His Heartbroken Bride (The Brides of Paradise Ranch - Spicy Version Book 4) Read Online Free PDF Page B

get’cha, you filthy reb,” Petey shouted at the top of his lungs as he tore through Josephine’s back yard.
    “No ya won’t, ya damn Yankee,” Vernon Strong, ten-year-old son of stationmaster Athos Strong, hollered back.
    Petey and Vernon had become instant best friends the moment they had met a few days ago. The overflowing Strong family lived next door to Josephine, and since sunrise on the first day after Petey and Vernon had spit in their hands, shaken, and declared each other life-long “spit brothers,” the Civil War had raged between their two properties once more. It was all in fun, of course, but the Strong family contained eight children, their mother had passed away a little more than a year ago, and Athos’s sister, Piper, only had so many hands.
    “I wanna play, I wanna play,” Matthew shouted, running after Petey and Vernon. It was Matthew’s bad luck that the two closest Strong children to his age were girls, and that they were more interested in catching Matthew so they could dress him up in what they called “baby clothes” and force him to pretend to be their little boy. In the past hour alone, Libby had dried three sets of tears, kissed two bruised elbows, and tossed two of the shirts she was attempting to hang on a clothesline in a frigid breeze back into the wash-basket after they’d been knocked to the dirt by one screaming child or another.
    To make matters worse, one of the upstairs windows clattered open.
    “Can you get them to be quiet please?” Muriel begged Libby from her bedroom. “I’m trying to read about Alexander the Great for a school essay.”
    Libby sighed and jammed a clothespin into a pair of Pete’s drawers. She shot out her arms to catch a rampaging child, then twisted to deal with Muriel.
    “Sorry. The worms have wriggled out of the can a bit.”
    “I’ll say,” Muriel muttered. A moment later, contrition pinched her face. “I’m sorry, Libby. I know you’ve got a lot on your hands. I’ll…I’ll come down and help as soon as I finish this chapter.”
    She ducked her head back into her room and shut the window, and Libby sighed. A rubber ball went sailing past Libby’s head, thumping against the side of Josephine’s house.
    “Sorry, Mama,” Petey called to her from the porch of the Strong house, only a dozen or so yards away. “I was bombing the Confederate camp.”
    Libby tried to smile at her imaginative son, but the panic that had been clawing its way up her back for the past three days—for the past six weeks, if she was being honest—wouldn’t let her. She couldn’t control two growing boys who had never been a handful before, how would she be able to keep them from running wild with a third? How was she supposed to keep them safe? And what would she do if, as soon as the new baby was put in her arms, she couldn’t love it? What if it grew up and took after its father?
    The upstairs window slapped open again.
    “I can’t concentrate with all that noise, I’m sorry,” Muriel complained. “Boys, be quiet!”
    “It’s General Lee! Get him!” A wiry boy with black hair and stunning blue eyes had joined Petey and Vernon on the Strong’s porch at some point. Libby thought she’d heard Josephine call him Toby Faraday. Whatever the little scamp’s name was, he hurled another rubber ball up at Muriel’s window.
    Muriel yelped as the ball sailed right through her window, swishing the curtains as it went. “Oh! I’ll get you for that.”
    She slammed the window shut. All of the boys in the yard—Confederate and Union—bellowed insults and invectives at the top of their lungs and began to scatter. Libby had to scoop the laundry basket up into her arms to keep it from spilling to the ground. At least it was almost empty.
    “Children, could you please calm down?” she shouted above the fray. There would be bruised knees to treat and scrapes to bandage if they weren’t careful. Not one of them stopped long enough to listen to what she’d