Follow Your Heart

“Bittner’s characters spring to life…extraordinary for the depth of emotion with which they are portrayed.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Rosanne Bittner retains her title as a premier romance writer…Poignant and startling.”

—Romantic Times

“True-to-life characters who stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page!”

—Los Angeles Daily News

And for WALK BY FAITH

“This standout novel is truly in a class of its own.”

—Romantic Times

“A tale that will touch the heart and engage the emotions on many levels.”

—Romance Reviews Today

“Bittner shines with this new inspirational historical.”

—Library Journal

And for WHERE HEAVEN BEGINS

“Rosanne has written a truly inspiring high adventure that will invigorate your senses and reaffirm your faith in God’s wisdom.”

—Affaire de Coeur

“Bittner bring to life the dangerous and beautiful Alaskan wilderness of the gold rush days. Clint is a hero who’ll pull at your heartstrings.”

—Romantic Times

Follow Your Heart

Rosanne Bittner

www.millsandboon.co.uk

The rich and poor have this in common:

The Lord is the Maker of them all.

—Proverbs 22:2

This book is for all those who believe that Love can conquer all…

Acknowledgment

A special thank-you to the “friend of a friend,” Karin Bernica, who is from Sweden and who helped me learn a few Swedish words and customs. Karin is neighbors with my friend and fellow writer Janet Wiist from Las Vegas, Nevada.

I also want to thank Terry and Jody Fanning, Indiana grain farmers who are related to my very good friend Sue Dahlquist. This Michigan author, who knows a good deal about fruit farming, knew nothing about corn and grain farming, so I had to find someone who could help me out. Terry and Jody were wonderful.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter One

Late April, 1873

“The Union Pacific could go bankrupt if we don’t do this, Jude.”

Jude Kingman eyed his father closely, very aware that the mishandling of railroad stocks and shady investments by greedy investors were the real reasons for the railroad’s money troubles. The man now sitting behind the huge oak desk in the Chicago offices of Kingman Investments was no less guilty than the rest of the opportunists covertly making their fortunes off the general public, while openly crying bankruptcy.

Jude walked over to a window and stared out at the heavy traffic in the street below. Two men whose buggy wheels had accidentally locked together were arguing and shaking their fists at each other. “We both know the real reason behind these money woes,” he said, turning to face his father again.

“Don’t tell me you’re thinking we should play the role of martyrs here,” Jude’s brother chided.

Jude shifted his gaze to his younger sibling. He and Mark were Yale educated, both in charge of various factions of the Kingman empire; but Mark looked so much more like their father—in his short, stocky build, chin line and smile, in his light brown hair and pale gray eyes that turned a deeper, cold blue-gray color when it came to business dealings, like right now. Anyone who didn’t know them would not believe he and Mark were brothers. They were so different in looks and personality.

Smile to their faces, shake their hands, stab them in the back whenever necessary. That was Mark’s motto. In that respect he and their father were most alike. Jude’s disagreement with such an attitude often spawned arguments among them over business dealings.

“I’m not suggesting any such thing,” Jude answered Mark. “I’m just asking why we should force innocent people to pay for the grievous errors and greediness of the men who invested in the railroad and then pocketed money that rightfully belonged to the government and the railroad.”

“You yourself are benefiting from some of that greed, big brother,” Mark reminded him smugly. “You and I might not have made the decisions, but we’re living very nicely off some of that money, and I intend to help Dad protect his interests in this. I’m sure you want the same.”

Jude frowned. Mark always had a way of making it look as if he was the only son who was interested in their father’s welfare. He turned his attention to his father. “Some of those people worked their land for years before the railroads even reached them. Now we’re going to turn around and tell them they have to get out?”

“Or pay a big price,” Mark answered first. “It’s not our fault they fell for the underhanded dealings of disreputable land agents.”

Compelled to direct his attention to his brother again, Jude forced self-control. “Well, that’s just like you, Mark, isn’t it? Far be it from you to consider a person’s feelings if it might cost you an expensive cigar or caviar for breakfast.”

“That’s enough,” their father ordered. He scowled at Jude. “The point is, son, that we can find people back in New York and Boston and even overseas who would be happy to buy up that land at premium prices, especially now that it’s been worked and there are towns sprouting up all along the railroad. Don’t forget that those first settlers went out there with dreams of getting rich off the railroad, so they are no less guilty of greed than we are.”

“They were promised they could buy that land at rock-bottom prices,” Jude protested.

“No money ever changed hands, so they aren’t out anything. We have every right to take back the land and sell it. And think of what we can use that money for—branching lines north and south of the main route, as well as getting the railroad back in the black. This whole land situation has been a mess, and everybody knows it. This will likely end up in court. Why not get rid of some of those people right now, before it gets that far? They don’t have a chance anyway, let alone the money to fight us. Our family business has a lot to lose if the U.P. goes under.”

