A Bride’s Troubling Dilemma (Preview)

Chapter One

The red dirt and oppressive heat seemed to stain the windows of the train as it came to a slow, stuttered halt. Sunbeams danced through the reflective glass, like rainbows traveling over heatwaves, indolent and carefree. The dark mocha eyes blinking in the reflection, though looked anything but. Worry lurked in the heavily lash-framed gaze, sunlight creating swirls of amber and butterscotch inside of them for the emotion to be carried on.

Creek, Arizona might as well have been a new frontier town, for all the familiarity that it gave the girl clutching her bag to her chest as the noise from other departing passengers filtered through the train.

Bella didn’t know what she had been expecting, not really, but it wasn’t this. Red sand as far as the eye could see and a lack of any real plant life or greenery that would break it up. It wasn’t just the landscape though, everything was different.

From the buildings to the style of dress, nothing outside of her window made her feel any more at ease getting off the train.

“It’s just one step,” a voice whispered in her mind. “One foot in front of the other, and then you do it again. And again. Until you no longer have to force it.”

Bella followed the advice almost by routine, the words resonating with a bittersweet echo that twinged in her heart. Her father’s voice followed her as she gathered her things, holding her suitcase tightly in one fist as she navigated the small crowd still exiting the train to the station. Last-minute stragglers such as herself thronged on either side, spread out enough to allow her focus to shift.

Her emotions and thoughts seemed to be on runaway trains of their own, skipping from one track to the next and near dizzying her between their intensity and randomness. She knew that it had to be nerves, the newness of her situation combined with a fear of the unknown…

And yet…

Knowing the reasoning behind her emotions did nothing to help her handle them any better.

Shelton Milroy.

His name echoed in her head almost as regularly as her father’s voice in the back of her mind. She kept trying to picture what his face would look like, if his appearance would match the voice behind his letters, but all she could see was the weathered, leathery skin of her father’s face creased in a soft smile.

“One foot in front of the other, Bella Luna,” he’d whisper.

The grief at even hearing his voice in her imagination still stung, despite the comfort it offered. The memories were bittersweet, the grief from having lost her father so recently tinged with the relief of having had him for so long. It was what had emboldened her to take this trip but also what made accepting it as her new reality so difficult.

“Hey!” a voice from her left called out, agitation and disgust clear in the single syllable. “Watch where you’re going!” The tall, impeccably dressed, blonde woman sneered as she walked off, tossing only a short-lived glance of disdain over her shoulder as she was met at the end of the platform by a similarly well-dressed man.

Bella just gathered her suitcases closer to her own body, breathing in deeply and searching the remaining faces in the quickly emptying station carefully.

She didn’t know what Shelton Milroy looked like, not really, though she was plenty curious as to what he might. She had drawn any number of pictures in her mind since she had started conversing with him through letters, trying to form a picture from what little she did know.

Shelton was taciturn, with little detail given other than what he deemed strictly necessary. Bella’s father would have called him unimaginative, but Bella hoped that that was only the case in his writing, not so much his life.

The truth of the matter was that she knew very little about Shelton Milroy beyond the very basic set of facts that he had given her. He lived in Creek, Arizona, and worked for one of the nearby farms as a farmhand. He complained of finding pants long enough to fit him and of having to let the hems out, which would infer that he was tall. Tall enough, Bella supposed, to stand out for it.

No tall men were lingering on the edges of what had once been a large crowd departing and meeting the train, though.

In fact, there were very few men left at all, those that were wearing the uniform belonging to the rail line and picking up and loading things back onto the cars.

“Excuse me,” Bella muttered, her voice lost in the hustle and bustle of those workers as she approached the man standing slightly catty-corner from the ticket booth. “Excuse me,” she tried again, raising her voice to be heard better. “Do you happen to know where I can find a Shelton Milroy?”

The man behind the counter eyed her beadily, his black eyes sweeping her person and her belongings narrowly before moving the wad of dip held in one cheek to the other. “Shelton Milroy?” he asked, his fuzzy black brows furrowing thoughtfully.

A glimmer of what might have been recognition seemed to glow behind his dark gaze, giving Bella hope. She nodded eagerly, readjusting her grip on her cases and smiling somewhat tremulously. “Yes, that’s right. I was supposed to meet him at the train station, but I’m afraid that there must have been some kind of misunderstanding….”

