Page 62 of Wyoming Promises

Lola leaned back, wiping her tears. “Isn’t it shameful to be...glad?”

“Oh, honey,” Grace said, drawing a handkerchief across her own damp cheeks, “it’s not that. I believe it’s what they’d want for us, your papa, my Pete.... They loved us so much, they wouldn’t want us to just go on living...but to go on living better.”

A sudden knock at her front door drew their attention. Lola pulled away to answer it. Doc Kendall’s eyebrows quirked at her appearance, and she forced a cheerful smile. “Hello, Doc. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Silas doffed his hat with a hasty glance through the door to Grace before nodding a brief greeting. “I’m afraid it’s business and not pleasure today, Miss Lola. I came from Myrtle Stiles’s place. She’d been feeling poorly, and her ranch hand rode to fetch me. She passed away this morning. Weak heart. The problem is, I’ve been called to help Mrs. Garrett deliver her baby. She lost her first only a year ago. I have to get there right away. I know it’s asking a lot, but can you manage to bring Myrtle into town?”

Myrtle Stiles was no small woman. She weighed nigh onto three hundred pounds and stood almost six feet tall. Lola glanced at Grace, knowing she could offer no help. “Will her ranch hands be there to assist?”

Silas shook his head. “I’m afraid not. I was hoping you could find someone in town.”

Lola’s mind sifted through the men she knew who could offer a hand, but somehow she felt less comfortable asking Ike than she had in the past. Still, she pushed the doctor on his way. “I’ll find someone,” she told him. “You go on and help Mrs. Garrett. I wish I could be there to assist.”

“I know,” the doctor said. “But duty calls us in different directions this time, I’m afraid. I thank you, Lola.” He hustled off with a quick wave.

“Let us know how things go with the baby!” she called after him. He mounted his horse and tore off through town, black bag bouncing against his horse’s flank.

Lola closed the door and turned to Grace. “I’m not sure who—”

“Get Bridger,” Grace said. “He would be back by now, I would think, and he’d be glad to help you. I know it.”

Lola grabbed her cape and satchel, pausing at the mortuary door to gather her things. “I can’t! What if he takes my request as a sign of interest? I don’t want to push things if it’s not what the Lord wants for me.”

Grace stepped toward her, squeezing from the side with one arm draped across her back. “I’m certain,” she said, a smile and a gleam lighting her face. “After all, this is ‘just business,’ is it not?”

* * *

Lola slipped into the boardinghouse and listened as the door creaked closed before making her way to Bridger’s room. Heavy tread echoed through the crack as she raised her hand to knock. She released her pent-up breath, a smile escaping with it.

They’d had supper together last night, so why such eagerness to see him so soon? Lola squared her shoulders. This was business. She rapped her knuckles against the coarse wood and waited.

Silence.

Lola leaned her ear toward the door. She’d been certain she heard him inside. She waited only a moment before she heard another shuffle. She knocked again. “Bridger? It’s me. I’m sorry to bother you, but I need your help.”

A sharp creak of mattress ties sounded muted through the wood, and she regretted bothering him. Dark lines of exhaustion had ringed his eyes last night. And something more—worry, tension...she wasn’t sure which. “I’m sorry, Bridger. I know you need your rest, but I didn’t know where else—”

The door swung open, filled with the frame of a man much taller and definitely broader than Bridger’s lanky build. Her heart thudded once, hard against her ribs. She jerked. “Who are you? Where’s Bridger?”

The large man shifted his feet, glancing into the room and over her shoulders with an anxious gleam in his blue eyes. “I’m not supposed to answer the door,” he explained.

So why had he? She sized the stranger up, his strong back, wide shoulders—a large, strapping man who would be able to lift Myrtle Stiles single-handedly. “Who are you?” she asked again.

He bent low, almost as if she were a small child. “You’re that pretty lady Bridger works for. I know you,” he said, his voice soft.

“Where is Bridger?” she asked. “What have you done with him?”

“He went with that marshal fella up the trail to show him where we found that lawman.” His stilted manner of speaking drew her curiosity.