Jude raised his eyebrows and smirked. “I suspect we’ve already gained much more than we will ever lose,” he answered. He moved to sit down in a large leather chair next to Mark.

Jefferson sighed. “Those people were too ignorant and poor to put up decent money and get properly signed and registered deeds in the first place. Those farmers are now nothing more than squatters, Jude, and you have to face that fact. Why does this bother you so much?”

Jude sighed. “Because we aren’t dealing with other ruthless businessmen,” he answered, “men who would walk all over us to get what they wanted. These are simple farmers, most of them immigrants, who thought they were doing the right thing—people who came to America with dreams of a better life and who worked hard to make that happen.”

“Whoa! Whoa, big brother!” Mark said with a chuckle. “Get off your soapbox. When did you become such a supporter of the poor and downtrodden?”

Jude ignored him. “I just don’t want the Kingman name associated with hard-heartedness and walking all over poor people,” he told his father.

“Maybe he’d like to go live in a soddy and help plow the cornfields,” Mark suggested snidely.

“There must be some alternative to this,” Jude said.

“There isn’t,” Jefferson answered.

Jude noticed a familiar, cold look move into the man’s eyes, the look that meant he’d made a decision and there was no arguing with it.

“But since you’re better at dealing with the common people than Mark is,” Jefferson continued, “I’m sending you down to Omaha with the job of doing what you can to get rid of some of those settlers, Jude—and just as you mentioned, without making us look bad.”

Jude just shook his head. “Why do I get the feeling this is some kind of test?”

“It is. Dad knows I can run Kingman Enterprises better than you can,” Mark told him. “Here’s your chance to show him you can come through for him.”

“That’s enough, Mark,” Jefferson told him, keeping his eyes on Jude. “I’m getting older, Jude, and it’s time you and Mark both take on even more holdings of my businesses. And although Mark is younger, he seems to understand the necessity of keeping personal feelings out of business dealings, something you’ve always had trouble doing. However, you’re handsome and charming and intelligent. This is the perfect venue for you to show me what you can do. I want to go out of this world confident that you and Mark can both take care of Kingman Investments and Corporate Enterprises.”

Jefferson stood up, obviously becoming agitated, his face reddening slightly, his chest puffed out, pride making him raise his chin and speak a little louder. Jude thought how, when his father took on this mood, he seemed much taller than his five-foot-eight-inch frame.

“I came up from the bottom,” Jefferson continued. “You both know that. I started with nothing, and I scraped and saved and earned and fought my way to the top, investing, reinvesting, taking advantage of good deals, buying at premium lows, and, yes, sometimes walking right over people to get what I wanted.”

His words came as he paced, but then he stopped and came around to sit on his desk, facing both sons. His look turned harder. “You’ve heard the story before. My father was once wealthy, but he lost it all through a partner who stabbed him in the back financially!” His fists tightened. “My mother—your grandmother—died from lack of proper medical care when she became gravely ill and there was no money for a hospital and doctors. My father shot himself because he felt like a failure and felt responsible for my mother’s death. I vowed then and there that I would make up for all of it, and I have. That included putting out of business the very man who destroyed my father. Now I’m depending on my own sons to make their father proud, and to never let what I’ve spent my life building be destroyed.”

He sat down behind his desk again. “Remember that what you have will go to your own children some day. Do this for them. Handle this right, and all my railroad interests will go to you. Mark will handle everything else. I’m talking millions of dollars and a lot of responsibility, Jude. Do this not just for me, but for yourself.”

Jude studied his father’s eyes, trying to find love there. He saw a spark of it, but always it was mixed with a strange doubt. It was that doubt that had always made him long for approval and affection from both his parents. Here was a chance to find favor in his father’s eyes, and he longed to accomplish that.

“When do I leave?” he asked, already dreading the job.

“Within a week or two, after Corinne’s spring social. Your mother would never forgive me if either of you missed the event of the year.” Jefferson smiled, his mood lighter again.

“Ah, yes, the spring social,” Mark mused. “Mother’s time to shine.” He looked at Jude. “And your chance to make all the young girls swoon,” he added snidely. “When do you think you’ll marry one of them, big brother? Or do you plan to just keep breaking their hearts?”

“I prefer not to marry someone just for status and to add to my wealth,” Jude interrupted, rising.

Mark’s gaze darkened. “That’s not why I’m marrying Cindy.”

Jude glared at him. “I know you too well, little brother. You don’t fool me one bit. You’re about as capable of loving someone as a lion is capable of loving a lamb.” He walked out, not caring to get into a full-blown argument or to listen to his father defend Mark. He truly wished he could get along with his brother, but Mark’s jealousy and spoiled, immature determination to be the favorite made that impossible.