“Miss,” the worker sighed, irritation lining his tone of forced politeness, “do I look like I care who you are or aren’t supposed to be meeting? I work here, selling tickets, not helping lost misses find their runaway beaus.”

His words were sharp and biting, highlighting that insecurity that already dwelled within Bella’s breast. She fought off the awkwardness it produced, smiling again despite the ugliness from the man before her. “Ah, I see,” she muttered politely, stepping back and sighing. “Thank you anyway,” she offered.

She hesitated then, looking from one end of the station to the other, trying to will Shelton into just appearing with a ready apology and excuse on his lips for having been so late.

It was just wishful thinking, though.

No man stepped suddenly from the shadows. No one gave her so much as a second glance as they bustled past. Instead, she just stood awkwardly in the path before the ticket booth, her lower lip pulled between her teeth as she tried to think of what she should do next.

“Are you going to buy a ticket back to wherever you came from then?” the worker behind the counter demanded, sounding somewhat put out with her lack of response.

“I’m sorry, what?” Bella asked dazedly, her mind catching up with the question he had asked her too late, shaking her head already before he could repeat himself. “No, oh, no. I won’t be needing that,” she dismissed with more certainty than she rightly felt.

“Then how’s about getting out of the way of what customers might want to purchase a ticket?” the man asked, his voice monotone.

“Of course,” Bella demurred, keeping her own irritation from seeping into her words. She had no idea what kind of day the ticket worker might have had or what had made him so ornery this early in the morning, but that didn’t give her cause to be ugly in return.

She just moved off to the side, only stopping once she had a better handle on all of her things. “Do you, perhaps, happen to know which way I would need to go to get to the sheriff’s office then?” Bella asked instead, keeping her tone overly friendly with a smile on her face despite the discomfort of doing so or even asking at all.

The man’s face clouded somewhat, suspicion burning in his gaze as he stared at her, but his tone was more neutrally polite when he did answer. “Right out those doors and to the left, if you hang a right up at the street, you should come to it in no time at all. The sheriff expecting you?”

Bella grinned, fighting her disappointment with having been forgotten, her own irritation with how she had been treated so far, and the vaguely alien feeling of being so new in a town so foreign to her as she hefted all of the belongings she had brought with her to her “new life” in her arms.

“Thank you so much,” she gushed, ignoring his question entirely and turning to follow the directions he had given her.

There was still every chance in the world that something had come up to waylay Shelton or that some misunderstanding had separated the two of them. She refused to give in to her feelings of inadequacy and nerves. Instead, she would go and find Shelton for herself, getting the explanation straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.

The bright light of the Arizonan sun assaulted her as she stepped out into it, her hands too full to shield her eyes and her heart heavy with a combination of anxiety and exhaustion.

She just needed to keep moving.

One foot in front of the other, she was out of the train station. Now she needed to take a left and then a right. One foot in front of the other again and again until she made it to the sheriff’s station where, God willing, answers would be waiting for her.

Chapter Two

“Explain it to me like I’m a child who doesn’t want to listen,” a firm, smooth voice instructed. Ambrose was fighting the temptation to flip the folder that his elbow rested on, talking to the man that stood in front of him with all of the patience of the parent of the child he was referencing versus the child itself.

“It was my goat!” the older man exclaimed, his gray eyes shining with a kind of angry fervor. “Mine!”

“Yes, sir,” Ambrose acknowledged, nodding in a conciliatory way as he stopped the man from going off on that same tangent again. “We’ve established that it was your goat, and I understand your upset over having lost said goat. What I’m asking is for the explanation of how your goat ended up in the road and how it being in the road puts Mr. Taylor here, who was driving the cart, at fault for it having been run over.”

Ambrose kept his voice even, his own irritation with having to repeat the same question again for the umpteenth time in the last half hour, just barely making it into his words. Mr. Taylor, for his part, stood with his hat in hand, staring stonily ahead and refusing to speak again. Although, honestly, that might have been for the way that Old Man McGuyver kept cutting him off whenever he tried.

“You see, my goat and me,” Old Man McGuyver started again, swallowing thickly and rearranging the way he stood so quickly that his bones seemed to creak in protest, “we had been going over to the butcher shop to see how much we could make.”

“Off of selling the goat?” Ambrose interrupted, surprised that finally, they seemed to be getting more of the story than just protestations of ownership and demands of payment.

