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A Baby of Her Own
Maude Harkey is resigned to a loveless life until a baby is born—and orphaned—at her boardinghouse home. She’ll never be a wife…but she can still be a mother. Yet a boardinghouse is no place for a newborn. Enter Jonas MacLaren—a handsome, exasperating rancher with an offer too good to refuse.
Jonas can handle running a ranch—but handling his cantankerous mother is another matter. Maude matches his mother’s stubbornness so she’ll be a perfect live-in companion. But she’s there for his mother, not for him. He’ll just have to keep his wounded heart closed to her beauty, her humor, her warmth and strength—and her irresistibly adorable baby.
Brides of Simpson Creek: Small-town Texas spinsters find love with mail-order grooms!
This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.
—Psalms 118:23
“Mr. MacLaren—” Maude began.
“Do you think you might call me Jonas?” he dared to ask. “At least when ’tis just us?”
Her eyes bore a guarded glint now. “I’ll call you Jonas if you wish,” she said, in that delicious Texas drawl that made everything she said land pleasantly on his ears—even what she said afterward. “But, Jonas, what do I know about you, really? You’re a man of secrets—you keep more than you give up. How am I to trust you?”
He saw it as she must see it—he was asking her to trust him without any basis in truth, without any transparency on his part.
“Trust doesn’t come easily for a MacLaren,” he said. “Not after what we’ve been through.”
“Without trust there can be no honest caring,” she told him then. “If you don’t trust me enough to show me your true self, how can I know who I’m caring for in return?”
The idea that some part of her, at least, wanted to care in return gladdened his heart, if only for a moment. But how could he bare his soul to her, knowing that if she knew everything, she’d whirl away from him in horror and disgust?
LAURIE KINGERY is a Texas-transplant-to-Ohio who writes romance set in post–Civil War Texas. She was nominated for a Carol Award for her second Love Inspired Historical novel, The Outlaw’s Lady, and is currently writing a series about mail-order grooms in a small town in the Texas Hill Country.
Hill Country Courtship
Laurie Kingery
MILLS & BOON
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To Danielle, my daughter, who as a doula is dedicated to helping women achieve a good birth, and as always, to Tom, my real-life hero
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Dear Reader
Simpson Creek, Texas, November 1869 Gilmore House
At the ripe old age of twenty-five, Maude Harkey had begun to resign herself to being an old maid. So it didn’t bother her, that November afternoon at the Spinsters’ Club Fall Barbecue and Social, that none of the male guests particularly
