“Jacob Butler couldn’t abide two children living on their own in that shack, so he took them home. “None of Sophie’s family, the Davis’s, would take them in,” he interrupted. “How are the Butlers related to my brother’s wife?” Olive asked.

“John and Mary are staying with Jacob Butler.”

The sheriff sat back in his chair and tapped his pencil stub against his mouth. The note from my sister-in-law’s family is unclear,” Olive explained as she pulled the oft folded and unfolded letter from her bag. But I am not quite sure with whom they are staying. I am here to take his children back to my home in Philadelphia. “My name is Olive Wilkins and my brother, James Wilkins and his wife Sophie, lived here in Spencer. “What can I help you with, ma’am?’ he asked as he looked up from his papers and tilted back his hat. Olive waited dutifully as he wrote, letting her eyes wander from the cells in the corner of the room to the gun belt looped over the hook near the door to the sign proclaiming Sheriff Bentley as the law in this small Ohio town. A weary faced man with sun toughened skin sat behind the desk. The walls were thick stone and the bars at the windows cast striped patterns on the floor. Olive Wilkins found the sheriff’s office as promised, beside a busy general store. Will Olive and Jacob find the strength to fight their battles alone or together? Will love conquer the bitterness of loss and broken dreams? Real danger threatens Olive and Mary and John while Jacob and his own brood battle the day-to-day struggles for survival. Her niece and nephew, Mary and John, have been living with a neighboring farmer, widower Jacob Butler, the father of three young children of his own and a man still in pain from the recent loss of his wife. She arrives to find the circumstances of her brother’s life deplorable and her long held beliefs of family and tradition, shaken.Īccustomed to the sophistication of Philadelphia, Olive arrives in Spencer, Ohio, a rough and tumble world she is not familiar with, facing two traumatized children. In 1891, spinster librarian, Olive Wilkins, is shocked to learn of her brother’s violent death at a saloon gaming table and her sister-in-law’s subsequent murder, traveling far from her staid life to rescue her niece and nephew, now orphans. Historical Romance set US midwest circa 1891

Romancing Olive by Holly Bush