Ingrid (Walker Creek Brides Book 2) Read online

  Her husband—well, almost her husband, Mayor Joshua Logan. The talk of guardian angels in the seamstress shop came flooding back her, Ingrid believing in her heart that it had to be true. Some instinct told her that dear little woman had brought them together in more ways than she would ever know.

  “Tante Kari, thank you…thank you!” she whispered, so immensely grateful, too, for Joshua’s new job and his impressive new office.

  “Hmm, I thought you were coming to see me, but instead you’re admiring the architecture, Miss Hagen.”

  Ingrid stepped back in surprise, Joshua having opened the door without her even realizing it. At once he caught her hand and drew her inside the building, his broad smile thrilling her to her toes.

  He looked younger, happier, and she thanked God, too, for the blessing of this wonderful man in her life. He seemed as mesmerized by her smile, Ingrid blushing furiously as he captured her in his strong arms and gave her a kiss just inside the door.

  “Mr. Mayor!” she laughed against his lips, but then she wound her arms around his neck and kissed him back, not caring if any passersby saw them.

  Nor the bookish clerk, Elias Smith, who assisted in the mayoral office, and who coughed with embarrassment from a nearby desk and looked away.

  Joshua heard the man, though, because he released Ingrid and drew her toward Elias’s desk.

  “You know my bride-to-be, Ingrid Hagen?”

  “Y-yes, Mayor, of course. A good day to you, Miss Hagen, and many felicitations on your upcoming nuptials.”

  “Thank you, Elias. You’ll be attending our wedding, won’t you?” Ingrid asked him, the older man still appearing flustered as he glanced from her to Joshua. “The whole town’s been invited.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t miss it, but if you’ll excuse me, I’ll leave the two of you alone and go eat my lunch outside.”

  “Don’t let me kissing my beautiful bride-to-be rattle you,” Joshua said as his clerk seemed not to hear him, but grabbed what appeared to be a sandwich wrapped in paper and hurried out the door.

  “Oh, dear, we’ve shocked the poor man,” Ingrid murmured, though she couldn’t have been more delighted when Joshua drew close to kiss her again—shocking herself, too.

  What had become of the shy young woman that would have ducked her head and fled at such a public display of affection? Love had made her bold and so happy…so happy.

  “I can’t believe I won’t see you until tomorrow,” Joshua whispered against her lips, pulling her closer. “I know Caleb and your sisters are waiting for you, but stay with me a little while longer, my love.”

  My love. How sweet those words sounded, his kiss, the wonder of his embrace, making her dizzy. She couldn’t bear that she wouldn’t see Joshua until their wedding, either, but she would be spending every moment with Kari and Anita at Walker Creek Ranch until she was driven in a flower-bedecked carriage to the church.

  “I must go,” she murmured, not wanting to leave but forcing herself to pull gently away from him. “Give Emily and Davy a hug for me. Just think, Joshua, soon we’ll be a family!”

  “They can’t wait and neither can I,” he said gruffly as if emotion had tightened his throat, Ingrid certain she saw a wetness in his eyes that made her blink away moisture, too. “I love you, Ingrid.”

  “I love you, Joshua Logan.” With a tremulous smile, she spun around and hastened from the building, blinking anew as her heart swelled with such joy she thought she might burst from the intensity of it.

  The hotel lay at the end of the block, Ingrid scarcely noticing the passersby who greeted her as she hurried along, her thoughts were so fixed upon Joshua and their wedding.

  A school holiday since Wednesday had given her the time she needed for any last details before the Saturday ceremony at two o’clock. Now with her dress finished, everything was done, Ingrid ticking off completed tasks in her head just to make sure.

  She was so distracted that she didn’t notice a sudden commotion until it was too late. Two men with red bandanas covering the lower half of their faces burst from the bank, guns drawn and saddlebags slung over their shoulders, Ingrid nearly colliding with the taller one.

  “Look, that’s the gal who came into the jail looking for her brother, the one marrying Joshua Logan!”

