Zina Abbott
Marigold Featured
She never wanted children of her own. He never wanted a wife. Without a family to care about him, he could end up in an orphanage. Content with being a spinster schoolteacher, Marigold Calloway never thought she was the kind of woman who wanted her own children. She never suspected she had a maternal bone in her body until, after her younger sister, Rose, whom Marigold had raised from the time the ...
As a teenager, unlike her older brother, Eleanor Daley survived the Spanish Flu pandemic. Only a few years away from voting age when women in her state finally won the right to vote, she proudly voted in the 1924 election. In 1925, Eleanor breaks free of her overbearing, over-protective parents and moves to Anchorage, Alaska, where men greatly outnumber women. She accepts a job as a switchboa ...
Fleeing the war-torn German Empire, Brunhilde “Hilde” Schuster immigrates to the United States where her cousin’s family teaches her rudimentary English. She finds work as a caretaker for the elderly member of a family whose German ancestors immigrated decades earlier. Carl Becker, whose parents fled Germany after the failed 1848 revolution before his birth, feels an attraction to the new companio ...
Searching for a new home for herself and her younger sister, Dolly, Carrie Watson decided they should write to two Baggs, Wyoming, cattle ranchers seeking wives so they could live close to each other. Too bad the man she wrote to never responded. Annoyed with her potential husband’s disregard, and after being warned that part of Wyoming was outlaw country, Carrie decided against her and Dolly ...
Lucy Baxter lived peacefully in Kansas with her aunt, Caroline Wilcox, her deceased mother’s sister until, by 1863, the War Between the States made life for two lone women insufferable—and dangerous. Her dream of teaching school is shattered. With her fiancé, her Uncle Wilcox, and two Wilcox cousins among the missing and believed dead, Aunt Caroline has decided the best option for getting both her ...
Ever since her husband was killed in a logging accident, Willow Morrow has been struggling to take care of her two-year-old daughter, Ila Mae, and survive. Left with limited funds and no family or friendship ties to the area, the lumber owner brought her to Sonora, California, the largest nearby city, and dumped her off with her husband’s final paycheck and two weeks extra wages. She feels fo ...
After being forced by a stranger, Florence Crowley suspects she might be with child. Her sister recommends Florence seek a husband through correspondence—one who lives far, far away. Rejected! At the end of a long train ride, her groom informs her he refuses to raise another man’s baby. He buys a return ticket but does not provide additional cash for food, Florence’s funds are limited. By the time ...
Beulah Beatrice “Be-Be” Connor, who is approaching the age of thirty, gave up on marriage after the second man who had courted her left and never returned. Unlike the two maiden great-aunts, after whom she was named, she did not have an inheritance to fall back on. She worked almost half her life for her own support. When the café job in Wichita, Kansas, disappeared as the Panic of 1893 conti ...
Jocelyn not only came to the realization that she reached the age of bordering on being a spinster, she also recognized why the local men did not choose to court her. She knew it was not because her looks or personality repelled men. She could sum it up in one word—Mama. Mama had always been opinionated and eager to tell others the best way to do things, but her tendency to insert herself int ...
Harry Bradford is a lawyer and sometimes detective. Some call him a bounty hunter. With half of his face torn to pieces toward the end of the Civil War, people turn away from him. He fled his native Indiana where people did not wish to hire anyone who reminded them of the war. He hoped to find among the drovers, stock yards, railroads, homesteaders and trouble-making drifters pouring into Abile ...
Enjoy reading these first three romances inspired by the 1878 total solar eclipse. Although the books were originally published in several multiple author projects, for the first time I have put them in order of occurrence. MAIL ORDER BLYTHE – the book that started it all. Blythe is forced out of her job as a maid after her employer discovers she is with child due to the lecherous behavior of ...
Enjoy reading these second three romances inspired by the 1878 total solar eclipse. In the first book, Mail Order Blythe, Eli Morgan’s mother gives him two letters from prospective brides. Eli promises to write before the end of summer. Once he finds the woman he chooses to marry, he convinces his two professor friends—a wedding gifts—to each take a letter and send a response. FIGGY PUDDING BY F ...
For years, Varinia Jewell yearned for Arnie to one day look her direction. When her parents invite him and his widower father to join them for Christmas dinner, she decides to bake him one of her favorite pies—lemon meringue. Only, when her mother and sister leave to deliver several figt sacks of Christmas cookies, she discovers the lemons she purchased are missing. With no time to shop for ...
A time for love in nineteenth century America, a time to be thankful. Shortly before she prepares to start her third year courses at the University of Iowa, Lila Cleod is called home. She leaves the Sewell family where she also works as a nanny and boards the train for Denver, Colorado. Her father has died. After the funeral, she will learn if he left her, his oldest daughter by his first marriage ...
As arable farmland grows scarce, the United States opens up former sections of Indian Territory for homesteading. Those who want to claim land must make a run for it. Rose Calloway feels guilty about living off her sister’s, meager schoolmarm’s wages. She responded to a matrimonial advertisement and sees a promising future with Joshua Kent. Joshua Kent, landless and working as a farrier, sees prom ...
