A Noble Groom (Michigan Brides #2)(3)

She eyed the bright flames dancing in the undergrowth of bushes and vines piled into a windrow. The dry burning brush popped like gunshots in the silent afternoon.

The distant scolding and chattering of a migrating flock of passenger pigeons echoed through the stillness. Otherwise, the farm was too quiet, too motionless.

“Hans?” She couldn’t bring herself to move another step toward him.

“Wake up, Papa.” Gretchen let go of her hand and skipped ahead. For as little attention as Hans gave their daughter, the girl’s love never wavered.



But even as Gretchen bent over to pat his back, wariness wormed through Annalisa’s unsettled stomach. “Don’t touch him!”

At her sharp command, Gretchen pulled her hand back as if she’d burned her fingers.

“Don’t touch,” Annalisa said again, trying to force a calmness to her voice she didn’t feel.

Gretchen stepped back, fear flittering in her widening eyes.

Annalisa forced her feet forward until she stood over her husband. “Hans? Are you sick?”

He didn’t move.

She stooped and jabbed him through the coarse linen of his homespun shirt. “If you’re not well, I’ll tend the fire for you.”

Still he didn’t respond.

Her heart thudded like a dasher beating up and down against fresh cream. Slowly she reached for his arm. At her slight nudge it fell away from his face, revealing charred skin with patches of roasted pink flesh underneath. Some places had burned away down to the white bone. Amidst the blackness, his eyes were open and stared unseeingly straight ahead.

A scream burned in her throat. “Gott, help us . . .” She stumbled backward, tripping and falling painfully to her backside, spilling the nuts they’d collected. “Oh, Gott, help us!”

Gretchen began to move forward.

“Nein!” Annalisa scrambled toward the girl, grabbed her and buried the little girl’s face into her empty apron. “Nein! Don’t look.”

What had happened to Hans?

Her body shook with sudden chills. She wanted to run away and hide, but her gaze returned to the awful sight.

Blood seeped from a deep gash near his hairline. Bright crimson smeared his sandy hair, turning it a muddy brown.



As angry as she was with Hans, as much as she despised his wayward ways, she hadn’t wanted him to die.

The truth was, she couldn’t survive without a husband. Not in this wilderness. Not as a woman alone on a forty-acre farm.

Bile rose in her throat.

A fly buzzed above the oozing and blistered flesh of his forehead.

Her stomach revolted. She turned away and retched on the hard barren ground.



“Annalisa must have a new husband.” Vater’s voice rose above the loud deliberating that had been ongoing since the men started their meal in the log cabin farmhouse that belonged to her parents.

“We are not disagreeing with you on this, Peter.” Herr Pastor reached for another slice of the thick brown bread on the platter in the center of the table.

With a crock of butter in one hand and a coffeepot in the other, Annalisa rushed to Herr Pastor’s spot. She plopped the crock next to him.

“Thank you, Annalisa.” He smiled and held out his mug for a refill. The whiskers around his mouth were spotted with the crumbs of all he’d already eaten.

She nodded but couldn’t form her lips into a smile, not even the barest semblance of one. She hadn’t been able to smile since yesterday—not since finding Hans.

Some of the neighbors had come to the consensus that Hans had merely suffered an accident, had hit his head and fallen unconscious into hot coals. But others—including Vater—decided that the greedy businessman, E. B. Ward, had murdered Hans so that he could finally get the land and build his mill.



It was all anyone had talked about at the funeral that afternoon, and now at the meal following the service. The men crowded together on the hand-hewn benches and scant chairs around the long table.

“We don’t disagree with you,” Herr Pastor said again. “But I’m only saying we may need to consider finding a God-fearing man from outside our own people. James McCann might be an Irishman, but he’s a Protestant and a hard worker—”

“Absolutely not!” Vater slammed the table. The spoons and knives rattled. Coffee sloshed over the edges of the steins. And silence descended through the crowded room. Even the women who’d clustered near the wood-burning stove ceased their chattering.

The sourness of a cabin full of sweaty men, unwashed after a long day of hard work, assaulted Annalisa anew. Her stomach swirled with the growing bouts of nausea. The stuffy heat, the spicy caraway of Mutter’s rostbratwurst, the tanginess of the sauerkraut—none of it eased her discomfort.

And it didn’t help that she was the center of the discussion.

“Nein! We won’t even consider it.” Vater pointed the nub of his missing forefinger at Herr Pastor. “It’s a good thing you’re a man of God or I’d send you running like Samson did to the Philistines.”

Annalisa leaned against the cool log wall with its mud and hay chinking and let it soothe the heat of her back. She longed to scoop up Gretchen, who was playing with the other children in the loft, and go home to bed.

She was tired of listening to everyone discuss Hans’s death, and she was tired of worrying about what would happen next.