  She gasped as the second man tossed his sack to the other robber and grabbed her, a callused hand pressed to her mouth as a guttural voice threatened, “Scream and you die.”

  Horrible reality crashing in upon her, Ingrid was swept roughly from her feet and handed up to the man who had already slung the bags over the saddle and mounted his horse.

  His accomplice had no sooner jumped atop his own horse when both men set off at a gallop in a cloud of dust, the pounding hooves no match for Ingrid’s heartbeat hammering in her ears.

  Chapter 10

  “Sheriff Logan—Lord help us, I mean Mayor Logan! Two men just robbed the bank and they’ve taken Miss Hagen!”

  Joshua lunged from his chair and ran out of his office, Elias just inside the door and pointing frantically out at the street.

  “They grabbed her and carried her off! I was sitting outside and saw the whole thing—”

  “Which way did they go, man?” Joshua demanded, his heart in his throat. “Which way?”

  “W-west, yes, west, and riding hell for leather—heaven protect her, she couldn’t scream for a hand over her mouth!”

  Joshua didn’t wait to hear any more but ran outside, the cries of alarm filling the street making his gut clench.

  Ingrid…no, no!

  His paint stallion tied to the hitching post, he rushed toward the animal to grab the reins and jump into the saddle even as riders thundered past him.

  Sheriff Braun and a pair of deputies as well as other men of the town who must have seen the commotion, Joshua veering Blaze into the street to join them.

  “Bank robbers!” he shouted to his former deputy. “They’ve taken Ingrid!”

  An agitated crowd stood outside the bank, someone fanning a woman who had fainted dead away. Other townspeople pointed to the west, the growing posse not stopping but heading straight out of town.

  Past the hotel where more people stood wide-eyed and stunned, Kari and Anita holding onto each other while Caleb acknowledged Joshua with a grim nod and mounted a horse to ride after them.

  Past Andreas, too, at the blacksmith shop two blocks from the hotel. His ashen face as he kicked a big bay into a gallop to join the posse told Joshua that he must have seen Ingrid in the clutches of her abductors.

  Anguished fury swelled inside Joshua, but he forced it down. He needed to be steady, calm, and prepared to face whatever lay ahead.

  He wasn’t a gambling man, but he would bet money on her captors’ identities. Only Cain and Connor Sutherland with nothing left to lose were crazy enough to pull such a stunt.

  Rob a bank and head south to Mexico with the loot, except now they had Ingrid—

  “Hang on, my love, hang on!” he grated out as the Sutherlands’ leering faces when she’d rushed into the jailhouse jumped to his mind to torment him.

  God help them, if they so much as touched her…

  “Don’t make a sound, do you hear me?”

  Terrified, Ingrid nodded, the man’s hand pressed so tightly against her mouth making it hard to breathe.

  Her captors had ducked under a low bridge over a dry creek bed, the wooden planks only a couple feet above their heads. Telling herself to try and stay calm though she’d never felt so helpless, Ingrid focused on breathing through her nose while her two captors drew their lathered horses closer together.

  “Blast you, Cain, I didn’t know you were going to grab her! I thought you’d just shoot her dead when I told you who she was. An eye for an eye! Her life for Cormac’s! That would have set Logan back and her brother, too. Now the whole town’s probably coming after us!”

  “Shut up! You’ve never been quick on your feet, Connor! She’s our insurance to get us to Mexico. Even if
they manage to track us down, they’ll never shoot for fear they might hit her. We’re going to rest the horses for a few minutes more and then we’ll set out again. They can hunt us all they want to, but as soon as we cross the Rio Grande, they can’t do anything to us!”

  Feeling sickened when Connor pulled her closer against him, his thumb just beneath the curve of her breast, Ingrid fought not to vomit right there.

  “I guess we’ll be keeping you, then, darlin’,” he murmured against her ear, Cain waving his gun at his brother to be quiet.

  “What’s that? Do you hear it?”

