His Bewildering Bride (The Brides of Paradise Ranch - Spicy Version Book 3) by Merry Farmer Page A

name is Olga. I’ve come to tidy your room.”
    “Oh.” Wendy’s face fell before she could recover from the disappointment of not seeing Travis. And why should she be so flustered about a man who she had only just met and barely knew? “Thank you, Olga, please come in.” She stepped aside, gesturing for the maid to enter.
    “I hope you don’t mind,” Olga went on in her lilting, Scandinavian accent, crossing to put the basket on the small table by the window. She took out a rag and set to work right away cleaning the windows. “Truthfully, I thought you’d gone out.”
    “No, I was just working.” Although it didn’t seem right to work now, not with someone else in the room. Wendy crossed to the bed and checked the stitching she’d done that morning to be sure she’d come to a good stopping place.
    “I was certain Travis would come back to town to take you to breakfast,” Olga went on, arm working like a fury as she washed the window. “But everybody knows Travis is very responsible. He must still be helping out at Paradise Ranch. I bet he’ll—Ooh!”
    Olga glanced over her shoulder at Wendy, then broke off her rambling comments with gasp. She pulled away from the window and skipped across the room, clutching the window rag to her chest.
    “Is that what you were working on?” she asked.
    “Mmm hmm.” Wendy showed her dress to the excitable maid.
    Olga reached out, but stopped short of touching Wendy’s work. “My hands are dirty,” she explained. “But it’s so beautiful. You have such small, even stitches. I noticed how fine your dresses are when I unpacked them yesterday.”
    “That was you?”
    “ Ja . I hope you don’t mind.”
    “Not at all. Thank you.”
    Olga glanced up at her with wide, blue eyes. “Did you make all of those dresses yourself?”
    “I did.” Wendy grinned. Olga’s enthusiasm was infectious.
    “I was a seamstress back in Sweden,” Olga revealed.
    “You were?” A sudden bolt of kinship made Wendy warm to the tiny maid even more, and made the gears in her mind turn.
    “ Ja . My family had a shop in Gothenburg. I was sad to leave it, if truth be told.”
    “Why did you?” Wendy sat on the edge of her bed, gesturing for Olga to sit with her. She was a resident of Haskell now, and married or not, it was about time she made friends with other residents. And since sweet Olga didn’t seem to bat an eyelash at how different they were, Wendy decided to focus on the ways they were the same.
    Olga shrugged as she sat. “My Papa made the decision that we would all move to America to seek our fortunes in the great, open West.”
    “Did he find his fortune?”
    Olga’s face fell. “No, Papa died on the ship over. Mama too. It was terrible. Half of the passengers and crew perished on that journey.”
    “I’m so sorry.” Wendy reached for the young woman’s hands, dirty or not, and squeezed them. “What did you do?”
    “Papa wanted to go to the West, so I took my share of the money we had and bought a train ticket. My brother, Hans, said I was foolish, that we should go to Minnesota, where so many of our countrymen had gone. I told him I would meet him there, but I had to do as Papa said and see the West first.” She shrugged, her smile returning, and finished with, “I ended up here. Mr. Garrett hired me as a maid, and Mr. Gunn has been kind in teaching me everything I need to know.”
    “But you miss sewing,” Wendy guessed.
    “ Ja .” Olga let out a breath, lowering her eyes with a sheepish smile.
    Wendy grinned. If she did manage to start a new dressmaker’s business here in Haskell, if there were enough customers to warrant it, she had a feeling she had just found her first employee.
    “Olga, would you be interested in—”
    She didn’t have a chance to finish her question. There was a knock at the door. In their haste to get acquainted, neither Wendy nor Olga had shut the room’s door again, and now Travis stood in the doorway. Wendy’s heart