I have a special treat today. I’m posting an excerpt from Award-Winning author Fran Shaff’s romance novel, Mari’s Miracle. I hope you take as much pleasure in this powerful scene as I have.

 Enjoy!

1914. Marigold Mahoney’s father has insisted she leave his palatial home in Minneapolis to teach school in dusty, little Heart Junction, South Dakota. Grit Truman agrees to be Mari’s driver even though he finds the spoiled little spitfire a challenge. But when a woman is as attractive as Mari, a man should welcome the tribulation. Sparks fly, and Grit begins to wonder who will end up taming whom.

EXCERPT

Mari’s father, an Irish immigrant, finally explains in his thick brogue why he sent her from his palatial home in Minneapolis to tiny, primitive Heart Junction, South Dakota.

“I’ve sent you to Heart Junction so you can learn to be independent, to take care of yourself.  You need to learn how to take care of yourself, Mari.  Perhaps when you’ve heard the story I am about to tell, you will comprehend why your gaining your independence is so important.”

Mari withdrew her hands from her father and folded her arms in front of her.

Wilson sat back and sighed.  “I had hoped all of my life that I could spare you from hearing this story, but I see that I must do something drastic to try to get you to understand why I placed you in Heart Junction.”

Mari bit her lips shut.  Maybe she’d listen to her father, and maybe she wouldn’t.

“You can wipe that obstinate look off of your face, Little Flower.  What I am about to say won’t be easy for you to hear, but, Mari, you must listen.”

She remained stubbornly silent.

“When your mother and I decided to send you on this journey, we did so because we feared what might happen to you if you did not know how to take care of yourself.  Since we made that decision, things have transpired that make us surer than ever that we made exactly the right decision.”

Mari opened her mouth to express a retort about her placement in Heart Junction, but she decided it was probably better to remain silent.

“We’re living in changing times, Mari,” Wilson continued. “While much of the progress that is going on around us is wonderful, there is also much that is happening that could be very dangerous to us.”  He paused and took a deep breath.  “There is trouble in the world, Mari.  Things are quite unsettled in Europe.  War has broken out over there.  Thousands of soldiers have already died.  High sources in America say it is very possible that our country may be drawn into the foreign skirmish.  If that happens, it won’t be only your brothers in the military who are at risk, Mari.  All of us will be in trouble.  Our economy may collapse.  If that happened, everything we know in life would then be subject to change.”  He squeezed her hand.  “Mari, if we lost our fortune, you would have nothing to live on when your mother and I are gone.  You would be at the mercy of your circumstances.  You could even find it necessary to sell yourself into marriage just so you could survive.  Or worse…”

“Father!  How can you say such things?  Why would you even think them?”

“I think these things because I’ve seen them happen.  I’ve seen horrors, Mari, that no human being should see.  I’ve known starvation, extreme poverty, frostbite and battles of all kinds.”

“No, Father!  These things could never have happened to you.  You are the strongest man I know.”

“I’m strong because I have known misery and poverty, Little Flower.  It is in adversity that we gain our greatest strength.  It is in survival that we learn to move forward.”

Mari placed her hands over her ears.  “Father, stop.  I don’t want to hear anymore.”

Wilson pulled her hands away from her ears.  “No matter how unpleasant you find my story, Mari, you are going to listen to what I have to say.”

Mari lifted her chin.  “If you insist, Father, then I shall listen.”

“I do insist,” he said firmly.  He sat forward and looked at her intently.  “Your mother, as it often happens with women, has suffered far more than I.  When I met her, she was subject to a tyrant who expected a great deal more from her than merely her service as his scrub girl.  He treated her terribly indecently, abominably.  That man was the devil’s own.”

“Mother was a scrub girl?”  This couldn’t be true!

“Indeed she was, and there’d be no shame in that, if that was all she was.  But her employer demanded much more of her.”  He closed his eyes tightly before he opened them again and went on.  “She suffered terribly, Mari, more horribly than any woman should suffer.  I wanted to take her away from Corrigan the moment I saw him touching her in his courtyard as I came upon his home to make a delivery for the man who employed me.  I distracted him with my business long enough for your mother to slip away from the courtyard.  When Corrigan went back inside his house, I searched for your mother.  I found her crying in the bushes behind the house.  I knew the moment I looked into her eyes that she’d been degraded and hurt by the powerful Mr. Corrigan.”