  Ingrid knew Cain hadn’t spoken to her, but her eyes widening at the distant sound of hooves hitting the ground gave her away.

  “You heard it, too, didn’t you? Don’t think you’re going to be rescued, far from it. They’ll never think we stopped so soon and they’re going to ride right over us. As soon as we can’t hear them anymore, we’ll cut south and go as far as we can until dark.”

  Ingrid’s heart sinking, she tensed as the pounding hooves drew closer. Her captors’ horses bobbed their heads and shifted nervously.

  Joshua was so near, so near! She could feel his presence as surely as his distress and worry, Ingrid never doubting for a moment that he would be among those looking for her…and maybe Caleb and Andreas, too.

  Yet would it go as Cain had said and the riders pass right over them and keep on going? All hope fading, she struggled again to breathe as Connor clapped his hand even more tightly over her mouth and half covering her nose.

  Dear God, was she going to suffocate while Joshua was so close he might be able to hear her if she somehow managed to scream? Desperately she began to pray as the riders thundered across the bridge, dust raining down upon them through the cracks between the boards as she begged for help, begged for a miracle—

  Kick the horse, Ingrid, kick the horse hard!

  She felt so dizzy now from lack of oxygen that she didn’t know if she’d heard the urgent voice or only imagined it.

  Kick the horse, Ingrid, now!

  Somehow she did, jamming her heel into the horse’s side so hard that the animal squealed in pain and reared up, Connor cracking his head on the boards. Suddenly Ingrid could breathe, his hand gone, his body slumped behind her. She kicked the horse again and grabbed its coarse mane as the panicked animal bolted from beneath the bridge, Connor dumped into the dirt.

  She heard Cain screaming at her and the report from his gun, something like fire grazing the right side of her body and making her scream, too. Still she clung to the mane as the horse plunged up the hill only to be surrounded by what looked to Ingrid like a dozen horses while more gunshots filled the air.

  “Ingrid!”

  She saw Joshua’s face in front of her, his eyes stricken as he pulled up on the reins and jumped down to rush toward her…even as she let go of the horse’s mane, no strength at all left in her fingers.

  “Ingrid…oh, God, no.”

  Her eyelids fluttered, Joshua looking down at her now, his strong arms cradling her and something wet falling upon her cheek.

  “Hold on, my love, please hold on. We’re going to get you some help.”

  She wanted to reach up and touch his face, but she couldn’t seem to move or even speak as the blue sky above her faded into black.

  “She’s going to be all right, Joshua, I promise you. The bullet glanced off her ribs, thank God—and thanks to her corset. It looked worse than it was, the shock of it all causing her to faint. She’s going to be fine.”

  Joshua said nothing, his head in his hands as he sat beside Ingrid’s bed.

  Try as he might and no matter Charles Davis’s many reassurances, he couldn’t shake the memory of bright red blood seeping through the right side of Ingrid’s yellow dress. Her face deathly pale. Her blue eyes staring up at him with such love just before she went limp in his arms, Joshua at that moment fearing he might have lost her.

  He would have dropped to his knees into the dirt if Caleb hadn’t run over and pressed his hand to her neck, assuring Joshua that he felt a pulse.

  After that was a blur of riding hard back to town with Ingrid clasped against his heart, Caleb and Andreas flanking him. Others had stayed behind to retrieve the Sutherland brothers’ bodies, thankfully no one else injured during the brief gunfight that had left Cain shot dead trying to escape, while Connor had succumbed not from a bullet but a fractured skull—or so Luke Braun had reported.

  The new sheriff’s theory that Ingrid had somehow managed to unseat Connor and escape on his horse from under that bridge made Joshua lift his head to stare at her…his courageous bride-to-be.

  “She should wake soon,” Molly added, laying her hand gently upon his shoulder. “We gave her only a small amount of chloroform to clean the flesh wound. We’ll keep her for the night, but other than a bandage and a twinge now and then of pain, she’ll be as right as rain.”

