The Amish Cowboy's Baby, page 1
The Amish Cowboy’s Baby
Amish Cowboys of Montana
Book II
Adina Senft
Copyright 2021 Shelley Adina Senft Bates
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher at www.moonshellbooks.com.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Cover design by Carpe Librum Book Design. Images used under license. Quotations from the King James Version of the Holy Bible.
The Amish Cowboy’s Baby / Adina Senft—1st ed.
ISBN: 978-1-950854-19-6 R102122
Created with Vellum
Contents
In this series
Introduction
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
Glossary
Also by Adina Senft
About the Author
Praise for Adina Senft
“Filled with spiritual insights and multilayered storylines. At times readers will be chuckling and other times, misty eyed as the book unfolds.”
Amish Reader on Herb of Grace
“A heart-warming tale that celebrates the best things about being Amish.”
Christian Fiction Addiction on Keys of Heaven
“Adina Senft has once again produced a simply sweet and engaging Amish romance novel, filled with twists and turns, enjoyable beyond compare.”
Amish Reader on Balm of Gilead
In this series
Amish Cowboys of Montana
The Montana Millers
* * *
The Amish Cowboy’s Christmas prequel novella
The Amish Cowboy
The Amish Cowboy’s Baby
The Amish Cowboy’s Bride
The Amish Cowboy’s Letter
The Amish Cowboy’s Makeover
The Amish Cowboy’s Home
Introduction
The Amish Cowboy’s Baby
A lonely prodigal, a cowboy rebel, a secret baby.
A recipe for disaster ... or for unexpected love?
* * *
Joshua Miller is the youngest in the Miller family—and the one most likely to break his mother’s heart. The minute he can sneak away, he’s out with his Englisch friends, planning when he’ll jump the fence. It’s all good times and bad choices ... until the day he finds a baby at the door with a note saying the child is his.
Sara Fischer once thought the grass was greener on the other side, only to discover that coming back to the church can be harder than leaving it. Now she’s returned to Montana ranch country, where the only job she can find is on the Circle M—as a nanny. She may not be very good with babies, but she knows a hurting man when she sees one—and she responds to Joshua in a way she never has with anyone else.
The Amish way of life is the fence that divides them. But can a baby’s trusting smile be the key that opens their hearts to each other—and to God?
The Montana Millers. They believe in faith, family, and the land. They’ll need all three when love comes to the Circle M!
1
Mountain Home, Montana
For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.
—Isaiah 9:6
Dat was right. For everything you did outside the will of God, there was a price to pay.
Joshua Miller, in the fifth year of his Rumspringe, was so hungover he thought his pounding head might come off and roll across the floor. He groaned as he attempted to lift it high enough to squint out the window. The sun was up. And he was alone. But where? When?
Rumspringe was supposed to be fun. Not to hurt this bad.
He looked down at himself. Still dressed. Huh.
The bed covers weren’t familiar. Neither was the room.
Maybe, instead of rolling over and going back to sleep the way he wanted to, he ought to find out where he was. He remembered the party in Whitefish with the Madison brothers and a bunch of their ski friends. Then coming home yesterday and freezing his toes off going … somewhere … in the back of the big Ford pickup with some kids from town. The rail trestle, maybe? Had they taken the truck out on the frozen lake?
Nope. He had nothing. Just a big blank expanse where a good time should have been.
Josh rolled to his feet. He found the door and opened it, and recognition flooded in. By some miracle he’d wound up in the ranch hands’ bunkhouse at the Rocking Diamond, the dude ranch and stud farm owned by Brock and Taylor Madison. Most of the hands had either been laid off for the winter months or gone home for Christmas, which was why he’d probably crawled up the steps and into the nearest bed he could find. And how about that—his phone was still in his back pocket.
Sunday, December 13, 10:42 a.m.
Oh, boy. If he didn’t hoof it back to the Circle M, he’d not only be assigned some awful job as punishment for missing church, he’d get something even worse for not being home when the family drove in after the fellowship meal. But if he could get his head together long enough to find some helpful chore to do, maybe that would lower Dat’s anger levels into the orange zone instead of the red.
He couldn’t risk being kicked off the ranch. He needed every penny he could save to go to Seattle and start a new life. An Englisch life. He had his share of the money from the cows they’d sold last autumn, and Tyler Carson had said that after Christmas, he’d buy Joshua’s share of the car they co-owned. With that, he’d be on a bus the first chance he got, leaving this place behind.