He decided his assignment to go to Omaha wasn’t so bad after all. At least he could get away from Mark’s incessant whining and insults, and from his mother’s petty lifestyle. Maybe he wouldn’t even stay for the all-important spring social. His mother’s deliberate and gaudy display of wealth and importance was not something he enjoyed. Nor did he look forward to the fawning of the available young women who attended, obviously hoping to marry into the Kingman wealth. He wanted something more in a woman than her being among the proper “class” for a Kingman. He wanted honesty and integrity. He wanted strength tempered with compassion. Most of all he wanted a woman who would love him for himself, not his station in life, or his money.

Such a woman would not be an easy find, which was why at twenty-nine years of age he was still single. He vowed never to end up married to a woman anything like his mother. Thanks to her, he wasn’t even sure how real love was supposed to feel.

Chapter Two

The hem of Ingrid’s dress hung heavy with mud, and she dreaded the mess her worn, black, high-top shoes would be by the time she finished gathering eggs and feeding the pigs. According to her diary entry of one year ago, Nebraska experienced a freak snowstorm this time last year. This spring was just the opposite. Although she did not doubt more cold weather was ahead, today was unusually warm and humid. Only partially thawed, the ground beneath her feet was a quagmire. In some places she literally had to yank her feet out of the mud.

Basket in hand, she made her way to the chicken coop, glancing first at a larger shed to see her ten-year-old brother throwing pebbles into a mud puddle. “Johnny Svensson, you are supposed to be milking the cow!” she shouted.

Looking startled, the towheaded boy turned and ran back into the shed.

“When will that boy learn to stay with one job until it is finished?” Ingrid muttered.

She stooped to enter a small sod chicken coop, wanting to hurry with her own chores so she could get breakfast started. Her father, always the first one up and out, was checking the fields to see if he might be able to plow some furrows to prepare for planting.

A farmer’s work was never done. Even in winter Albert Svensson was out in the barn every day sharpening tools, sorting baskets and taking care of other endless winter chores in preparation for spring planting and a long, hot summer of farming. In spite of a painful back problem that had plagued him the past two years, her tall, strong father never shunned work and considered it the only way to heaven.

“Perhaps it is,” she said to the chickens. Hard work kept a person busy, with no time to think about, let alone act on, sinful ways. She remembered her mother telling her that when she was just a little girl.

Hens pecked at her hands as she shooed them away from their nests so she could collect their eggs. She laid the still-warm eggs in her basket, glad to find plenty to cook a big breakfast.

She ducked out of the hen shed, enjoying the warm morning sun. It was times like this when she missed her mother the most. Yolanda Svensson would have gloried in a morning like this. Although she’d died ten years ago when Johnny was born, Ingrid still had vivid memories of the strong, brave woman.

She headed back to the family’s soddy, where coffee was still warming on her proudest possession, a Concord cooking range ordered from Pennsylvania through Grooten’s Dry Goods in nearby Plum Creek. In winter it warmed the house much better than their stone fireplace ever had. How her mother would have enjoyed that stove!

Before she reached the house, the long wail of another Union Pacific locomotive cried out through the morning air. That would be the 7:00 a.m. She’d never ridden a train—couldn’t afford it—but she could time her day by their regularity.

She went into the house and set her basket of eggs on a small table near the entrance, being careful not to get mud on the wood plank floor. After her father had laid that floor last year she’d felt as though she were living in luxury. The soddy’s mud-plastered walls were now whitewashed, and two real glass windows let in sunlight. The sod roof had been replaced two years ago with real wood beams, wood planks and shingles, so she no longer had to hang blankets under the ceiling to catch dirt and bugs, which pleased her greatly.

She turned around and made her way to the cowshed, stepping inside to see that her brother had collected enough milk to garner a good amount of cream for making butter.

“Good job, Johnny,” she praised him, taking the bucket. Together they headed back to the house, the disappearing locomotive still wailing in the distance and leaving a trail of smoke on the horizon.

“Ingrid?” Johnny asked.

“What is it?”

“What if I don’t want to be a farmer when I grow up?”

Ingrid stopped walking and faced him. “Of course you will be a farmer, Johnny. That is why Far is building up this land,” she reminded him, affectionately using the Swedish term for father. “This farm will be yours someday.”

Johnny looked across the flat expanse of farmland at the lingering smoke in the air. “Maybe I’ll want to be a locomotive engineer, or ride the caboose. Maybe I’ll just get on a train and go as far as it will take me.”