“Mother worked for a man who treated her unfairly?  It can’t be true.”

“It’s true, Little Flower, and he did much worse than treat her unfairly.”

Mari almost asked exactly what Mr. Corrigan had done to her mother, but she wasn’t sure she’d want to know.  If he’d beaten her mother…  A sick feeling filled her stomach, and she looked away from her father.  No.  Nothing that awful could have happened to her mother.

“Child, look at me while I’m speakin’ to ya,” Wilson said sternly.

Mari looked at him once more.

“Erin lost her parents when she was only fourteen.  She had no choice but to indenture herself if she wanted to stay alive, but she’d made no bargain like the one Corrigan forced upon her,” he said, shaking his head as his eyes grew dark.  “She was almost sixteen when I met her.  She was as beautiful back then as she is now.”

“Did you fall in love with her beauty, Father?”

“Fall in love?” he asked, furrowing his brows.  “No, darlin’.  As beautiful as your mother was then, neither of us had any thoughts of love.  All of our energy had to be focused on survival.”  He paused and took a deep, soulful breath.  “My heart went out to Erin when I saw her suffering.  I wanted to help her, but I didn’t know just how such a wish might be fulfilled.  Seeing her suffering troubled me something fierce, and I knew I couldn’t live with myself if I left her to the biddings of Devil Corrigan.  Eventually, I found a way for her to get out of her degrading circumstances.”

“What did you do, Father?”

He took another deep breath.  “My employer was intending to go to America.  He needed servants to accompany him on the long voyage.  I wanted desperately to go with him, but the only servants he’d intended to take along with him had to be a married couple.  He wanted both a male and female servant, and he could afford only one set of quarters on the ship.  Only a married couple would suit both his needs and his moral code.  I offered marriage to Erin so she could get out of her bad circumstances, and, by accepting my proposal, she offered me the opportunity to fulfill my dream of coming to America.”

“You married Mother when you barely knew her?  You married her without loving her?”

“Yes.  It seemed like the logical thing to do at the time.  By getting married we both got what we wanted.”

“But you and Mother are so much in love.  I believed you had married for love and been in love all of your lives.”

Wilson chuckled unexpectedly.  “My innocent little flower.  You have such an unrealistic idea of life pictured in your head.”  He touched her cheek gently.  “As it turned out, we could barely stand each other,” he said, drawing back his hand.  “The ride on that ship across the ocean was one of the most miserable times of our lives.  The only time worse was when we tried to find work once we landed in America after our employer discharged us.  Many folks in New York hated the Irish.  We lived on the streets for a long time.  We needed each other to survive, to keep food in our stomachs and to keep warm when it got cold.  Between the two of us we found many ways to stay alive.”  An odd look of good and bad reverie crossed his face.  “It wasn’t until Erin nearly died from a feverish disease that I realized how much she had come to mean to me.  Once she recovered, I saw to it that she grew to love me the way I’d grown to love her.  It was through our commitment and our need for each other that we grew to love each other.”

“Father, I am astonished!”

“I hope you are much more than astonished, Little Flower.  I hope that you now understand how important it is that you are able to take care of yourself.  I hope you comprehend just how hard life can truly be when circumstances get bad enough.  I don’t want you to ever be in a situation like your mother was in, nor do I want you to be as unskilled and helpless as we both were when it came to finding a way to survive.”

“But you’ve become such a success in life, Father.”

“Because I was lucky a few times, and because I worked very hard, often with little or no sleep and with lots of doing without, I did eventually make my fortune.  Many others of our people were not so lucky, Mari.  Many of them went on to live lives of poverty and starvation.  I don’t ever want my children to suffer as we did or as so many of our fellow Irish have suffered.”  He touched her chin.  “You think what I’ve done placing you here, Mari, was cruel, but I had good reason for my actions.  And now you know what they are, don’t you, child?”

Mari’s Miracle

By Fran Shaff

Contemporary Sweet Romance

Create Space, Paperback

ISBN:  1438254598

Smashwords, E-book

Buy at Smashwords:  http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/9030

Buy at Amazon:  http://www.amazon.com/Maris-Miracle-Three-Heart-Junction/dp/1438254598/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1266869912&sr=8-3

Fran Shaff Website:  http://sites.google.com/site/fshaff

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