“That’s right,” Old Man McGuyver harrumphed, sending a flinty-eyed glare Mr. Taylor’s way. “We were on our way to see how much money we could make off of selling the goat, and my foot got caught in the loose gravel off of the side of the road, and I went to shake it free.” The old man moved as if to pantomime the movement he had made to get his foot free, stopping only once it became obvious that doing so might make him topple. “And the goat pulled free of my rope, going into the road.”

“And then was run over?” Ambrose verified, tapping his pen on the paper in front of him and swallowing the exasperation welling in the back of his throat.

“Yes, Sheriff, by this hooligan here! He came turning around the corner all fast, going God only knows how fast on that road!”

“There’s no corner where the goat was run over,” Mr. Taylor objected, sounding somehow both irritated and bored in the same breath.

“There is no corner, Mr. Mcgyver unless you’re suggesting this took place on a different road than where I met the two of you?” Ambrose asked, watching as the old man’s glare grew even more pronounced.

“Corner or not! This man was driving so fast that he nearly popped my hip out just passing me, and I want fair payment!”

“For the goat?” Ambrose checked, lifting his eyebrows and barely waiting for the old man to nod before continuing. “Well, that’s easy, then, Mr. McGuyver. I happen to know that Sam, the butcher, will take this goat here dead or alive. Since your intention was to have him butchered anyway, I don’t much see how some tenderizing of the meat beforehand would affect any of that. So, what I will order is that Mr. Taylor here transport said goat to the butcher for you, having run over it, so that you can go collect the payment. Does that satisfy everyone here?”

“Finally,” Mr. Taylor grunted, pushing past the deputy standing behind him and walking off without so much as a nod in the old man’s direction.

Old Man McGuyver followed after him, complaining loudly about how it wasn’t much in the way of justice but not arguing any either.

Ambrose all but deflated in the aftermath of them leaving, sinking down into the counter that he had been leaning on and scrubbing his hands over his face and through his hair. He didn’t have time to be settling such petty disputes, much less taking that long to handle them, but Old Man McGuyver was well known for being ornery, and Ambrose knew he wouldn’t have listened to anyone else.

“Sheriff?” A soft voice interrupted his brief interlude, sounding hesitant. “You are the sheriff, aren’t you?”

Ambrose looked up, pushing himself back off of the counter to look at the stranger that stood before him. She was a tiny wisp of a thing, barely tall enough to be eye level with his chest, her dark brown eyes so deep they would have looked black if it weren’t for the amber swirls throughout them.

Her lips parted slightly, her gaze dropping shyly from his own and falling to her feet as she set the suitcases in her hand down to stand more evenly. It was obvious that she was weary, her fair skin a slightly gray hue that would suggest an unusual paleness, the freckles covering her face and neck standing out all the more darkly for it.

“I am,” Ambrose forced out after a moment, keeping his voice even despite his surprise and obvious attraction. The woman looked like some faerie trap turned human, her lips twitching as she finally smiled at him.

“Oh, good,” she breathed.

“I’m Sheriff Ambrose Wittaker. What can I help you with, ma’am?”

The woman shifted again, tucking a stray auburn curl back behind one ear as she surveyed him in return. “I’m Bella Zimmerman. I’m new here. I was supposed to be meeting my fiancé at the train station this afternoon, but he never showed up. I’m sure there must be some misunderstanding or some miscommunication even, so I was hoping you could help me locate him?”

Fiancé. Of course. Ambrose pushed away his own disappointment with a ready grin, stepping out from behind the counter. It only made sense that she would be engaged, looking at her and listening to the gentle way in which she spoke. “What’s the name of this fiancé? I’ll walk you over.”

He knew everyone in town. It wasn’t a boast or brag, just a simple fact. Even as he asked, he was wracking his brain for which young man it might be from town, trying to think of who might have mentioned a new girl or long-term plan.

Bella looked relieved, even more so as he bent to grab her cases from her, trying to save her the trouble of lugging them around any longer when it was clear she had already been doing so for a while. “Thank you,” she breathed, smiling as she followed him towards the front of the station.

“I know he said he worked on one of the farms around here,” she muttered, smoothing her skirts out as they walked. That narrowed it down, but unfortunately, meant he might not personally know the lad in question. “Shelton Milroy,” she finally exclaimed, as if only just realizing that she hadn’t yet answered.

Ambrose stopped dead in his tracks, his eyes closing in disappointment.

