Mail Order Bride Leah: A Sweet Western Historical Romance (Montana Mail Order Brides Series Book 1) by Rose Jenster Read Free Book Online

smile answered his, and he didn’t release her hand.
    “You’re positively pretty when you smile. You don’t look so nervous. What’s more, I think you should have been called Ophelia. Who else but you could have tempted Hamlet to leave behind his madness and revenge?”
    Leah shut her eyes. No one but her mother had ever thought to call her pretty before. She felt it, then, not like it was empty flattery, but that possibly, just possibly, he saw her for who she really was. She would have married him that very moment on the sidewalk.
    He conducted her down the street to a magnificent wooden building, constructed of logs, with many glass picture windows on the main level. It was three stories high with a porch on each floor. He brought her round to the back porch and indicated a rocking chair for her to sit in. As she sank onto the seat, she looked out at the view and saw the stately gray mountains, rising bluish in the last of the morning fog, and she gasped at their beauty.
    “Oh, I could sit here for hours and look at them,” she said, turning to Henry with tears in her eyes.
    He took her hand again and kissed it without a word. They sat in silence for several minutes before he took her hand again and led her indoors. She entered a sitting room with a bright rag rug on the floor and a hunting dog asleep on the hearth. Leah saw the table and chairs, the cook stove and cupboard at the far end of the room, the cheerful white curtains at the window where a pump stood over the washbasin.
    Admiring it all, she went to the hearth first and knelt beside the dog to pat him. The animal stirred and thumped its tail against the wood floor happily as she petted his soft ears and whispered to him.
    “North likes you,” Henry remarked.
    “I like him, too,” she said.
    “Good. Thought you might not like a dog in the house.” He was taciturn again and she shook her head, wondering about these fits of shyness and how changeable he seemed.
    “I don’t mind,” she said, standing up and looking around.
    Two chairs stood before the hearth with a table to hold the lamp between them. There were no books, no evidence of a shelf or cabinet that might hold the library he’d written of. Disappointed, she wondered if he had made that up to impress her. Sighing, she nodded approvingly and waited to see what he would say.
    “Through there’s the bedroom. Wouldn’t be right to show it to you now, I suppose. If I step out on the porch you can peek in there,” he offered, and let himself outdoors with the dog trailing after him.
    The log bedstead held a puffy featherbed covered by an eiderdown quilt. A wardrobe and some clothes pegs took up one wall and the other two were covered entirely in bookshelves, laden with volumes of every description. She approached the books reverently, touching the binding of a worn copy of Thomas Jefferson’s letters, another of The Pilgrim’s Progress . She longed to take down a book and read, sharing passages aloud, discussing points of the plot together. Eyes shining, she rejoined him on the back porch, sinking into the chair she had vacated.
    “It wouldn’t do to have books out where people could see,” he explained.
    “Is there—do you think there might be room on the shelves for my books? I’ve brought quite a lot. Not so many as you have, but several dozens at least,” she inquired boldly.
    Again, Henry grinned at her, an almost boyish smile brightening his already handsome features.
    “Suppose you’d like to see the inn and stables,” he said, taking her back around to the front of the building and showing her around, from the reception desk to the linen closet. He opened one door and stepped back into the hallway carefully. “This is what a room looks like. You’re free to look around if you want. I’ll stand out here.” He was so meticulous about her virtue, about making his honorable nature clear.
    There were sixteen horses in the stable, all shining with health and whinnying at