd found her answer in Willabelle's maid. A maid was perfect. And Kit had been good enough to fall in love with her and everything. It should have solved all her problems. Junebug scowled at the ink-scratched pages of her complaints book. But, in actual fact, things were worse than ever. It turned out Maddy the Maid could only cook colcannon mash and pandy-and Junebug was sick to death of potatoes in all their mash, as were her brothers. Which meant Junebug was stuck back in the cookhouse, cooking for them all. And she hated cooking. Almost as much as she hated laundry. Which she still had to do, because Kit had declared that he and Maddy were setting up house and Maddy was only responsible for the two of them. Ugh. Which left three whole brothers Junebug had to launder for.

And then there was the problem of Morgan . . .

Damn Morgan. The blockiest, bullheadedest brother of all. No one beat Morgan for stubbornness, or bossiness, or flat-out infuriating contrariness. He acted like he owned the world. Or at least this patch of it. Junebug bet he even bossed her around in his dreams.

But as irritating as he was, she loved him. And he was making noises about leaving again, which gave Junebug an awful feeling in her stomach. A swampy feeling, like things were crawling away down there. Lately he'd been poring over catalogs again, dog-earing the pages that advertised new saddles and tack. She knew Morgan pined for his days as a cowhand, for the time before he got burdened with his orphaned siblings. When he told stories about being a cowboy, his voice got a dreamy tone that was so out of character that it sent chills down her spine. Since when did Morgan talk that way about an orange sunset, and the way it cut through trails of dust, glittering with gold? Or the way the mountains rose blue and violet on the horizon, like a dream of what was coming? This was Morgan. Who had as much poetry in him as a cook pot.

But now that Kit was hitched, and there was a woman on the scene to mother Junebug, Morgan was waxing all poetic. And he seemed to think he could saddle up and head back out running cattle, leaving Junebug behind to cook for everyone and to launder Beau's and Jonah's pestiferous underthings. Junebug didn't like it. Not one bit.

It didn't matter how many times Junebug hid or destroyed the catalogs; he always seemed to get his hands on more. It made Junebug sick how much he pined to leave her. They had a good life here in Buck's Creek. Look at the place! It was goddamn picturesque.

Through the open door of the trading post, Junebug could see the creek (which was really more of a river) tumbling by, silvery in the sunshine. The thick meadow grasses were spring green and feathered with larkspur and balsamroot, and the chokecherry was waving wands of white blossom. The blue-blue mountain sky was fluffed with cloud so white it looked like new snow and the air was pine fresh and carrying the smell of sap and bloom. What more goddamn poetry could he want?

And aside from all the bucolic waxing on about the mountains, wasn't she enough?

Morgan had been a parent to her-a bossy, griping, captious parent, to be sure, but he had been there. He was constant, as solid as the ancient gray rock of the mountains, predictable and sure. Morgan just was, and Junebug felt something very like raw panic at the thought of him leaving. Hell, she'd lost a mother, and a father, her brother Charlie and a bunch of sisters-did she have to lose Morgan too?

He seemed to think she didn't need him anymore. Which was just plain wrongheaded. But so much of Morgan was wrongheaded. It was in his nature.

Junebug was scrawling angrily in her complaints book about that exact topic-Why in hell won't Morgan let me take the train to Butte? Thunderhead Bill says they got a saloon with dancing girls, on a real stage and everything. Morgan says dancing girls ain't no sight for a kid like me, which is the dumbest thing I ever heard; surely the whole point of a dancing girl is to be looked at?-when Purdy Joe came by with the mail.

Purdy Joe was new to these parts. He was a broad-faced midwesterner from somewhere down on the plains; he had wheat-colored bangs and a big gap between his two front teeth. His name was Jensen or Hanson, or something along those lines, but all anyone ever called him was Purdy Joe. He was up in the Elkhorns prospecting for silver and he was bright with expectation, like a kid on the hunt for candy. Beau and Jonah were prone to buttonholing him to ask about the prospecting-those two idiots had a mind to go looking for silver themselves. Purdy Joe had got familiar enough with them that he volunteered to run the mail up from Bitterroot to Buck's Creek whenever he was passing through, to save the McBrides a trip.

Bitterroot was four hours down the mountain and was shaping up to be a proper town. It had the post office, the rail spur, a mercantile, a hotel, a saloon, a cathouse and now a butcher shop (well, it was a tent more than a shop), run by a man named Hicks, who had arrived on the train and decided that the miners would probably spend their coins on beefsteak. He wasn't wrong. As far as Junebug could see, miners liked spending their money on pretty much everything.

Up here in Buck's Creek, in the high mountain meadows, there wasn't any butcher, tented or otherwise; there was only the trading post and Kit's forge. Junebug didn't see that it was ever going to be much of a town-it certainly wasn't getting the railway, not up a mountain this steep. Junebug thought it would be fine to have a railway station on your doorstep. Why, just think. You could hop aboard and go just about anywhere. Butte, for starters. But there was also Billings, Miles...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593335597
• ISBN 13: 9780593335598
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar