Cullen's Love (Grooms With Honor Book 5)

  Cullen’s Love

  Grooms with Honor Series, Book 5

  Copyright © 2018 by Linda K. Hubalek

  Published by Butterfield Books Inc.

  Printed Book ISBN—978-1985609761

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018902231

  Kindle Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to the retailer and buy your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Except for the history of Kansas mentioned in the book, the names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cullen and Rose

  I always picture my characters, either imaginary or from real images, when I write my books. For the Grooms with Honor series I’m using couples I found in my great-grandparent’s photo album, dating back to the early 1880s to early 1900s period. My great-grandparents were born in Sweden, moved to Kansas, and married in 1892.

  There are no names written on the back of these photographs, and I don’t recognize them as any of my relatives. This photo, plus others I will be using for other books in the series, features the wedding portrait of some of their friends. (There was no need to write their names on the photos since my great-grandparents knew them, and I’m sure they didn’t think their great-granddaughter would be trying to identify them more than a hundred years later.)

  These couples don’t look like our modern-day cover models (men with rippling muscles and women with flawless makeup), but they show real couples starting their new life together as husband and wife during the same period as the couples in my Grooms with Honor series.

  While you’re reading Cullen’s Love, you can pretend this wedding portrait is of Cullen Reagan and Rose Leander in 1887. Hopefully, I’ve given them a good start in their married life.

  Prologue

  Clear Creek, Kansas

  February 1887

  Postmaster Cullen Reagan carefully folded the letter to the matrimonial agency and slid it into the envelope. Was this the right thing to do for the lonely rancher? How about the unsuspecting women Cullen would be writing to once the matrimonial agency sent possible candidates to Richard to choose from?

  “Thanks for doing this, Cullen,” Richard Kandt, said with a duck of his head. “I need a wife and I appreciate you reading the mail-order brides advertisements to me and writing a letter on my behalf.”

  Cullen, the postmaster of Clear Creek, Kansas, felt obligated to help the man since Kandt point blank asked Cullen to help him, even though Cullen cringed thinking of a woman arriving to see Kandt's place. Cullen pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiped sweat and anxiety off his neck, even though it was still late winter.

  Kandt's ranch homestead was nothing more than a tiny, roughly-built wooden shack, a lean-to animal shelter of sod blocks laid on top of tree branches and... Was there an outhouse? Cullen didn't remember one on the bachelor's place. Kandt had lived on the land for over five years and hadn't managed to improve the homestead yet. He brought several dozen calves to town to ship east each fall, but so far, he'd apparently put his money into building his herd, instead of his living conditions.

  “How soon you hoping to find a wife? Don't you need time to uh...add on to your home first?”

  “I need a helpmate to help me build a decent house for us. That will be the first project after we're married.”

  Cullen couldn't fault the man's idea. Pioneer women came out to the prairie and started from scratch for years before his time. Most ranches in the area had been established for a couple of decades, so you didn't see dugouts and soddies doting the landscape anymore.

  “Alright, but I'm not guaranteeing we'll have luck with the first advertisement. You might want to build an outhouse while we wait for a letter back from the agency. They might send more than one name for you to correspond with.”

  “I want to thank you for reading and writing letters for me Cullen. Maybe my new wife can teach me to read,” Richard wishfully added.

  The German immigrant had lived in America long enough to pick up the language but not to read or write it yet.

  “It's lonely out there by myself, and I look forward to having a wife.”

  “I'll bet it is,” Cullen agreed, but he never felt the urge to court anyone himself. Growing up in a brothel where Cullen's mother worked kept him from believing in having a “happily ever after” with a woman.

  Richard carefully counted out the pennies he needed for the letter's postage on the window's edge and shoved the coins across the counter to Cullen.

  “And now we wait,” Richard knocked the counter with his knuckles. “How soon do you think we'll hear something back from the agency?”

  “Hard to say, Richard. After the letter reaches the Chicago agency, they have to write back with possible bride matches. It could take months if you want to write back and forth with several women to find out who you like the best.”

  “But I want a strong woman by this spring, so she can plant a garden. And we need to dig a cellar to put the harvested food in this fall—”

  Cullen lifted his palm to stop Richard. “Don't get ahead of yourself. Finding your wife might take time if you don't want to court someone around here.”

  “I've looked, but no one is strong enough to live out in the shack and build their own home.”

  Cullen thought about suggesting Richard hire a builder, so his future wife had a decent home when she arrived, but Cullen knew Richard didn't have the money.

  Would Richard take the charity of a community house-raising party if Richard had the building supplies in place? Richard only came into town when he had to for supplies. The man probably hadn't been to church more than a dozen times over the years.

  Cullen chuckled. A wife just might change that because she’d need female companionship, and the church was one of the best places to connect with others.

  “What's so funny, Cullen?” Richard's hands were on his hips in a defense mode.

  “Do you realize how much a wife will change your life, Richard? I think you'll be in for a surprise.”

