A Lone Wolf's Serenade: A Historical Western Romance Novel, page 1
A Lone Wolf's Serenade
A WESTERN ROMANCE NOVEL
ELAINE SHIELDS
Copyright © 2023 by Elaine Shields
All Rights Reserved.
This book may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the publisher.
In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
A Lone Wolf's Serenade
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Tasting Love's Delight
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
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A Lone Wolf's Serenade
Introduction
Pearl Sullivan's devotion to her family fuels her every decision, but when her father loses his job, she faces a difficult choice. She needs to marry a wealthy stranger in order to secure her family's future. However, the winds of change carry her toward the enigmatic Johnny, and a daring proposition that could alter the course of her life presents itself…
As their worlds collide, can Pearl open her heart to a complete stranger?
Johnny Hayes, a rancher with a rugged exterior, has weathered the tempests of grief. Left to raise his young son alone, he yearns for a beacon of light in his life. At the prospect of a potential companion, a shimmer of hope dances before him… Pearl's letter with words of empathy and a shared understanding of parental responsibilities, ignites a spark of anticipation. Could this stranger from afar save his wounded heart?
Perhaps she’ll be the one to rekindle the fire of his spirit that had long been extinguished…
As Pearl and Johnny's connection deepens, their newfound happiness is suddenly threatened… Can love truly conquer the trials that fate has woven into their path? While the fragile bond they've nurtured is facing new trouble, will Pearl's heart be torn between loyalty to her family and the irresistible pull of love?
Chapter 1
Pearl Sullivan lifted her eyes and cast them to the heavens, unable to believe she was ankle-deep in cow waste. She looked down with disgust, pulling her boot out of the pile, and began the tedious task of scraping her shoe in the grass to rid it of further cow dung.
“Oh, for the love of the Lord,” she murmured. The situation was only made worse when her best friend, Wendy Price, who had come along with her to milk the cow, laughed hysterically behind her. She gave her friend a narrow look. “Don’t act like this has never happened to you, Wendy Price,” she spat out, trying to hold back a smile but inevitably grinning from ear to ear.
“Oh, it definitely has,” Wendy replied through her laughter, “but I have been waiting for a chance to see it happen to someone else. Now I know I’m not alone.” She continued to laugh while Pearl shook her head and rolled her eyes. She headed for the water pump and splashed the liquid over the bottom of her boot, cleaning the rest of it off.
“All I wanted to do was milk a cow,” she grumbled good-naturedly.
Pearl lived with her family in the middle of a Chicago neighborhood that hosted many poor families. She and her parents, Lisa and Artie, along with her young sisters, June and May, and their baby brother, Joseph, lived in a tiny shack on a small plot of land that afforded them a small garden, a chicken coop, and a shed where they kept Annie, the cow.
How she had managed not to see the cow dung from the only animal in the shed and step in it would always be a mystery.
“Reminds me of someone we used to know,” Wendy remarked when her laughter died down.
Confused, Pearl looked up at her friend, her brows pulled together. She noticed Wendy looking at the dung remnants on her boot. The realization made her skin tingle. Wendy was talking about the man who had left Pearl the year before when she was eighteen, who had asked her to marry him and spend the rest of her life with him.
She shook her head, a new level of disgust passing through her. “Oh, Wendy, why must you bring him up? I don’t want to think about him.”
“I know you don’t; I’m sorry,” Wendy replied, contrition in her voice. “I couldn’t help it. I saw him the other day.”
Pearl’s heart tightened in her chest. She didn’t want to think about Caleb. She had been certain he was the man she would marry and be with for the rest of her life. They met when she was seventeen and he was twenty years old. For two years, she had supported, encouraged, and even studied his books with him to get ahead in the career as a lawyer he wanted so badly.
