A Creed Country Christmas. Linda Miller Lael

not excited about Christmas,” Gracie said, with the exaggerated patience she might have shown the village idiot. Stillwater Springs boasted its share of those. “You’re going to marry Miss Mitchell, and I’ll have Billy-Moses and Daisy to play with—”

      Tom chuckled into his coffee cup.

      Lincoln sighed again and settled back in his chair. Although he’d thought about hitching up with the schoolteacher, he’d probably been hasty. “Gracie, Miss Mitchell isn’t here to marry me. She was stranded in town because the Indian School closed down, so I brought her and the kids home—”

      “Will I still have to call her ‘Miss Mitchell’ after you get married to her? She’d be ‘Mrs. Creed’ then, wouldn’t she? It would be really silly for me to go around saying ‘Mrs. Creed’ all the time—”

      “Gracie.”

      “What?”

      “Go to bed.”

      “I told you, I’m too excited.”

      “And I told you to go to bed.”

      “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Gracie protested, disgruntled.

      But she got out of her chair at the table, said good-night to Tom and stood on tiptoe to kiss Lincoln on the cheek.

      His heart melted like a honeycomb under a hot sun when she did that. Her blue eyes, so like Beth’s, sparkled as she looked up at him, then turned solemn.

      “Be nice to Miss Mitchell, Papa,” she instructed solemnly. “Stand up when she comes into a room, and pull her chair back for her. We want her to like it here and stay.”

      Lincoln’s throat constricted, and his eyes burned. He couldn’t have answered to save his hide from a hot brand.

      “You’ll come and hear my prayers?” Gracie asked, the way she did every night.

      The prayers varied slightly, but certain parts were always the same.

      Please keep my papa safe, and Tom, too. I’d like a dog of my very own, one that will fetch, and I want to go to school, so I don’t grow up to be stupid….

      Lincoln nodded his assent. Though it was a request he never refused, Gracie always asked.

      Once she left the room, Tom set his cup in the sink, folded his arms. “According to young Joseph,” he said, “he and his sister have folks in North Dakota—an aunt and a grandfather. Soon as he can save enough money, he means to head for home and take Theresa with him.”

      Lincoln felt a lot older than his thirty-five years as he raised himself from his chair, began turning down lamp wicks, one by one. Tom, in the meantime, banked the fire in the cookstove.

      They were usual, these long gaps in their conversations. Right or wrong, Lincoln had always been closer to Tom than to his own father—Josiah Creed had been a hard man in many ways. Neither Lincoln nor Wes had mourned him overmuch—they left that to Micah, the eldest, and their mother.

      “Did the boy happen to say how he and the girl wound up in a school outside of Stillwater Springs, Montana?”

      Tom straightened, his profile grim in the last of the lantern light. “The government decided he and his sister would be better off if they learned white ways,” he said. “Took them off the reservation in North Dakota a couple of years ago, and they were in several different ‘institutions’ before their luck changed. They haven’t seen their people since the day they left Dakota, though Juliana helped him write a letter to them six months back, and they got an answer.” Tom paused, swallowed visibly. His voice sounded hoarse. “The folks at home want them back, Lincoln.”

      Lincoln stood in the relative darkness for a few moments, reflecting. “I’ll send them, then,” he said after a long time. “Put them on the train when it comes through next week.”

      Tom didn’t answer immediately, and when he did, the whole Trail of Tears echoed in his voice. “They’re just kids. They oughtn’t to make a trip like that alone.”

      Another lengthy silence rested comfortably between the two men. Then Lincoln said, “You want to go with them.”

      “Somebody ought to,” Tom replied. “Make sure they get there all right. Might be that things have changed since that letter came.”

      Lincoln absorbed that, finally nodded. “What about the little ones?” he asked without looking at his friend. “Daisy and Billy-Moses?”

      “They’re orphans,” Tom said, and sadness settled over the darkened room like a weight. “Reckon Miss Mitchell planned on keeping them until she could find them a home.”

      Lincoln sighed inwardly. Until she could find them a home. As if those near-babies were stray puppies or kittens.

      With another nod, this one sorrowful, he turned away.

      It was time to turn in; morning would come early.

      But damned if he’d sleep a wink between the plight of four innocent children and the knowledge that Juliana Mitchell was lying on the other side of the wall.

      Chapter Two

      The mattress felt like a cloud, tufted and stuffed with feathers from angels’ wings, beneath Juliana’s weary frame, but sleep eluded her. Daisy slumbered innocently at her right side, sucking one tiny thumb, while Billy-Moses snuggled close on the left, clinging to her flannel nightgown—the cloth was still chilled from being rolled up in her satchel, out in the weather most of the day.

      Juliana listened as the sturdy house settled around her, her body still stiff with tension, that being its long-established habit, heard a plank creaking here, a roof timber there. She caught the sound of a door opening and closing just down the corridor, pictured Lincoln Creed passing into his room, or bending over little Gracie’s bed to tuck her in and bid her good-night. Would he spare a kind word for Theresa, who was sharing Gracie’s room, and so hungry for affection, or reserve all his attention for his little daughter?

      Gracie was a charming child, as lovely as a doll come to life, with those thickly lashed eyes, golden ringlets brushing her shoulders and the pink-tinged porcelain perfection of her skin. Privileged by comparison to most children, not to mention the four in Juliana’s own charge, Gracie was precocious, but if she was spoiled, there had been no sign of it yet. She’d greeted the new arrivals at Stillwater Springs Ranch with frank curiosity, yes, but then she’d ladled milk into mugs for them, even served it at the table.

      Juliana’s heart pinched. Gracie had a strong, loving father, a home, robust good health. But behind those more obvious blessings lurked a certain lonely resignation uncommon in one so young. Gracie had lost her mother at a very early age, and no one understood the sorrows of that more than Juliana herself—she’d been six years old when her own had succumbed to consumption. Juliana’s father, outraged by grief, torn asunder by it, had dumped both his offspring on their maternal grandmother’s doorstep barely two weeks after his wife’s funeral and, over the next few years, delivered himself up to dissolution and debauchery.

      Clay, nine at the time of their mother’s passing, had changed from a lighthearted, mischievous boy to a solemn-faced man, seemingly overnight. In a very real way, Juliana had lost him, in addition to both her parents.

      Victoria Marston, their grandmother, already a widow when her only daughter had died, dressed in mourning until her own death a decade later, but she had loved Juliana and Clay tirelessly nonetheless. Grandmama had given them every advantage—tutors, music lessons, finishing school for Juliana, who had immediately changed the course of her study to train as a schoolteacher upon the discovery that “finishing” involved learning to make small talk with men, the proper way to pour tea and a lot of walking about with a book balanced on top of her head. There had been college in San Francisco for Clay, even a Grand Tour.

      Juliana had stayed behind in Denver, living at home with Grandmama, attending classes every day and letting her doting