Magic And The Texan

by Martha Hix

Genres: Historical Romance

Synopsis

Certain he's fated to meet his bride on his thirtieth birthday, Texas rancher Jon Marc O'Brien arranges for the perfect woman to arrive on that day. He's never set eyes on sweet Beth Buchanan, a cattle buyer's daughter from Kansas, but after a two-year romance-by-correspondence, he knows she'll be the ideal wife—pure of heart, body, and soul. The glossy-haired beauty who steps from the coach is not Beth Buchanan, who died on the journey. She's a runaway named Bethany who's so hungry for the respectable life she's willing to steal a dead woman's identity—and her betrothed. It's a desperate gamble that will throw Bethany and Jon Marc into a white-hot firestorm of passion and embroil them in a Texas-sized range war with deadly outlaw Hoot Todd, but Todd's wrath will be nothing compared to the fury of Jon Marc O'Brien should he ever discover his new bride's true identity...

Release date: January 1, 1998

Publisher: Zebra Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

April 21, 1872

Bethany Todd tried not to think of that rhyme—the sort she’d first encountered in the Long Lick drinkery—yet how could she not? Today she would face that cowpoke, and marry him. Deceiving Jon Marc O’Brien into marriage would be the biggest sin in a life of transgressions, slips, and lapses.

“Don’t do it,” Bethany whispered against the curled fingers that she pressed to trembling lips. No one heard her. No other passengers rode the stagecoach traveling south on the Old Spanish Trail, the other having met a tragic end seven days previously. “Just stay aboard. Don’t step down. He doesn’t know you from beans.”

After a two-year correspondence, Jon Marc O’Brien had written to Kansas to ask for marriage. Marriageable ladies, Bethany had been given to understand, were as scarce as cobbled streets in the badlands that stretched southwest from San Antonio to the Mexican border at Laredo.

For some unmentioned reason Jon Marc had requested his mail-order bride’s arrival to coincide with the day he turned thirty. Today. He expected chastity and a whole lot more, none of which Bethany Todd could provide.

Her curled fingers flattened on the bodice of a traveling suit that she’d fallen heir to from her sainted friend, the same one who passed last week to wherever saints went. “Just say you aren’t Beth. Keep going. It’s the right thing to do.”

Jarred by more than a ride through Texas brush country, Bethany pulled curtains aside as the stagecoach vaulted over the bridge that spanned the river Nueces, approaching the settlement called Fort Ewell.

A cowboy stepped from beneath a sign lettered “Post Ofice,” alighting the porch of a clapboard building that tilted slightly to starboard. Dressed in Sunday best—black suit, ruffled shirt, string tie, and polished boots—he wore a ten-gallon hat supported low on his brow.

He cast a long shadow, his step carrying a sensuality to it. She couldn’t make out his face, but his shoulders capped a lanky frame. His litheness bespoke a hale, hearty man of the land—a physique honed from rounding up wild cattle and even wilder mustangs.

Was this Jon Marc O’Brien?

Jon Marc. Ranch owner. A man of means. The answer to a wretch’s dreams. The man who could give her everything she wanted and needed, starting with respectability.

But why weren’t two young men awaiting this stagecoach? There were two men at the post office, all right. But one had some years on him. The older man, grizzled and bearded, sat on the porch, a big dog at his side. That man couldn’t be thirty.

When the stagecoach screeched to a halt, Bethany settled her gaze anew on the cowboy who ambled the thirty or so feet that separated building from coach. From the outline at the right pocket of his frock coat, she noted something sinister.

He packed a big gun.

She let go the curtain to shove her spine against the coach seat. Hopefully he wasn’t a thief of horses, cows, and handbags—the Fort Ewell bandit gossiped about as far north as the Fort Worth stage stop, and no telling how far to the east.

The coach bounced once, when the shotgun rider jumped down to assist his passenger. But he didn’t. The cowboy opened that door.

A hand browned by the sun reached into the interior. “I’ve been waiting all my life for you. Welcome.”

He had a deep voice, a nice one. Could this be the answer to her dreams?

“Are you . . . are you Mr. O’Brien?”

“Yes, ma’am. None other. But I’d think, due to our engagement, you’d feel free enough to call me Jon Marc.”

This was where good sense should have told Bethany not to get off the seat. Practicality mixed with desperation pulled her up, as if by marionette strings. Where else could she go? What could she do, and what would she do it with?