He found his coat on the floor on top of his boots, his wallet still in the pocket. He filled a quart canning jar he found in the kitchen with water from the tap, and drank it down. Every step on the exterior staircase of the bunkhouse was torture, and it only got worse as he hiked the five miles cross-country to the Circle M. The morning was almost mild—a warm wind had come up from the west, creating a Chinook arch made of clouds over the mountains, with the wind blowing through it.
Already the snow left on the ground from the last storm had begun to melt. If this kept up, they’d have clear roads for once. By the last mile his head was clearing, too, as he breathed in the scent of pines and wet earth. He cut through Grossmammi’s orchard and zigzagged down the path to the Miller house on its knoll, then took the steps two at a time up to the deck. From here he had a staggering view of the valley below, mostly covered in snow yet, but he could see the frozen river where the snow had blown off. Mountains stood guard, blue and purple peaks white with snow, their sides fringed with green pines.
But he couldn’t stand around admiring the view. He had to get cleaned up and changed and find something to do before his parents’ buggy came rolling up the lane.
He opened the door of the narrow boot room that gave on to the house proper, and blinked.
There was something sitting just inside, on the waterproof mat. A present of some kind?
His parents were friendly with all the Englisch in the valley, but they didn’t have the sort of relationships that led to presents left on the porch at Christmas. An Amish family would never just drop a gift and run—certainly not on a Sunday. No, they’d come in the evening, be invited in and given something to eat, and two hours would go by while everyone caught up with the news of people they’d probably just seen in church that week.
He closed the door and stood there with his hands on his hips, staring down at a wicker basket with a bunch of blankets rolled up in it.
And then something punched the blanket from inside and yelled, and Joshua nearly fell over backward as he stumbled away from it. “What in the blazes?”
It looked like kittens were playing under there. Sounded like it, too.
“Ach, neh,” he said in tones of disgust. “Tell me somebody hasn’t dumped a litter on us.” He was half tempted to take the basket down to the river and toss it in. How many were in there? And how old?
He pulled away the soft blue blanket that had been carefully tucked into the sides of the basket.
A small human face, screwed up in frustration, met his disbelieving gaze. A pair of blue eyes focused on him. And then a wail, not as loud as the first one, as if it had been going at it for a while and had given up hope that anyone was listening.
Joshua took the Lord’s name in vain. Several times. Loudly.
“Who thought it was a good idea to leave a baby in the boot room in December?” he demanded of the basket.
He snatched it up and got it into the warmth of the house. It was only about fifty-five degrees out, but still, babies were supposed to be warm. What on earth was going on?
He swore again as he set his burden on the kitchen table. He’d seen enough babies to know that this one was probably three or four months old. “We have to get you back where you belong, because it sure ain’t here. Where is Mamm when I need her?”
At the Burkholders’, that was where, way on the other side of the valley.
There were lumps under the blankets. One by one he pulled them out.
Bottles. Full of milk.
Oh, no. This did not look good. This meant somebody was counting on the baby being here at least a day. Maybe more.
His questing fingers around the baby’s warm, squirming body in its tiny blue snow suit located something else. Not more bottles. An envelope.
He pulled it out. His name was written on the front.
No, no, no.
Sunday, December 13
Dear Joshua,
You probably don’t remember me, but it doesn’t matter. We had a night together around New Year’s, and this is the result. Meet Nathan Joshua Miller. I know he’s yours because I hadn’t been with anyone for months before that, and believe me, I don’t plan on it for years after this.
I got accepted to university and won’t be coming back. There’s no room in my life for a child. My parents don’t even know I had him. They thought I was doing a couple of exchange terms in Boston.
I know the Amish are all about family so the best place for him is with his dad. His birth certificate is enclosed. I hope you love him like he deserves. Even as messed up as you are, you have to be a better dad than I would be a mom.
Carey Lindholm
Joshua’s mouth hung open, the shock like ice water cascading over his head, his shoulders, all the way to his feet. Then going to his insides, like ice breaking and causing a flood.
He dropped the letter on the table and lunged for the kitchen sink, where he was violently sick, enough to rid himself of every bad decision from last night. The sudden movement must have scared the baby, because it let out a shriek.
Then it started to cry.
That made two of them.
2
The bus roared up in front of the tiny station in Mountain Home, Montana, and jerked to a halt in one of the two long parking spaces. Sara Fischer woke up with a jolt as her head smacked against the window.
“Ow.” She rubbed the sore spot, groggy from lack of sleep, and blinked some moisture into her eyes. Not that it did much good. It still felt like someone had thrown sand into them.
