High Plains Bride

High Plains Bride
Valerie Hansen

Emmeline Carter was prepared for danger on the new frontier. But she didn't foresee the tornado that tore their wagon train apart.Now her father is dead, her mother and sister are injured and their twin wards are missing. There's nowhere to turn but the fledgling Kansas settlement of High Plains. Town founder Will Logan steps in to search for the twins and house the Carters…for now. He's not cut out for family life long-term. But Emmeline's got her own ideas, and when this high plains bride chooses her groom, nothing will get in her way!

“We will not accept charity.”

“I need a good cook, and it would give you a roof over your head. Please? You’ll be doing me a great favor.” Will waited until Emmeline finally nodded.

“All right. Hopefully, it will just be for a few days. I don’t know how to thank you, Mr. Logan.”

“You can begin by calling me Will,” he suggested.

“If I am to be in your employ, I should not be so familiar.”

Will could tell she had slipped into a subservient position and he didn’t like that. In a way Emmeline was behaving wisely. If she remained in High Plains, keeping her good name would be crucial to finding a husband and making a new life for herself.

That thought hit Will like a punch in the stomach. Most young women chose to marry and raise families.

It was the idea of Emmeline Carter as a bride that stuck in his craw.

VALERIE HANSEN

was thirty when she awoke to the presence of the Lord in her life and turned to Jesus. In the years that followed she worked with young children, both in church and secular environments. She also raised a family of her own and played foster mother to a wide assortment of furred and feathered critters.

Married to her high school sweetheart since age seventeen, she now lives in an old farmhouse she and her husband renovated with their own hands. She loves to hike the wooded hills behind the house and reflect on the marvelous turn her life has taken. Not only is she privileged to reside among the loving, accepting folks in the breathtakingly beautiful Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, she also gets to share her personal faith by telling the stories of her heart for all of Steeple Hill’s Love Inspired lines.

Life doesn’t get much better than that!

High Plains Bride

Valerie Hansen

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

Many are the plans in a man’s heart,

but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.

—Proverbs 19:21

Special thanks to the two other authors who

participated with me in the series

After the Storm: The Founding Years,

Renee Ryan and Victoria Bylin

Getting to know both these talented writers

as we’ve worked and plotted together

has been a real blessing.

Special thanks and acknowledgment to

Valerie Hansen for her contribution to the

After the Storm: The Founding Years miniseries.

Contents

Prologue

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