Bride On The Run (Historical Romance) Read Free Page A

this wasn’t going to work out. Not for a week. Not for a day. Not for a damn-blasted minute. He’d have been better off alone.
    Determinedly, he stepped away from her. “I’d betterget these mules unhitched,” he muttered, feeling sweaty and awkward.
    “Can I do anything to help?” she asked all too innocently.
    “Just stay out of the way. A skittish mule can kick hard enough to kill you.” He turned aside and began fumbling with the buckles, which seemed unusually stubborn. Anna stood where he had left her, glancing up and down the road as if she were expecting company.
    At last she cleared her throat. “Well, if you don’t need me, I’m going to find a convenient bush,” she announced. “Heaven knows I’ve been needing one.”
    Malachi choked on his own spit. He wasn’t used to having a woman speak so frankly about her bodily functions. There was hell of a lot he didn’t know about this woman who’d given her maiden name as Anna Creer. But one thing was already certain—his new wife was no lady.
    “Watch out for rattlesnakes,” he said. She shot him a startled glance, then turned and stalked up the road toward a big clump of sagebrush, lifting her skirt to keep the hem from trailing in the dust.
    Malachi’s mood darkened as he finished unhitching the mules. He could feel his whole plan unraveling like a badly made wool stocking—not that it had been a great plan to begin with. He had grown desperate over the past eleven months, with Elise gone and the children so sorely in need of a mother. Every day he had lived with that need—watching Carrie grow toward womanhood without a mother’s guidance, seeing the lost look in little Josh’s eyes. His heart had ached for them. But there were no eligible womenwithin a day’s ride, and it was all he could do to manage the ferry and the stock and the household chores, let alone go off courting.
    He had let the months pass without taking action. Then the letter had come—the letter that even now threatened to rip his whole world apart—and Malachi had known he could not wait any longer.
    One desperate night he had hit on the idea of ordering a wife—a plain, good-hearted woman with no illusions about romance, a woman who would be content to stay in the canyon, care for the children and work at his side. Before dawn he had written the letter to Stuart and the plan was in motion.
    The terms of the contract had been set up to protect both himself and his prospective bride from hurt if things didn’t work out. But it had been Malachi’s hope that over time, mutual respect would ripen into a semblance of love, and the awkward arrangement would become a true marriage. Now—he swore under his breath as he struggled with the harness. What a calamity he had brought down—upon himself, upon his innocent children, and upon this willful bit of fluff who seemed to have no notion what was in store for her.
    Anna emerged from behind the sage clump, brushing twigs and flecks of dirt from her skirt. “No rattlesnakes,” she said. “But I did meet a very curious lizard. I ordered him to turn his back, but the little imp just sat there and stared at me the whole time. Most ungentlemanly of him.”
    Malachi kept his eyes on the mules, ignoring her attempt at ribaldry. “There are a lot of animals in the canyon,” he said. “You’ll get used to them in time.”What in blazes was he saying? The woman wouldn’t likely stick around long enough to get used to anything!
    He glanced back to find her a few paces behind him, watching as he freed the harness from the traces. She was older than he’d first thought, Malachi reckoned, twenty-five or twenty-six, perhaps. That part was fine, since he was almost thirty-five himself. But even though she was trying her best to be pleasant, something about her just didn’t set right. She was too bold, too worldly; too much like the women he had known in that other long-ago life, the life before Elise and the children.
    How could