“Did you say, Shelton Milroy?” Ambrose asked, hoping against all hope that she was going to correct him or say that he had misheard. When he turned to look at her, though, it was to see an expression of surprise and trepidation.

Bella’s eyebrows furrowed, her hands fidgeting somewhat as she met his stark gaze frankly. “Yes sir, I did. Is there a problem?” Ambrose could hear the fear in her voice as if she was expecting him to tell her that the man had fallen dead earlier that morning, or worse, didn’t even exist.

You could say that, Ambrose wanted to say, biting back the words with real remorse as he watched the girl’s features pinch. “How long have you known Mr. Milroy?” Ambrose asked instead, curiosity filling the tone he fought to keep from turning too serious.

“Oh, well, we’ve been writing to one another for a handful of months now,” Bella explained, shifting from one foot to the other. The nervous energy coming off her was high, making Ambrose feel even worse about what he knew.

“And you’ve never met him in person?” Ambrose asked in surprise, his eyebrows lifting.

“Well, no,” Bella mumbled, dropping her gaze as her cheeks flushed a deep, dark pink. “I answered his posting for a mail-order bride,” she confided, her voice dropping somewhat as if she expected him to view it shamefully.

The truth was, those ads were becoming more and more popular in these parts. Ambrose couldn’t fault people for turning to them. It offered a convenient solution to an annoying problem.

“Follow me, Ms. Zimmerman,” Ambrose offered, gentling his voice some and using the hand not holding her cases to usher her to the other side of the station and into his office.

“Alright,” Bella murmured, sounding even more anxious for being made to wait. She walked carefully in front of him, stopping just inside the door until he followed her. Even as she approached the desk on the far side of the room, she watched Ambrose out of the corner of her eyes, making him feel as if he were being weighed and measured.

Ambrose set her cases down next to the door as he closed it, following her inside and rounding the desk to the other side. Then, gesturing for her to sit, he took his own seat behind the desk and sighed, feeling the weight of his position pressing him down.

“I hate to be the one to inform you of this, Ms. Zimmerman, really, I do. We’ve had a string of robberies, particularly recently a bank robbery, and just yesterday, we picked up Mr. Shelton Milroy in connection to said bank robbery.”

Ambrose watched Bella’s face fall, her anxiety morphing into an expression that Ambrose recognized all too well. She looked lost, suddenly smaller and more alone dwarfed in the chair across from him. Even as she seemed to process the words, she shrunk in on herself, wrapping her arms slowly around her middle and inhaling heavily.

“He was caught robbing the bank?” Bella repeated in question, her lips downturned.

“No, ma’am, not quite. He is, however, one of our main suspects-” Ambrose cut off as Bella looked up hopefully, the faintest glimmer in the depths of her eyes.

“So, you aren’t sure it was him?” she asked, her eyebrows furrowing.

“Well, no, ma’am, but he is still a suspect. And as such, he is being held here in the jail.” Ambrose spoke slowly, watching as Bella’s expression changed.

“Sheriff Whittaker, I understand what you’re saying, but I gave my word to marry the man, and if his guilt isn’t ironclad…” She trailed off, a note of determination beneath her words.

Ambrose shifted at the desk, unsure of how to approach what she had said. It wasn’t ironclad, but he didn’t have the heart to tell her that it was more than just idle suspicion that was making him hold the man she had promised herself to.

“You can call me Ambrose,” he offered gently, pushing back from the desk and standing once more. “I understand wanting to keep your word. If you’d like, I can take you to see Shelton in the jail. I can’t allow you to visit him for long, but….”

He shouldn’t have been taking her at all, but he couldn’t help the sympathetic twinge from how lost she looked. A part of him, though, was hoping that she would deny the offer.

“Sheriff!” a voice called in unison with the sound of a few short knocks on the door he had only just closed. “I need you to sign off on this!”

Ambrose exhaled, looking over to Bella momentarily before nodding and standing from his desk. “I’ll be right back. Take your time to think about it,” he offered, opening the door and slipping through the crack to face his deputy.

Maybe, if he were being honest with himself, it was more than just a small part of him that hoped Bella wouldn’t want to go see Shelton. A girl like her deserved something better than the lowlife he knew he held in his cells.

Chapter Three

Being arrested in connection to a bank robbery was, as far as excuses went, a pretty solid one for having missed meeting her at the train station, Bella thought. It was certainly a situation that was beyond Shelton’s control. She shifted in the seat that Sheriff Whittaker – Ambrose, she reminded herself – had left her in.