Mountain Home didn’t seem to have changed much in the years since she’d left. The bus station still needed its windows washed. The Gas-N-Go was still painted banana yellow for reasons no one understood. And there was Talley’s bar, the only one in town, looking exactly the way it had the last time she’d stumbled out of it. The sign in the window said Open in loopy neon letters. Of course it was.
They said you couldn’t go home again. Well, sometimes you could. Sometimes you didn’t have a choice.
With a sigh, she collected her backpack from the overhead rack and made sure her zipped wallet was still in the inside pocket of her puffy jacket. Fact was, she was coming home pretty much the way she’d left, except then she hadn’t had a backpack. All her worldly goods had been stuffed in two canvas grocery bags with rope handles. Mamm had made them.
Nope. Not going to think about that.
She went into the bus station’s only bathroom and pulled out the clothes she’d put on top inside the pack. That she’d hung on to for reasons even she couldn’t explain. Then she stripped out of her jeans and sweatshirt and put them on. Black tights. A purple dress that still fastened up the front with snaps, though they pulled a little across the chest now. It was too short now, too, but that couldn’t be helped. An apron, though she had to use safety pins because the original straight pins were long gone. She had no idea where she’d lost the cape. Her white, bucket-shaped Kapp had been torn off her head in a wind storm somewhere in Olympia. So all she had was a Duchly, a scarf, bought at the dollar store.
Sara tied it over her hair. That would be the second thing someone noticed. The hair, cropped short.
She gazed at herself in the mirror. You look like you put on an Amish Halloween costume with half the pieces missing.
Yep, pretty much.
She pulled her cowboy boots back on because where did you buy black Oxfords outside of an Amish store? Besides, they were good boots. She didn’t plan on giving them up. But she had left Amish, so she’d come back that way.
Back to the only life that seemed even remotely familiar. Back to make up for her mistakes. To try again.
She walked through the tiny downtown, feeling out of place and far too visible. In Englisch clothes no one would have noticed her. In Amish clothes, the same. But in this half-and-half outfit, she stood out.
She also stood out because she was the only one on the street, despite the unseasonable warmth in the air. And then she realized why—it was Sunday. Half the shops in Mountain Home seemed to be Amish now, which meant they were closed. But on a closer look, the town had changed. It looked downright prosperous. The Rose Garden Quilt Shop. Yoder’s Variety Store. The Dutch Apple Café. Mountain Carpentry and Cabinets.
The Amish seemed to have turned the town around. That was a good sign. That meant there might be work.
Her heart kicked as she passed a window full of candles. She stopped. Leaned in to get a better look at the display. Pillar candles with flowers and leaves embedded in creamy wax were surrounded by wreaths of holly and fat bows made of red and gold ribbon. Behind them and tucked in between were books—at least a dozen Christmas romances with happy couples on the covers. She glanced up at the old-fashioned swinging sign, hanging over the boardwalks just like the ones over the other shops.
Currer Bell’s Books and Candles.
Okay, not Amish, clearly. But the shop was in the same location as the previous one where her mother had sold her candles. Maybe these folks had bought it after—
She jerked into motion and walked on, down to the end of the street where it turned back into a highway and continued on out into ranch country. End of the line. Fine. She turned and walked back to the only place that seemed to be open.
Talley’s.
She paused inside the door. It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust from the brilliant day outside to the dim lighting that did more to hide spills and scuffs than it did to illuminate anything. Not one thing had changed. She tripped over the board that stuck up next to the tiny raised stage and shook her head at herself. At one time she’d stepped over it instinctively.
“Help you?” The man behind the bar took her in. “Hey, Sara. That you?”
“Hi, Leroy.”
“You back in town for good?”
“I’m not sure I can manage good. But I’m back.”
“Staying at your folks’ place, I guess. Hope you have a fallback plan. No one’s been out there in years. Except kids, maybe.”
Her stomach sank, as did her shoulders. She hadn’t really thought about what happened to empty houses. “Guess I’ll find out.”
“You got a car?”
She shook her head. “I just got off the bus. I’ll walk.” It was a long way. But again—no choice.
He leaned over the counter. “Hey, Miller.”
A boy lifted his head like it weighed fifty pounds. Amish kid, Sara saw at once. On Rumspringe, obviously. He looked completely miserable, despite the fact that two others at the table were hollering at the TV, cheering on some football team. There was a basket at his feet.
