The Cowboy's Mail Order Bride by Carolyn Brown Read Free Book Online

with hot steaming coffee and drank it as she watched out the kitchen window for the first signs of a brand-new Texas sunrise. A rooster crowed and she could see the outline of the chicken house to the south. In the opposite direction a lonesome old bawling heifer joined in the barnyard noises.
    Like she’d thought when she first awoke, ranch work was never done. She borrowed a work coat from the rack beside the back door and slipped outside. The morning air was brisk with a hint of oncoming moisture, and it was good to have eggs to gather and a cow to milk. She would have started breakfast, but Clarice had whispered that Dotty was very territorial when it came to the kitchen, and no matter what, not to interfere with her cooking.
    A heifer had been penned up in the corral at the back of the barn. The old girl had a bulging udder, and a clean milk bucket waited beside a three-legged stool inside the first stall. Emily had never liked that job, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t squirt milk into a galvanized bucket. Some jobs were downright fun; others were just hard work. When Emily opened the door the cow bawled and headed toward the big sliding doors on the back side of the barn.
    She dumped feed into the trough and the heifer had her head in it when Emily drew the stool up to the side, leaned her head against the cow’s flank, and set the milk bucket under her udder. The first few squirts made a pinging noise when they hit the galvanized bucket, but after a while it was mundane work and Emily’s mind wandered back to those sticky notes. What did they do when there was no more room? Did they throw them away and start over or just take a few off at a time?
    When she finished the job, she picked up the bucket, hung the stool back on the nail, and sweet-talked the heifer back outside. There was a thin orange line on the horizon, and the sun’s warmth burned off a few of the gray clouds. It might be a nice day after all.
    The rooster was doing his best to talk the sun up when she got back to the house, set the milk on the counter, and picked up the egg-gathering basket from a hook in the utility room. She noticed a cluster of bright yellow daffodils blooming right beside the henhouse and squatted to get a better look at them. The petals were soft on her fingertips and made her think of Aunt Molly. She adored yellow flowers of any kind. Maybe that morning Taylor was picking daffodils out in Happy, Texas, for his granny.
    She was about to stand up when something cold touched the bare skin on her neck and her squeal quieted the rooster for a whole minute. She wound up flat on her back, staring at what was left of a few faint stars in the sky, with a Catahoula dog slurping right up across her chin and cheek, not stopping until he got his tongue tangled up in her hair. His tail wagged furiously, and when she tried to sit up, he put his paws on her chest.
    “Hey, now!” She shoved back at him. “Cold nosing a woman and scaring the bejesus out of her is rude. Don’t you dogs up here in north Texas have any manners at all?”
    When she was sitting, the dog plopped down in her lap and she rubbed his ears. “Where have you been? I didn’t see you yesterday. Did you get out of the pen and go visiting the neighborhood girl dogs?” she asked.
    The animal’s tail thumped in the grass.
    She pushed him off her lap. “Hey, I see a light in the house. That means I need to get the eggs and take them in or we might not have breakfast.”
    The rooster flapped his wings and set about his daily chore of waking up everyone who could hear him. She gathered thirteen eggs. Thirteen had always been her lucky number. That had to mean she’d made the right decision to stay on at Lightning Ridge.
    The aroma of bacon wafted through the air and her stomach growled. She opened the back door to find Dotty staring at the milk bucket. “Girl, what are you doing up so early? Did you bring this milk in? I was wonderin’ if that cow had milked