  Chapter 1

  Clear Creek, Kansas

  July 1887

  “No. No, no. No.” Cullen emphatically replied to Richard Kandt’s declaration after the rancher walked into the Clear Creek post office.

  “You ordered that mail-order bride, and you’re responsible for her. You can’t decide you don’t want her and leave her at the depot,” Cullen continued to argue with the rancher.

  “She’s crippled,” Richard pointed through the open door toward the depot, but Cullen couldn’t see from his station behind the postal window. Reluctantly, he walked through the door between his office and the lobby to look out the door.

  A young woman was standing in a light blue dress in front of the depot, but Cullen was too far away to see her clearly.

  “Didn’t you meet her when she got off the train?” Cullen asked Kandt.

  “I was late in arriving, but saw your brother, Angus, help her from the train. She can’t use her left arm. It’s stuck, as if her shoulder and elbow are frozen.”

  “So, you walked away instead of meeting her?” Cullen asked incredulously.

  “My wife has to be
a strong, sturdy woman, and that fragile cripple couldn’t chop wood let alone dig the outhouse hole.”

  Cullen sighed. He’d been telling the rancher for months his mail-order bride would appreciate an outhouse, but Kandt apparently hadn’t gotten around to it. The man always said she had the whole ranch to do her “business” on.

  Cullen worried that the woman would see the man’s shack he called home and hightail it out of there anyway, but Kandt wasn’t giving her a chance to make up her own mind.

  “Maybe she just hit her elbow getting off the train, and it’s sore. You got to give her the chance to explain her injury. It might not be permanent.” Cullen argued.

  “I think it is, plus she’s so tiny. How’s she going to load a fifty-pound bag of flour into the wagon by herself?”

  “Richard, you ordered a bride, not a mule! Don’t expect her to be able to do all the jobs you can.”

  “Well, I was hoping for a big woman like Doctor Pansy, only pretty.”

  Cullen bit his tongue, so he didn’t blast the man. His brother, Mack’s new wife, Doctor Pansy, was over six-foot tall and outweighed Cullen by at least fifty pounds, but her plain, hard face had softened with love. The newlyweds were so besotted with love it was almost nauseous.

  “Then you should have placed an ad for a ‘pretty’ woman who could work like a mule all day and have time to fix meals and wash your clothes at the end of the work day.”

  “An ad like that would have cost too much.”

  “You get what you pay for when you’re cheap, which is the woman who’s standing at the depot waiting for you.”

  Sweat ran down Cullen’s back, but it wasn’t because of the afternoon heat. He’d been a part of this fiasco because he wrote letters to the woman for Kandt. But it was still the rancher’s duty to take care of the woman, not his.

  Cullen glanced down the street again and swallowed hard as his parents walked up to the woman. Oh boy. Now there was going to be trouble.

  “You better do something, Richard, because my parents are talking to your bride.” And when his mother found out the woman was abandoned, she’d be moved into the parsonage in minutes.

  “I stopped and talked to your father before I went to the depot. I asked him to marry us before we rode out to my ranch.”

  “And since you two hadn’t shown up, my parents decided to check on your delay.”

  Cullen ducked back in the door of the post office because both the woman and his parents were looking this direction.

  It was time the man faced his predicament. Cullen grabbed Richard’s arm and yanked him out on the boardwalk before the man could find his footing. That’s all it took for Cullen’s father, Pastor Patrick Reagan, to see the stray groom and point towards them.

  “Time to face the preacher and say your vows with your bride, Kandt. And you better remember ‘for richer for poorer, in sickness and health’ or my ma will see that you do.”

  “She still carries that peashooter in her reticule?” Richard asked as he stayed on the boardwalk.

  “Yes,” Cullen decided to answer, although he didn’t know for sure. “So, you better greet your bride, or my ma will shoot you.” Kaitlyn Reagan was quicker on the draw than Sheriff Adam Wilerson when Cullen’s sister-in-law, Iris, was taken hostage in a situation before Iris and his brother, Fergus, were married. His ma put her hand in her reticule and shot the abductor in the arm without pulling the gun out of her bag. And that wasn’t the first bullet hole his ma had patched in her reticule either.

  Luckily the man wasn’t maimed for life, or his mother would have gone to jail for murder.

  “Oh Deuteronomy,” Cullen muttered as his parents looked over letters the young woman was showing them. He was in deep trouble because they would recognize his handwriting.

  His father pointed at both Richard and himself, then waved at them to come over to the depot.

  Both men looked both ways down the street, then walked toward the small group standing by the young woman. Cullen’s brother, Angus, had stepped out of the depot to join the group.

  “What’s going on?” Mack’s voice behind Cullen made him stumble. Of course, Cullen’s luck, Mack was working nearby on his latest building and walked over to check the impromptu meeting.

  “Kandt’s mail-order bride has arrived,” Cullen finally answered since Richard wasn’t saying anything.

  “Congratulations, Richard. Didn’t know you ordered a bride. Cullen kept his mouth shut about it,” Mack told Kandt as he slapped the man on the back.