It had taken the last of her money, as well as her departed friend’s, to get the poor dear buried with a decent marker. Bethany couldn’t ride on to the next town, not without money for passage. Besides, she wanted what Jon Marc O’Brien offered.

Unable to eye him, she put her hand in his. Skin roughened by honest toil and a grip hardened by years of cowboying—these were what she felt. They bespoke honesty and hard work.

Having read and reread the stack of letters sent to court a bride, Bethany knew he had character. This was an honorable man. A man with an appreciation for the finer things in life, and he wasn’t afraid to work for them.

In no time she’d gathered parasol and reticule, and was contemplating brown Texas dirt. Jon Marc stepped back. For that she could be thankful, since she needed distance to catch her breath.

Her nerves went from jarred to clattering like a tambourine at full jangle. Catch her breath? Impossible. Could she pull off this ruse? What if he saw through her? She might not measure up to the tintype sent last year. What if he flat didn’t like her?

She dared a glance at him.

He cocked his hatted head, but the brim shaded his face. Even though he was a half head taller than Bethany, she found it impossible to assess either his looks or his frame of mind.

“You’re even prettier than your picture, Beth honey.”

Under normal conditions she would have smiled, compliments having been few and far between in her twenty years. Fear that he’d send her away froze the muscles around her mouth.

That was when he went down on a knee and brought her fingers to his lips. His gallant kiss launched a bounty of sensations up her arm, past her shoulder, and into her heart.

She almost dropped her reticule and parasol.

“ ’For in my mind, of all mankind, I will love but you alone,’ ” recited the Texan.

Unfortunately, Bethany couldn’t appreciate his gestures, nor smile at anything. Meeting his gaze? Dangerous.

“You sure are pretty.” He drew to booted feet and brushed dust from a knee before adding, with either disappointment or suspicion, she couldn’t judge which: “You’re younger-looking than I expected.”

She refused to admit falling shy of the twenty-two he believed her to be. Her gaze averted, she retreated a pair of steps and unfurled her parasol to ward off the afternoon sun. Or was it to put a barrier between herself and her prey?

He got close enough for her to see the tips of his boots and to smell bay rum. He said, “Please don’t be frightened of me. I’m only out to love you.”

Touched, albeit terrified of making a wrong move, she whispered in a kitten’s mewl, “I know you are, sir.”

Somehow Bethany collected enough courage to scrutinize the man she wanted to deceive. With the post office and the oldster with dog as backdrop, Jon Marc leveled those wide, wide shoulders. He had a charming yet disconcerting trait of looking into her eyes, as if the rest of the world meant nothing to him, as if she were the only person in it.

That had its advantages. If he kept his eyes on her face, he wouldn’t get a look at her shoes.

His lips twitched as he met her stare. That was a manly mouth; Bethany had the urge to touch it and find out if it was as soft yet firm as it looked.

He wasn’t pretty, not of features. Pretty didn’t matter. This Texan was wonderful to look at.

Neatly trimmed, shining clean hair—the hue of a much-traded penny—grew thick and curled at his nape. He had nice, soft brown eyes with thick, straight brows that might have been tipped with gold dust. The best part? Those manly planes that made up his face.

Craggy, dipped by time and sun, it had substance and strength. No mustache, no beard. Shaven clean. Somehow he’d escaped the bane of redheads, skin that objected to sunshine. His nose was on the large side, but it complemented those crags and dips.

Ain’t no riddle when you get the diddle: big nose, long hose. Bethany trembled anew, trying not to have bawdy thoughts.

Silence gathered, the only noise coming from the stagecoach boot, where the shotgun rider tossed her pair of valises to the bowlegged oldster who had gotten down from the porch to help. The old man complained about the weight of her belongings, and he hadn’t reached the dowry offerings—boxes and a barrel of flour.

Jon Marc took the parasol from her stiff fingers to hold it at the correct angle. His voice rough with emotion, he said, “I may not be the answer to a maiden’s prayers, but I’m healthy, I’m strong, and I’ll always be good to you.”

If Bethany had gone on instinct, she would have gushed about how easy he was on the eye and how much she wanted to please him. Unladylike behavior. Improper! A disgrace.

But why didn’t he kiss her, just grab her up and slam his lips to hers? She knew why not. This rancher, born in Memphis but twelve years a Texan, was too good for grabbing a woman as if she were no more than a piece of meat.