  “Thank you, Molly,” he murmured, while standing in a cluster at the foot of the bed, Kari, Seth, Anita, Andreas, and Caleb looked more than relieved.

  “What about the wedding?” Kari asked softly, looking with such compassion at Joshua while Charles stood at the head of the bed checking Ingrid’s pulse.

  “Molly and I are looking forward to it. No reason not to go ahead with everything as planned if it’s all right with Ingrid.”

  All right with Ingrid? Sighing heavily, Joshua leaned back in his chair, feeling sick and in despair by turns.

  How could it be all right with Ingrid? She could have been killed—and why? Because of her association with him, no matter he was no longer the sheriff but the town mayor. The posse might have passed right over that bridge and ridden on in pursuit if she hadn’t broken loose from her captors, and where would that have left her? His gut clenching painfully, Joshua couldn’t even bear the thought.

  “Joshua, what happened to Ingrid isn’t your fault,” Caleb said, clearly guessing his thoughts, though it did nothing to soothe the heart-rending anguish threatening to overwhelm him.

  “Not my fault? The Sutherlands didn’t abduct her because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but because of what she was to me!”

  “And to me,” Andreas added quietly, though his hands clenched into fists at his sides. “If I hadn’t gotten into that fight and ended up in jail, she wouldn’t have come looking for me—”

  “Enough!” Caleb’s roar made all of them jump, except for Seth and Joshua, who had seen this side of him many times before. “Ingrid’s alive and safe and that’s all that matters! Why torment yourselves any further? I haven’t paid for a second wedding with all the trimmings to see that money spent for nothing. And it’s going to be one of the happiest days Walker Creek has ever seen!”

  For some reason, Joshua, shaking his head, began to laugh. Almost to himself at first as everyone else began to chuckle, too, even Caleb, who looked as if his vehement outburst had taken him by surprise as well.

  It was true, his beloved Ingrid was alive and safe, a sudden movement of her fingers making Joshua stop laughing almost as soon as he’d started and lean toward her.

  “Joshua?”

  The welcome sound of her voice flooding him with gratitude, he moved closer as she turned her head to look at him…her gaze as filled with love as when he’d held her at the bridge. He wanted so desperately to enfold her in his arms now, too, but he didn’t dare, fearing he might hurt her.

  “Are you in pain, my love?” he asked, his voice grown hoarse.

  “A little. Not as bad as when I felt that terrible burning.”

  “You were shot, Ingrid,” Joshua added gently, not wanting to distress her, “but only a flesh wound. Everything’s fine. You won’t have to worry about those men anymore, either, and no one in the posse was hurt.”

  She didn’t say anything for a long moment, as if absorbing what he’d told her, her eyes never straying from his face, though suddenly she looked alarmed.

  “Oh, Joshua! If everything’s fine, we’re sti
ll getting married tomorrow, aren’t we?”

  Now he couldn’t hold back any longer, and leaned over her to kiss her tenderly, oh, so tenderly, until she sighed with relief and smiled against his lips.

  “You look so beautiful, Ingrid,” Kari murmured, Anita at her side. “Are you ready?”

  Ingrid nodded, her gaze fixed upon Joshua waiting for her in front of the altar…waiting for them to become husband and wife.

  His gaze fixed intently upon her, too. His steel gray eyes full of love as he raised his hand as if to beckon her to come to him.

  She did, joyfully, the strains of Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” played by violin and harp swelling in the packed church. Just behind her came her beloved sisters while Emily, smiling from ear to ear and skipping ahead, scattered fragrant magnolia petals and white rose petals down the aisle.

  An expectant hush had fallen over the congregation, except for a sweet voice that sounded more like a whisper in Ingrid’s ear.

  God bless you and your marriage, dear child.

  Her heart overflowing, Ingrid whispered to herself even as she reached out to take Joshua’s hand, “Thank you, Tante Kari. God bless you, too.”

  LILY

  Walker Creek Brides, Book 3

  If you enjoyed Ingrid, Book 2, don’t miss Lily!

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