The Crawford Family Series includes Train Station Bride, Contract to Wed, companion novella, The Maid’s Quarters, and Her Safe Harbor and tell the tales of three Boston sisters, heiresses to the family banking fortune.
The Gentry’s of Paradise chronicle the lives of Virginia horse breeders and begins with Beauregard and Eleanor Gentry’s story, set in 1842, in the prequel novella, Into the Evermore. The full-length novels are set in the 1870’s of the next generation of Gentrys and include For the Brave, For This Moment, and For Her Honor.
Reader favorites Romancing Olive and Reconstructing Jackson are American set Prairie Romances and Cross the Ocean is set in both England and America.
Politics & Bedfellows and All the News are my general fiction titles published under Hollis Bush.
Please leave a review where you purchased The Bachelor’s Bride or on GoodReads or other social sites for readers. Thank you so much for your purchase. I love to hear from readers!
The first few pages of Into the Evermore and the second book in this series, The Bareknuckle Groom follows.
Into the Evermore Excerpt
Into the Evermore
* * *
November 1842 Virginia
“Twenty dollars and you can have her. Don’t make no never mind to me what you do with her. I just want to see the gold first.”
The filthy-looking bearded man waved his gun in every direction as he spoke, including at the head of the young woman he held in his arms and at the three men in front of him. The trio all had handkerchiefs covering the lower part of their faces and hats pulled down tight, revealing six eyes now riveted to the pistol as it honed in on one random target after the other. The woman was struggling, although it was a pitiful attempt as she was clearly exhausted, and maybe hurt. The wind whipped through the trees, blowing the dry snow in circles around them. Beau Gentry watched the grim scene play out as he peered around a boulder down into a small ravine. He’d been propped against the sheltered rock, dozing, and thinking he’d best start a fire, when he heard voices below.
“Ain’t paying twenty dollars in gold for some used-up whore,” one of the masked men said.
The filthy man wrenched his arm tighter around the woman and put the gun to her temple. “Tell ’em, girly. Tell ’em you ain’t no whore.”
She shrank away from the barrel of the gun and moaned. “Please, mister. Let me go,” she begged.
“Tell ’em you ain’t no whore!”
She shook her head and pulled at the filthy man’s arm around her waist. “I’m no fallen lady,” she whispered. “I’m just, I’m just . . .” The woman went limp, and Beau thought she’d fainted but instead she vomited into the snow in front of her. He watched her choke and gag, bent over the man’s arm, and that’s when he realized she was barefoot.
Beau leaned back against the rock and checked his pistols and shotgun beside him. He hoped his horse wouldn’t bolt from the tree she was loosely tied to when the bullets started to fly. It’d be a long walk back to Winchester if she did, especially as he’d most likely be carrying the woman. “Shit,” he muttered. “Shit and damnation. She doesn’t have any goddamn shoes on.”
From his angle, he’d need to drop the three bandits with the two shells from the shotgun, and finish off any of them still breathing with one of his pistols. They’d be surprised and hopefully slow if the liquor smell floating on the wind meant anything. He was counting on the filthy man being hampered by the woman’s struggling. He was hoping she didn’t get shot in the cross fire, but then she’d be better off dead than facing what was in store for her if the filthy man was the victor. The argument over the gold was getting heated, he could hear, making this as good a time as any.
The snow fell away from the fur collar and trim of Beau’s coat as he stood, lifted the shotgun to his shoulder, and aimed at the first man. He pulled the trigger, sighted in the second man, and pulled the second trigger right after the other, marching forward through brush and snow, letting the shotgun fall from his hands as he went. Two of the men dropped and the third fell to his knees, aiming his pistol at Beau as he did. Beau lengthened his stride, pulled a pistol from his waistband as he made the clearing, raised his left arm straight, and dropped the kneeling man to the ground with a shot to his face, letting the spent weapon fall to the ground. As he turned, he pulled his new fighting knife free of its scabbard and brought his right hand up, wielding a second pistol, side-stepping to get an angle on the filthy man.
“She’s mine! You ain’t getting her.”
“Drop the gun.”
“Twenty dollars in gold and you can have her!”
He wondered how much longer the woman would last. She was white-faced, except for the dirt, and her hair hung in clumps, matted together with blood. Her mouth was open in a silent scream. She raised and lowered her arms as if paddling in a pool of water. Most likely she was long past terrified and all the way to hysterical.
“Fine,” Beau said. “You want twenty dollars?”
The filthy man nodded, and Beau dropped his knife in the snow and reached his hand in his pants pocket as if intending to retrieve a gold piece. The man lowered his weapon by an inch or so as his eyes followed Beau’s hand, and in that moment Beau brought up his right hand and fired his weapon. The bullet tore through the man’s neck, sending blood gushing into the snow as the man tumbled sideways, releasing the woman. She fell in the opposite direction, covered in splattered blood, clawing and crawling away from her captor, turning on her back and shoving off in the mud and snow with bleeding feet, pushing herself away. Her cry echoed in the silent cold night.
Beau pulled his knife from the snow, kicked away the filthy man’s gun, and walked to where he lay, now writhing as he slowly drowned in his own blood. The hair on the back of Beau’s neck stood and he turned. The last of the three men, missing part of his cheek and ear, had retrieved a loaded pistol from the belt of one of his companions and was now aiming it at Beau with shaking hands. Beau released the knife with a whip of his wrist, landing it dead center on the man’s chest. He turned to the woman and watched as her eyes rolled back in her head and she crumbled the last four or five inches, until her back hit the forest floor.
The Bareknuckled Groom Excerpt
Coming March of 2021
December 1868
Philadelphia
* * *
James Thompson eyed the dainty brunette and the others as they approached him. She was dressed in festive colors with matching ribbons, sparkling up at him, her lashes fluttering, her cheeks pink. He was at some infernal December gathering, one of many that the Pendergast family hosted, being a prominent Philadelphia family, and not as snobby and stuck on themselves as he’d expected when his sister Elspeth first took an interest in her husband, Alexander Pendergast.
But the guests at their parties were exactly the kind of people James expected them to be, including the brunette, the two men on either side of her, one of them puffing out his chest, and certainly the tall blond goddess with the wide pink lips and pale blue eyes. She looked at him as if he was the lowliest of the low, barely a servant, one of the unwashed, or even a beggar. He did not know how a woman could convey so much disdain for a person with a smile, but this woman did exactly that.