Instant Bride

Chapter One

David Andrew Dalery swung his team into the rutted road that wound its way five miles from his parent's farm into Willcox.  The jostling of the wagon scarcely registered in his angry mind.  He was always upset after a visit with his mother and sisters but today he was furious.

"It's just too much," he muttered through clinched jaws. "Try to pay a friendly visit to my folks and all I get is that hogwash about marryin’!  You'd think that was all Ma wanted of me—to get married and produce a son to carry on the Dalery name!"

Inside his head he could still see the snapping dark eyes of his mother and hear her strident voice, "David Andrew (everyone but his mother called him Dave) how can you be so absolutely selfish?  Your father isn't getting any younger and you aren't even married yet!  Are you forgetting that you are the sole remaining male Dalery?  If you don't give us a man child, the Dalery name will vanish from off the face of this earth!"

Cracking through his brain now was the condemning voice of his younger sister, Vernie, "It isn't as if you couldn't find a girl, Dave!  Julie Sue would give her eye teeth to marry you and you know it!"

Didn't he know it?  He would be blind and deaf if he didn't!  Vernie had been pushing him at her best friend, Julie Sue, for three years, ever since the girl had turned fourteen years old!  And Julie Sue had been smirking and making eyes at him ever since she was twelve! 

It wasn't that Vernie's best friend wasn't pretty.  With long blond hair like silkweed and gray-blue eyes fringed in long golden eyelashes, she would probably have caught him in her matrimonial snare long ago if it hadn't been for all the infernal finagling that everyone had been doing to get them hitched-up!

And for the fact that even at twenty-three, Dave still savored his freedom!  All his life he had been ordered around by females!  His mother was a natural-born nagger and his two sisters were almost as bad.  Pity the poor men they had married!

Florence, two years his senior, had been married seven years and had borne five children, three still living.  Vernie, eighteen, had been married for better than a year and was in a family way—due in a few months. It's a good thing their husbands are both wild about them or they couldn't stand their nagging, he thought darkly. Vernie's husband Luke had been hired to help Pa with his farm when David had moved to the old Oliver homestead, and he and Vernie still lived there.

"If you keep dragging your feet Julie Sue will marry someone else like that Kemper boy that's been making eyes at her lately," Vernie had warned.