“You’ll do, sir,” was all she dared reply.

The older man then toddled toward them. His sand-colored dog, missing a hind leg, hobbled beside him. The dog lifted his snout to bark, displaying a missing incisor.

“Shud up, Stumpy.” His master nudged Stumpy’s brisket with a toe of his boot. “If ya ain’t barkin’, you’s gnawin’ fleas. I swear, I’m gonna get shut of you, one of these days. It be into the Nueces for your lousy hide!”

“He’s all bark and no bite,” Jon Marc confided, his regard for the other man friendly. “And I’m not talking about Stumpy.”

Bethany smiled.

“Howdy, ma’am. Welcome to brush country. I be Liam Short. Postmaster of Fort Ewell.” Before she could muster the social graces, Liam turned to Jon Marc, scratching his white beard and saying, “Son, I thought you said her eye-uz blue.”

“Why don’t you get those thirsty horses a drink, Liam? Now!”

The meddlesome old coot shrugged, but imparted a superior look Jon Marc’s way, before hitching up his britches to take off.

“You did mention blue eyes,” Jon Marc prompted.

Bethany couldn’t meet the curious, intense stare of her intended. This would be her first venture into what would surely lead to a host of face-to-face lies with the fine man who deserved honesty. “Did I say that? How very absentminded of me. My eyes were blue, as a moppet. But they turned hazel.”

“They’re a pretty shade of hazel. Leaf-green irises with darker circles around them, like the color of a pecan. Looks mighty pretty with your black hair and heart-shaped face.” His voice had a smile in it, despite the awkward moment. “Mighty pretty.”

She sighed with relief, having covered her blunder.

Another copious silence puckered before Jon Marc said in a husky whisper, “You’re sweeter-faced than your picture.”

Having depleted her store of swift replies on the eyes error, she concentrated on his string tie.

“Beth . . . mind if I ask what became of your chaperone?”

“Mrs. Wiley had to be discharged in Waco. She was found in a state of inebriation, compromising her good name with the innkeeper. And, um, with the cook’s assistant. I believe they were playing a game of cards that involved betting one’s attire.”

Jon Marc chuckled, the timbre deep and pleasant. Blinking and tilting his jaw just so, he clicked his tongue and grinned. His flirtatious yet boyish expression had a magnetic quality to it.

While he found mirth in Estelle Wiley’s fall from grace, Bethany took comfort in his sense of humor about human frailties.

Maybe he wouldn’t send her away.

Having gained some control over the tambourine of her nerves, she noted the riverside surroundings. A buckboard waited, festooned with roses, near the post office. No doubt to carry a bride and groom to the church, then to Rancho Caliente. What a sweet gesture, Jon Marc thinking of flowers when few grew within miles of this stretch of Texas. Where had he found them?

Not here in Fort Ewell.

The town barely fit the definition of one. A single wooden structure, the post office. Cows on the horizon. Chickens scratched dirt in front of a quartet of adobe huts. One burro grazed next to a weathered oxcart, between the river and what appeared to be a pen of pigs. A tiny white church with a wooden steeple lay beyond what might be considered the city limits.

Bethany also saw miles and miles of miles and miles. It wasn’t much, this town. But any place beat the place she came from.

“Beth?” Solemn in both tone and face, Jon Marc asked, “Would you like a lemonade before we ride over to the church?”

“No.” She couldn’t have swallowed anything. “First, where is Hoot . . . ?” Somehow she couldn’t voice the outlaw’s last name. But Hoot would be enough. From Jon Marc’s letters, and from gossip first heard in Fort Worth, she knew the bandit to be an enemy to Rancho Caliente. Her voice found, Bethany went on, “His half sister traveled on the stage. Planned to make a home with him. We were given to understand he’d meet her.”

“He’s not what you call dependable.”

“I must forward a message to him.” Grieved at losing a friend—the women had formed a sisterly bond in a fortnight of shared travel, one that Bethany would never forget—she whispered, “His sister won’t be arriving.”

“The postmaster spread it around, about Hoot expecting kin.” A frown shored up Jon Marc’s mouth. “If she’s got good sense, she’ll stay away. Hoot is bad news.”

“So I’ve heard.” Bethany moved her reticule to the other perspiring palm. “I bring sad tidings. That lovely lady succumbed to a rattlesnake bite, a week ago in Austin.”

