Mail Order Bride Mishap (Into the West #3)

Chapter 1

Miss O’Toole leaned forward until her face filled the opening between the teller’s bars, and the man wisely stepped back a pace as Fiona at last found her voice, a hissing replica of its more melodious counterpart.

 “Are you—are you suggesting I…I whore myself out in order to make ends meet?”

Belatedly ashamed for his flippant suggestion, and shocked that the young woman before him actually said the…the W-word in public, the clerk began to recant his earlier proposal. Anything to get this foreigner out of his establishment!

“I did not mean for you to do…to do that, per se. Perhaps she could give you a cleaning job, or a singing--”

Miss Fiona O’Toole did not accept the clerk’s hasty retraction. Her eyes positively popped with emerald-tinted flames, while the fragile hold she’d been maintaining on her famous, red-headed temper broke over the dam she’d tenuously constructed within.

“You meant exactly that, you lying, skinny, effeminate, greased down… popinjay! How dare you insinuate that I go sell my body to pay my debts? I bet you’d be the first paying client, too, wouldn’t you, you officious jackass! Or maybe not. You probably prefer men!” Fiona’s voice, starting out in an indignant tone, ended on a fishwife’s screech, bringing customers’ and staff’s attention around to stare at her in horrified curiosity. The young matron two windows down from Fiona gaped at the Irish woman, mouth dropped wide enough to see her back teeth, while the rest of the clientele gazed at her with appalled attention. Not a one showed a whit of pity; only embarrassment and disgusted shock.

“Guard! Guard! Would you escort Miss…O’Toole outside?” shouted Fiona’s clerk, his own face a study in outrage as her words settled and took roost within his brain. Just because he preferred the gentleman’s club down the street to Madame Rostov’s Emporium didn’t mean anything like what she implied! Likewise the fact that he rather enjoyed a sweaty bout of boxing—

 “I don’t need an escort, you lousy molly! Being Irish should have no bearing on my borrowing money! Oh! Let go of me!--” Fiona shrieked as the bank’s guard, a stoic, middle-aged man the size of a tree with ham-sized hands to match, grasped the Irish woman’s elbow and roughly pulled her away from the teller.

Fiona fought valiantly, fueled by desperation and indignation at her unfair treatment. She waved her free arm, and kicked out at her captor with her cardboard-lined boots, screaming invectives she’d learned from hanging around the docks with her Da as a young girl, though their meanings remained hazy in Fiona’s relative innocence. But the words served as the final nails in her loan search coffin, for her stalwart escort opened the bank door with one hand and shoved Fiona, still vehemently protesting, out onto the cobbled sidewalk, slamming the door and ominously twitching the lock behind her. Only to abruptly reopen the door to pitch out the bird from her hat, which somehow had managed to extricate itself from its moorings atop her head. It landed at Fiona’s feet, a subtle reminder of the death of her dream.

 Silence.

 Immediately upon finding herself tossed out of the last bank in Boston that might have given her a business loan, Fiona O’Toole quickly grabbed up the bird and covered her mouth with a gloved hand in an attempt to stem her vicious complaints, as well as the fruitless tears threatening to overspill her emerald eyes.

 “Oh, sweet Mother Mary, what have you done, Fiona O’Toole? Now where shall you go?” Fiona asked herself as she stared around the bustling Boston thoroughfare upon which she’d been thrown, where carriages and wagons clattered by and more people you could ever count brushed past her with nary a by-your-leave.

 She hadn’t lied to the bank teller when she’d told him she needed the money to live. The small pittance the stevedore coalition had bestowed upon her as her father’s next of kin was all but used up, and the pay she received for her sewing would never cover her housing, even though she’d let go the tiny apartment she and her father had shared after his death, and now lived in a boarding house run by a no-nonsense widow by the name of Mrs. Katherine Callaghan. Her husband had run away with another woman and later been shot in bed by that woman’s husband. So Fiona knew she would get no extensions from the widow Callaghan; only salt-of-the-earth adages such as “pull yourself up by your bootstraps, darlin’, like I did!” Or, “You’ll never plough a field by turning it over in your mind!” No, there would be no largesse coming from that quarter.