  “I’m not marrying her,” Kandt growled.

  “Why not? She’s a pretty little thing,” Mack asked before rushing on to say, “although I prefer my pretty big wife.”

  “Mr. Kandt,” Cullen’s father, snapped as the three of them arrived at the depot. “I just met your future wife, Miss Rose Leander, who you didn’t meet at the depot as you should have. Why the delay in meeting your bride and bringing her over to the church for your ceremony?”

  Cullen’s ma laid a hand on his father’s arm to stop his questioning.

  “Miss Rose Leander, I’d like you to meet two more of my sons. Mack, the one covered in sawdust, is a carpenter and married to the town physician, Doctor Pansy. And Cullen, who is the postmaster of Clear Creek is unmarried—at the moment.”

  Cullen quickly glanced at his mother before turning his attention to the young woman. Miss Leander’s heart-shaped face featured porcelain skin and bright blue eyes. She wore a dainty feathered hat on her brunette hair. The light blue traveling dress cinched the tiniest waist Cullen had ever seen on a woman who wasn’t in her teens anymore.

  Living out on the open prairie would ruin her beautiful complexion before the month was over.

  Cullen took Miss Leander’s offered glove hand and gave it a slight squeeze, offering her his silent condolences because the situation was going to get worse for the young woman in the next few moments.

  “Nice to meet you, Miss Leander,” Cullen smiled, trying to put the woman at ease.

  Unfortunately, her left arm wasn’t moving as Richard had earlier pointed out. How would she cope living on Kandt’s primitive ranch?

  “And this is your groom, Mr. Richard Kandt,” his ma continued.

  Miss Leander took a deep breath and held out her hand. “Nice to finally meet you, Mr. Kandt. I’ve enjoyed your letters describing Clear Creek and your ranch.”

  The woman’s voice was just as delicate as her skin. And it had a bit of European accent to it, but not quite like Richard’s German one.

  “If you liked the letters, you better marry the writer then, because I won’t be marrying you,” Richard sharply answered and pointed to Cullen.

  “Excuse me? What do you mean, sir?” Miss Leander asked before anyone else could do the same.

  Richard shook his head. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but you’re a cripple. You couldn’t do the work required of a ranch wife. It would be better if you married, Cullen, who wrote the letters to you.”

  All eyes turned to Cullen, but Cullen turned to Richard. “You asked me to write those letters for you since you can’t read or write. I agreed to help you because you promised no one would know.”

  “Mr. Kandt,” his mother was taking her turn at him, “you know the wedding vows say, ‘in sickness and in health.’ You can’t turn a wife away if she has a problem, just as she can’t do the same to you if you’re sick.”

  “That’s why I say I can’t marry her now. I can’t afford a hired hand to do her duties. I didn’t even dig an outhouse hole because I thought she could do that herself once she got here.”

  “You still haven’t built an outhouse yet?” Cullen’s mother asked incredulously.

  “A person has the whole prairie to do their business on. Who needs an outhouse?”

  “A woman, so she doesn’t have to squat while fighting the wind which blowing her skirt over her head!”

  Cullen looked at Miss Leander as his mother and Richard continued to argue as if the mail-order brid
e wasn’t standing there. He was surprised the petite woman hadn’t dissolved into a puddle of tears on the boardwalk considering how embarrassing this must be for her.

  “Kaitlyn, you’re not helping the situation so please stop, and for goodness sakes lower your reticule,” his pa asked, and Cullen, Mack, and Angus stepped out of their mother’s range, just in case a bullet was shot by accident.

  “Richard, you sent a train ticket for Miss Leander, so she could be your wife. You are bound by duty to marry her,” Cullen’s father concluded.

  “But she’s not suited for my way of life on the ranch. It would ruin her health,” Richard argued back.

  “Then buy her a return ticket so she can get back home.”

  “I don’t have the money, Pastor Reagan. I had to borrow money from Cullen because I was short on the first ticket. I still owe him five dollars.”

  Miss Leander put two fingers in her mouth and let out a sharp whistle which would make every dog in town pay attention.

  Cullen’s and everyone else’s shoulders ducked at the shrill sound, then turned toward the little woman.

  “May I please speak since this is my life you’re arguing about?” Miss Leander stated while looking everyone in the eye, one at a time.

  Cullen’s ma’s smile couldn’t be any broader, proud of the woman’s spunk. Cullen had to admire her too for wanting to speak on her own behalf.

  “I was injured in a train wreck some months ago, which damaged my shoulder and elbow. Movement is slowly returning, but I may never have full use of my arm.

  “That said, I can do most household tasks, but no, I can’t, and no, I won’t, dig my own outhouse hole and build a building to enclose it. I assumed you, Mr. Kandt would provide the best for your wife and I’m disappointed in you.”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Leander but I’m just a poor lonely homesteader,” Richard tried to apologize.

  “None the less, your letters were deceiving, painting a lovely description of your ranch and the community.”