“She wouldn’t have got much in him. Stinkingest varmint between San Antonio and Laredo, her brother. I might as well give it to you straight, Beth honey. The closest lawman is in San Antonio. Outlaws cotton to La Salle County. But don’t worry, not one whit. You won’t suffer for ruffians. My word is law on the Caliente. I’ll take care of you.”

Always, Bethany had yearned to hear such a pledge from someone like Jon Marc O’Brien. Her chest tightened. Before being handed the chance to become his wife, she’d had no life, no future, and had been betrayed by all she’d held dear.

But luck had finally smiled at her, through the benevolence of an angel and a twist of fate. Fallen she might be, yet she hadn’t arrived with malice, and she still had worth, lots of worth. All she needed was a chance to prove it.

“I promise to take good care of you and your home,” she said in a voice both soft and earnest.

She’d keep her word, but it wasn’t by rights hers to make, and never had been. If truth be told, Bethany had been more than put through her paces. This saddle-broken miss wasn’t even Jon Marc’s mail-order bride.

Elizabeth Ann Buchanan, pious Catholic lady better known as Beth, was the one who got bitten by that serpent—not Hoot Todd’s sister.

It was as plain as Jon Marc O’Brien’s soap-ugly face: his bride-to-be didn’t like him.

Still hurt that she’d barely looked at him, much less smiled, he set the last of Beth’s valises in the beflowered wagon, then peered at the porch of the post office, where the postmaster—who didn’t believe in marriage, sight unseen—stewed in a straight chair while braiding rawhide into a whip, Stumpy at his side. Mostly, Jon Marc saw the medium-tall lady, neither stout nor skinny, who hadn’t accepted Liam’s offer to make herself at home in one of the chairs.

Jon Marc had stared at her tintype, now tucked in a coat pocket, times too numerous to count. With a veil covering her face in the photograph, he hadn’t been able to make out her features. In person she was more than he’d counted on. He’d gotten very lucky, just to have a chance with her. Lovely, just lovely was his Beth.

She wore a straw Gypsy bonnet tied with a ribbon beneath a sweet face of high cheekbones and a wide forehead, and the prettiest eyes and the smoothest skin in the Lone Star State. Her hat rode atop midnight black hair pulled back, tight as a tick, and skewered beneath her bonnet. Her sea green traveling suit had a prim collar, but the jacket stretched a tad snug across the bodice. Her bosom caught his attention, secondary to Jon Marc’s knowing this was a diamond of many facets.

She fit his requirements for a wife; her virtues met the standards that poets spent their imaginations praising. Her arrival on his birthday—well, it was magic. A gift. The culmination of a wish on a magic lamp, made long ago by his supposed aunt, Tessa O’Brien Jinnings.

Tessa, who had wished him a bride on this particular birthday.

Unlike his two half brothers, Jon Marc had met magic with planning. Careful planning. Knowing that today would dawn, he’d made certain, before laying eyes on Beth Buchanan, that his bride would be the cream of the crop.

Cream had never been creamier. Musical and poetic; educated in a convent, and had stayed on after her schooling was over; daughter of the noble, recently deceased Aaron Buchanan, cattle broker in Wichita. At her dying father’s behest, she hadn’t returned to the cloister.

Although it had taken quite a bit of asking for her hand, she had agreed to become a ranch wife, not long after her father’s death, and here she was.

But where was the feisty Beth of the letters, quick to debate and speak her mind? She struck Jon Marc as young, alone, and too scared to confess her heart by saying she liked neither the town nor the man.

How could he ensure her happiness?

A poet would form the right words. Jon Marc wasn’t a poet. He was a brush popper with an appreciation for verse, period. At this point in time, he wished—man alive! how he wished!—he’d gotten more accustomed to the company of ladies, as his two half brothers had done before marriage.

Considering the mess he’d made of himself, his first time out of the chute, with a certain San Antonio widow, he frowned. Persia Glennie had tutored him, amongst a host of lessons, to “take care how you kiss a lady, else you’ll stick your big nose in her mouth.”

Persia had smoothed a few of his bedroom talents, yet he remained green as grass in the areas of sweet-talking a lady. Like when he’d tried to compliment Beth. To disappointing results. He must keep trying.

Dusting his hands, he approached the porch and climbed the three steps. Beth retreated, a scant backward movement of her shoulders, as if she feared he might touch her.