But when he graduated with a two-year degree and got a job at twenty-two with a small firm on the upper west side of Chicago, she noticed a change in him. He began to avoid her and make excuses for not seeing her. Then, on an outing with friends, Pearl spotted him with another woman in a restaurant known as a meeting spot for lovers. And they weren’t exactly sitting miles apart.
He’d broken Pearl’s heart. From then on, she found it hard to trust any men. There didn’t seem to be a lot of offers coming her way after Caleb, though. He was well-known in most parts of Chicago. He was a talkative, social man whose outer façade was much different than the unfaithful, egotistical man he was underneath.
Pearl was still hurting from the betrayal. He’d promised so much behind closed doors and betrayed her in front of everyone. No matter how many times Wendy and her other friends and family told her it wasn’t her fault, she still felt like she’d done something wrong, something to push him to want to go to other women.
Eventually, she would be over it. But in the meantime, she had her family to worry about. There wasn’t much money coming in, and she was determined to find a position somewhere to help bring in some money. She might be a woman, but she was strong and willing to work hard. No one would hire her for manual labor, though, unless she worked as a cleaner. She wasn’t against that, but there wasn’t anyone in Chicago wanting to hire her now that Caleb was moving in wealthier circles.
And she didn’t want to be around Caleb’s new circle of friends anyway. She definitely didn’t want to work as a maid for one of them. She was hoping Lucy in the seamstress shop on West Main street would hire her, at least temporarily, during the summer months. She always got extra work during those months, she’d said in the past, because kids wore their clothes out playing outside so much.
She finished milking Annie and carried the bucket back to the house and into the kitchen, with Wendy close on her heels, chewing on a length of hay she’d taken from a stack near the shed.
“What about you?” Pearl asked, setting the bucket on the counter by the icebox to be transferred to smaller bottles. “Are you still going to the dance next week with Billy?”
She liked the way Wendy blushed and looked away shyly. It made her feel good to know her best friend found love and had a future planned.
“Of course,” Wendy responded softly. “He wouldn’t take anyone else, you know.”
“No,” Pearl replied firmly, grinning wide. “I’m sure he wouldn’t. Sit down and relax. You want a biscuit or a cookie or something?”
Wendy giggled. “I’ll take a cookie if you have some. Are they sugar?”
“Yeah, sugar cookies. I didn’t have anything else to make them with. I made snickerdoodles last week, you know.”
A memory flashed through Pearl’s mind. Caleb laughing, taking a bite from a hot, straight out of the oven cookie and telling her exactly the words Wendy had just said.
She turned away from her friend to get the cookies from the tin, pushing the memory away, determined not to let that man hurt her anymore.
Chapter 1
Pearl stooped over, resting one knee on the floor, trapping her skirt underneath it. She struggled to button the back of Joey’s hat so it would stay on his head. It was makeshift, something she’d come up with herself because her little brother had a smaller head than normal, and his hats never fit. She and her parents quickly grew tired of hearing him complain that his hat kept sliding down over his eyes and he was getting in trouble for losing them because he preferred to carry them and left them everywhere he went.
Pearl pushed the button through the hoop and sighed, glad that task was done. She could hear the worry in her parents’ voices as they talked in the next room. May and June, who were eight and nine respectively, weren’t listening to their parents. They were at the window, looking out anxiously, waiting to leave for school.
Sometimes Pearl wondered if her sisters were mischievous at school. They were that way at home some, but she’d always thought they were probably well-behaved at school. Mrs. Blackberry had never mentioned any misbehaving. The way they were standing there today, though, so anxious and excited, it made her wonder what they were like when they weren’t at home with family.
Everyone changed when they weren’t with their family. Sometimes it was to an extreme, such as Caleb, who wore two faces, sometimes more, depending on who he was with. Pearl thought herself to be a one-faced woman. She was still growing, learning, maturing, and hoping others would allow her to do that before they judged her.