Ingrid could just imagine the picture of adventure trains conjured up for a boy of ten, the whistle beckoning a child’s spirit to explore a faraway land. “When you are older you will see what is truly important, Johnny. Honoring your father is important. Working the land is important. Perhaps you might leave for a while, but this is your home, and you will always come back.”

Johnny frowned. “How do you know?”

These were times when Ingrid missed her beloved mother the most, sure the woman would always have the right answers. “I just know it, Johnny, in my heart. The only thing that matters in life is our loved ones, the land and our faith in God.”

Johnny just shrugged. “After church Sunday can I go watch the trains?”

“You will have to ask Far. It depends on how much we need in the way of supplies and if we need your help loading them. I don’t want Far lifting too much because of his back.”

“Well…” Johnny regarded his sister. “Why don’t you marry Carl? He could help us a lot, and Far wouldn’t have so much work to do.”

Ingrid shook her head at her brother’s reference to their closest neighbor, another Swede named Carl Unger, who had hinted more than once to her father that he was interested in marrying her. “Marriage is not something to take lightly, Johnny. And I do not love Carl in the right way to marry him.”

“But he’s a real good man, and I really like him.”

“I know, Johnny, I know.” At nineteen, Ingrid knew she should most certainly be thinking about marriage, but there was so much to do on the farm, plus all the cooking and cleaning and helping raise Johnny, that she’d seldom had time to ponder marriage or to get involved in the process of being courted. Besides, no one had come along who’d made her heart beat a little faster with true feelings of love. Her father seemed to think she was getting old enough that she should no longer be too picky, and he felt Carl was by far the best man for her.

Ingrid was not sure of that at all. When she was little her mother had once told her to marry for love and love alone. Love, and your faith in God, can help you through just about anything life hands you, she’d told her. Since then Ingrid had held on to the dream that someday the right man would come along, and she would know it in her heart when he did.

Chapter Three

Early May

Wilson Beyer adjusted his tiny square spectacles, studying the list of names in front of him. As was his habit, he twitched his tiny mustache and cleared his throat every few seconds, which irritated Jude to no end, even though he liked the man.

“I prepared a list for you, just as you asked in your telegram,” Wilson told Jude. “And I have men ready to go out with you to order these settlers off their property.”

Jude took a thin cigar from his vest pocket, then put it to his lips and leaned down to light it from a tapered candle burning on Wilson’s desk. Wilson actually thought burning a candle would somehow relieve him of some of his spring allergies. “I don’t need the extra men,” he told Wilson. He puffed on the cigar to get it burning.

Wilson’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Oh? I should advise you that these settlers won’t leave peacefully. It could even involve firearms.”

Jude shrugged. “I’d rather try a less forceful approach. I intend to go visit each settler on my own first.”

“Your father won’t be very pleased.”

“You don’t need to tell me that. I’ve never been able to please him anyway. Besides, all he told me was to come down here and prepare the settlers for the inevitable, so I will handle this the way I see fit.”

Wilson cleared his throat again. “Must you smoke that cigar? I have enough trouble with the pollen and dust and humidity in this cow town without breathing that wretched cigar smoke.”

Jude took the offending article from his lips and eyed it a moment. “Actually, it calms me, but if it stirs up your endless list of allergies, I’ll put it out for the moment.”

Wilson smiled, showing dark, tiny teeth. “Well, that’s kind of you, Jude. I didn’t mean to be rude, but I swear, if you didn’t pay me so well I’d hop the next train back to Chicago.”

“Yes, the air is so clean in Chicago,” Jude answered wryly as he stamped out the barely smoked tobacco. He looked around the plain, unpretentious office and sat down in a wooden chair across from Wilson’s desk. “Omaha is growing fast,” he added. “Someday it will rival Chicago.”

Wilson grunted a laugh. “I’ll be long dead from allergies by then.”

Both men laughed as Wilson handed over the list of settlers’ names and locations. “You have your work cut out for you, Jude. The people on that list will either have to get off their land or buy it at the going rate, which is more than most of them can afford.”

“I know.” Jude scanned the list, still irritated at the job his father had given him. “What do you think of all this, Wilson?”

Wilson thought a moment. “I like my job in land management, so I suppose I have to back the powers that be so we stay in business.” He pulled his glasses down to the end of his nose and looked up bare-eyed at Jude. “Is this really necessary?”

Jude ran a hand through his hair, wishing he could better control its thick waves. “According to my father it is, and I’m a Kingman, after all. I have a job to do.”

“I’m surprised Jefferson didn’t give this job to your brother. From what I know of you two, Mark seems the better man for the job, and I don’t mean that as an insult to you—”

Jude put up his hand to cut him off. “I know.”

“Sometimes I wonder about that brother of yours. He has a wicked streak, and your parents spoil him rotten. From what I’ve observed, you and Mark are like night and day—”