“Y’all ’bout ready for the big event?” Liam asked from his chair, his brows wiggling at the bridegroom.

Jon Marc rubbed fingers across his lips. I thought you said her eyes-uz blue.

“Are you ready?” he asked her.

“Yes. Let’s do go on to the church.”

He blinked twice at Beth’s suggestion. Several times in her letters, she’d objected to being wed by a “foreign” priest. Padre Miguel had been born in this area, and had more right to call himself a Texan than most who did. San Antonio being too far to travel to exchange vows in front of an Anglo priest, the Caliente too precarious to leave, lest Hoot Todd wreak havoc on the place, Jon Marc had begged her indulgence.

Apparently his argument had worked, but he wanted to make certain. “You’re agreeable to Padre Miguel marrying us?”

She kept her head lowered while replying, “I have no objection. I want what you want.”

“Ain’t that peculiar, no objection?” Liam put in. “Sorta goes with the eyes.”

Jon Marc studied the big hazel eyes that refused to meet his stare. Curious. Why had she fibbed about eye color? What stirred her to do it?

Apparently she’d rather be anywhere but here, yet she’d go through with the wedding. Why? Money, most likely.

Her father’s last illness had destroyed the Buchanan fortunes. Jon Marc had sent funds for her trousseau and stage fare. Couldn’t be much, if any, of it left. She might return to the convent, if she had the means to get there. Wouldn’t come from him. By damn, he wouldn’t spend hard-earned cash to expedite her leaving.

“It-uz me, I wouldn’t’ve changed over to the Meskin church for no gal, ’specially one I never met.” Liam squinted at Beth. “Iffen I-uz a gal, I won’t marry no feller I ain’t met afore. No tellin’ what mighta been crawlin’ under his saddle.”

“It’s Church of Rome, not Mexico City, and we couldn’t have been married in the church, if I hadn’t converted,” Jon Marc came back, peeved. “Furthermore, watch your mouth.”

“Thank you,” Beth murmured to Jon Marc.

Liam lifted his half-braided whip to the sun, squinting at his handiwork but giving the bridegroom food for thought. “Y’all got a lot to learn, be what I think. Got the cart leadin’ the horse, planning to marry afore ya even know if—”

“You do too much thinking,” Jon Marc interrupted.

He then noted a flush of embarrassment in Beth’s face, all the way to her slightly pointed chin. “Liam Short,” he demanded, the timbre lifting Stumpy’s ears to attention, “apologize to my lady.”

Rheumy gray eyes filling with contrition, Liam did as ordered. “Beg pardon, ma’am. But I think a lot of your man. I worry. ’Fraid y’all be making a mistake. Hope ya ain’t.”

Lifting her chin with dignity, Beth replied, “You wouldn’t be much of a friend, Mr. Short, if you didn’t question my presence. I trust, as time passes, that I measure up, both to your standards and Mr. O’Brien’s. Actually, I meet his. We have, you understand, been on friendly terms for a good while. By correspondence, granted. But does a couple ever really know each other until they’ve lived in marriage?”

Did she mean it, though, about wanting forever-after?

Jon Marc brushed her elbow. She started. The straw hat teetered on her head of black hair, reminding him of dark days gone by. When his mother flinched at her husband’s touch.

Georgia Morgan O’Brien had gone into marriage with a disinclined heart, which proved it wasn’t smart to push a woman in a direction she didn’t want to go. Jon Marc realized something he should have considered months ago. He ached for a willing, perhaps even eager bride.

Where the hell is that magic lamp when an hombre could use help? A purely rhetorical question, since it was common knowledge, at least in O’Brien circles, that the lantern was no more.

He proffered a forearm for Beth to lay a palm across, which she did. “Liam, if you see Hoot Todd, tell him not to look for his sister.” Jon Marc lifted her parasol to ward off the sun. “Miss Todd is with the saints.”

They quit the porch, strolling toward the buckboard with the lame dog Stumpy hobbling in their wake, two strangers about to pledge their troth to each other.

Jon Marc halted short of the wagon. Cost what it may, he couldn’t bring himself to wrest a vow from a reluctant bride.

Or was it conscience? I cannot be false to this woman.

Taking the cowardly advance, he said, “You don’t have to go through with this.”

“I want to! We should proceed with our plans.”

Bemused, Jon Marc let the parasol tilt aw. . .