It was hardly the situation that she had expected to find herself in upon arriving in Creek.

Then again, several months previous to this, she would have found the idea of traveling across the country to marry a man she had met via a newspaper ad to be an unexpected situation as well. But, as hard as it was to believe, this was the situation that she now needed to navigate.

One foot in front of the other.

A part of her wanted to tell the sheriff that she didn’t need to go see Shelton at all and ask him how she could earn the fare to go back home. Not that she had any home to go back to, but still, the idea was there.

Another part of her wanted to deny the very idea that Shelton could have done what he was accused of on instinct alone. Not because she felt like the way he had presented himself in his letters was beyond all reproach and made it impossible for him to do such a thing, but solely because of the fact that she had promised her life to the man.

What did that make her, the fiancée of an accused bank robber?

It wasn’t how she had seen this journey going.

A gentle knock at the door broke her out of her reverie, her eyes lifting in time to see the sheriff standing in the doorway of his office and looking sympathetically at her.

He also wasn’t what she had been expecting.

For some reason, she had been picturing a gruff, older man with a gray or graying handlebar mustache and bristles growing out of near every pore in his face. What she had been met with, upon arriving, had almost tied her tongue. Asking him for assistance had been difficult enough on its own.

Ambrose Whittaker was tall, at least compared to her, although even his deputy stood a half head higher than him. She supposed that would make him about medium height to most people, with tanned skin and bright gray eyes that seemed kind and warm even just looking at them. The faint laugh lines around his eyes and the ready twitch of his mustache made him seem more of a mischievous teenager than the sheriff.

He had been nothing but professional, though, helping her and breaking the news to her more gently than she would have expected given the situation.

“If you’d like to just sit in here for a little bit and take it easy while making your decision,” Ambrose offered her from the doorway, not making his way back into the space despite the fact that it was his. “you are more than welcome.”

Bella looked around her, gathering her courage and shaking her head resolutely. “No, that’s okay,” she demurred, standing suddenly and smoothing the skirts of her dress out as she did. “I do want to see Shelton,” she decided, sounding more confident than she actually felt.

She thought she saw faint disappointment enter the sheriff’s steel gaze, but it was gone as quickly as she imagined it, his nod firm as he opened the door further.

“Of course,” he agreed, pushing her cases more out of the way of the door with one toe of his boot and stepping back.

“I just came all of this way,” Bella explained as she passed him, her tone plaintive even to her ears. “With what I’ve already promised, with my word given, it’s only right to give him a chance at explaining himself.”

The open ease with which Ambrose had regarded her before seemed to be gone, though she couldn’t call his expression now unfriendly or stifled. Instead, he just seemed more reserved as he gently took her elbow, leading her down the hall and towards a set of doors off to the side.

“It is your decision, Ms. Zimmerman,” he told her kindly, the rough calluses of his fingers only briefly squeezing her arm as if to reassure her.

Not for the first time since meeting him, she was glad of his presence at her side.

He was calm, cool, and collected even while leading her out into a separate area of the station. He didn’t seem judgmental or upset, even though Bella thought he might have the right to be, considering she was calling into question his belief that the arrest of her fiancé was valid.

Ambrose just walked with her, ushering her through the brightly lit room and back towards a set of cells near the back corner. Even from across the room, she could see the men held in both of them, neither of them even turning at the sound of their approach.

They were both large men, larger than the sheriff by a hand at least, and Bella tried telling herself it was this combined with the sight of them inside of the cells in the first place that made the two of them seem so intimidating.

“Milroy,” Ambrose called out, letting go of Bella’s elbow.

The man in the cell closest to them turned, his brown eyes glittering with an emotion that looked almost like malice in the lower lighting on this end of the room. Bella blanched, even just thinking as much, but not even a blink later, and instead, he was just viewing the two of them with abject curiosity.

“Here to drop the charges, Sheriff?” Shelton asked, walking slowly over to the side of the cell that Bella and Ambrose stood on.

Ambrose bristled somewhat, but Bella ignored it, watching Shelton’s reaction instead. Or rather, Shelton’s lack of reaction.

“No, sir, you know I can’t do that,” Ambrose replied stiffly, taking a step back and leaning forward to capture Bella’s gaze instead. “I’ll be right over here if you need me. Unfortunately, I can only allow you a few minutes. I hope you understand.”

