Read Cowboy Heart (Historical Western Romance) (Longren Family series #3, Kitty and Lukes story) for Free Online Page A

supper and, by then, my tale would be told.
                  I was still shy around William. At least I was no longer jealous of their marriage.
     
                  Sarah met William two springs back in 1883, when Uncle Matthew and Chloe took all of us on his train to visit my grandparents in Alturas. 
                  It wasn't really his train.  He'd been working for the railroads since summer 1881, dispatching out of Reno and heading into Northern California for runs.  My aunt by marriage—Chloe, the mayor's daughter who I'd gone to school with—went with him.  No one asked much about that.  Chloe's the mayor's daughter and although, most of the time, she's as glad as anyone to not be hampered by that title, sometimes she uses it to her advantage, like when people try to tell her that a proper lady doesn't go gallivanting around on a train with her husband, she waves a hankie properly when standing at the train station and waits for him to come home.
                  Chloe makes proper work for herself.  She dresses beautifully and she cooks like a dream, though she says she doesn't, she keeps a beautiful house and most of the time she's on the train with Matthew.  And she doesn't have to use the mayor's daughter thing anymore—especially since she helped Matthew bind up passengers' wounds after a flood forced their locomotive off the tracks during a storm one October.
                  When Matthew offered the chance for all of us to visit the Longren Ranch in Alturas, we took it, watching high desert Northern Nevada turn to the plateaus of Northern California.  The trip took two days and we stayed with my grandparents for a week before my mother wanted to get back to her shop and Maggie and Uncle Hutch wanted to get back to their hotel in Virginia City with Little John, who was only one.
                  Sarah, though, didn't want to get back to anything.  She met William Kennedy the second day we were there.  He was in Alturas helping a friend finish off a barn and they met that night at the dance that celebrated the new barn.  Fiddlers played, my grandparents danced, my mother watched quietly, still missing my father, no doubt, and Sarah?  Sarah fell in love with William Kennedy and he with her.
                  We didn't go home for another week after that and Sarah, who always seemed to be stepping out with a new fella every week, as though there were an inexhaustible supply in Gold Hill and Virginia City, though I had never found them, Sarah didn't want to go home at all and when we did, she refused all callers and most meals and wrote letters when she should have been doing chores and it was no surprise to anyone when William Kennedy took a train that wasn't run by Matthew Longren and showed up in Gold Hill, courting her.
                  I was jealous.  I was 16 and considering all options on a regular basis.  Johnny was still my friend but on the verge of becoming something more and, suddenly, seeing my sister serious about someone, I felt left behind already, too young, too alone.
                  Too jealous.
                  But, she never knew it.  She asked me to be her maid of honor and, even if William had looked at anyone after he found Sarah, I wouldn't have been interested and, by the time their wedding came round, Johnny and I were stepping out.
                  And now we weren't, but Sarah was miles away in California and married and I was brooding my way through the pasture by the time I came to and found I was about to stray onto the same side of the fence as the cattle, some of whom were considering me with rolling, nervous eyes and little snorts.  What I knew about cattle could fit into a thimble with room left over for a marriage proposal, but I truly believed mooning my way into the midst of a herd was probably a bad idea.
                  I began