Caleb hadn’t cared two figs about her reputation and did a lot of damage that Pearl was still feeling in the poor class of Chicago. She still saw certain looks from people she didn’t even know, that disdain she always saw on Caleb’s face whenever she had the misfortune of running into him. She longed to get away from that, but how would that ever happen? Praying for relief hadn’t worked so far. She didn’t know what God was waiting for but knew they needed help immediately.
The seamstress job was the only thing she had to help her family get out of the hole they were living in, barely enough food on the table and recycled clothes for the kids. It was the way life was for her and her family. She would do anything to bring them out of the depths of poverty.
Her father’s words came through to her as she ushered the little ones out the door. She froze for a moment, watching them run ahead to the buggy, unable to move for a moment.
Had she heard him right? Had he just said the man who owned the plot next to theirs had sold out to a large company coming into town? What did that mean for their little plot of land? Pearl didn’t even know if her parents owned their small house and the land around it. She’d always assumed they did.
What if they didn’t?
What would happen to the family?
Tears came to her eyes as she stepped out of the house and closed the door behind her. She couldn’t let her siblings see her in a state. They would ask what was wrong, and she’d be forced to lie to them, which she did not want to do.
She cleared her throat and straightened her spine, taking a deep breath. As she let it out, Pearl walked toward the buggy and climbed into the driver’s seat. She twisted at the waist to look at her brother, who was beside her, and her sisters, who were in the back.
“Ready for school?”
“We’ve been ready!” May exclaimed, bouncing excitedly. “Let’s go! We have friends we want to see! Let’s go!”
Pearl laughed, nodding and turning back to face the front of the buggy. She took the reins in hand and clucked at the horses to make them move, a sound her father had taught her that was different from normal commands to move. He wanted to make sure it was harder to steal the buggy. The horses wouldn’t move unless they heard that particular sound.
It was nice that her siblings didn’t seem to care about the hardship of poverty. They were clean and had clothes to wear. They had shoes on their feet and knew that their father worked hard every day to provide for them. Here they were, excited to go to school while she was worried about whether they would have a home soon.
Her fearful thoughts brought the topic back to her mind, whether she liked it or not. Would they have to sell? If they did, would they get enough money to go somewhere nice? Would they be able to move to a nicer home and live in a better part of Chicago, or maybe even move out of Chicago?
The prospect of starting somewhere brand new made Pearl feel giddy inside. That was exactly what she wanted to do. She longed to get out of Chicago, something she didn’t even realize might happen.
Now that she had the possibility of that actually happening … it almost sounded too good to be true.
But would her father sell? He had been given that property by his grandfather, Grandpa Matthew, who passed away just after Pearl was born.
Remembering this fact settled Pearl’s mind about whether her parents owned the property. She shook her head at her initial questioning. Her fear had made her thoughts irrational.
But that didn’t change the fact that since it was her father’s property, would he be willing to sell it? They were a poor family. Surely he wouldn’t pass up the chance at prosperity, or at least some financial security, just to hold onto his father’s land.
Would he?
Pearl took her siblings to school and dropped them off, waving with a smile and a happy, “See you after! See you after!”
Her heart pounded fiercely in her chest as she drove on to her seamstress job at Lucy’s place. She wanted to talk to her parents. She wanted to be involved in what was happening, help them in any way she could, and be there for them.
She would talk to them after work. She could only hope they hadn’t made their own decision yet. And if they had, she hoped it was the right one.
What was the right thing to do, though? Pearl didn’t have all the facts yet. She would have to wait. Patience was such a hard skill to learn. She worked on it every day.
She pulled the buggy up beside the building in the alley on the left. It was going to be a long day.
Chapter 2
One last glance in the room let Pearl know the girls were already asleep. Joey went to sleep early in the evening, around seven, and slept until seven the next day. He’d done that since he was three, and now he was six.
She’d hurt one of her fingers at work, sliding a needle into it while fixing the trousers of one of her neighbors. It had bled profusely, but she managed to keep any of the red stuff from getting on the man’s clothes. That would have cost her money she didn’t have.