“I’m allowed visitors now?” Shelton asked, speaking over the end of Ambrose’s statement. “Sheriff, you’ve got no proof-”

“And we’ll discuss that another time,” Ambrose’s own voice rose, stopping Shelton with a steady glare. “Your fiancée has requested a few minutes with you,” he informed him matter-of-factly. “You take that time to talk to her. Save the rest for the judge.”

Bella’s stomach twisted from all of the animosity in the room, her fingers curling into her palms as she stepped away from Ambrose resolutely. No matter what comfort and security Ambrose provided, Shelton was her betrothed, not him.

“My fiancée?” Shelton repeated, his eyes narrowing as he turned to look Bella up and down appraisingly. His heavy brows were furrowed, recognition lighting the back of his gaze with a sort of stunted recognition. “Bella?”

Bella’s lips pulled, the best attempt at a smile that she could offer him, given the situation. “You have me at a bit of a disadvantage, sir, being that I can’t recognize you from any photograph.”

The smile that lit Shelton’s face made the rough edges seem to soften, his body finishing the trek to the edge of the cell as he wrapped his fingers around the bars. “This isn’t how I wanted us to meet,” he said softly, his gaze dropping. When he lifted it to look back up, it was with a glare in the direction that Ambrose had stepped off in. “This isn’t how we should have met,” he repeated.

“Me either,” Bella offered, a half-smile tugging at the corners of her lips. “The sheriff says that you’re accused of being involved in a bank robbery….”

“I didn’t do it,” Shelton professed immediately, his tone full of righteous indignation. “They just got me and my coworker here because they weren’t able to find anyone else. I swear, Bella, I would never have sullied my name in such a way.”

Bella nodded, trying to fight the discomfort in her stomach and view her betrothed through the romantic lens that she knew she ought to. She tried telling herself that it was just the presence of the bars and metal between them, the discomfort of the situation as a whole, but looking into his eyes, she didn’t know if she was seeing sincerity or something else.

“I believe you,” Bella offered, reaching hesitantly forward to touch his curled knuckles with the tips of her fingers.

The look on Shelton’s face was unlike anything Bella had seen before. His abject disbelief slowly morphed into something else, and the intensity of it near stole her breath. “If you just wait… I’ll be out of here in no time, I know that this isn’t -”

“Time’s up,” Ambrose called from the other end of the room, cutting Shelton off.

“I was just talking to my fiancée,” Shelton snapped, his gaze narrowing again.

Bella felt the need to soothe the room, her fingers pressing with the slightest bit more pressure against Shelton’s before she stepped back. “It’s okay. He did tell me we only had a short minute,” Bella offered, swallowing her discomfort as best as she was able. “I’m not going anywhere. I gave you my word, Mr. Milroy.”

---

“A Bride’s Troubling Dilemma” is an Amazon Best-Selling novel, check it out here!

The day her father suddenly passed away, Bella Zimmerman lost her best friend. Getting on the train to Creek, Arizona meant that everything was about to change forever. It was inevitable since she decided to be a mail-order bride for a man she only knew through letters. What she never expected to hear was that her betrothed was just arrested as a suspect in a robbery… With no money and no home to return to, her silver lining comes in the form of the welcoming local sheriff. As he helps her settle into town, Bella becomes fascinated by him and soon worries she may face a dilemma. If her betrothed is released, will she choose to break her word to him or her own heart?

Ambrose Whittaker is as committed to his job as Creek’s Sheriff as he is to his family. When the most beautiful woman he has ever set eyes on comes looking to marry a man he just arrested, Ambrose feels compelled to help her. He already has enough on his plate fighting crime and keeping an eye on his troubled sisters. Yet he can’t seem to stay away from Bella and quickly realizes that he is undeniably charmed by her kind heart and quiet strength. Can he ignore his heart forever though and accept that she is still promised to another man?

No matter how many times Bella tells herself she should honor her promise, something about Ambrose keeps pulling her further away from that decision. When Bella’s life gets threatened not once but twice, Andre realizes just how far he could go to protect her. Can Ambrose save Bella from danger and convince her to choose him and their powerful connection over heartbreak?

“A Bride’s Troubling Dilemma” is a historical western romance novel of approximately 55,000 words. No cheating, no cliffhangers, and a guaranteed happily ever after.

Get your copy from Amazon!