Jake Walker's Wife Read Online Free PDF Page B

If she could only get him to open up, maybe she could help him put whatever it was behind him. It's what her mother would have done....
    Bess was stacking the breakfast plates, hoping to find a way to reach his well-protected heart when he walked into the kitchen. "Lubbock," he said, leaning an elbow on the water pump. When she didn't respond, he said it again. "Lubbock."
    She arched her left brow and grinned. "I don't know whether that's a very poor imitation of a bullfrog, or if you have something stuck in your throat."
    Jake chuckled. "It's my home town."
    Her heart skipped a beat, because he'd told her, in four simple words, that he trusted her, finally. Bess smiled. "So tell me, was the town named for a bullfrog? Or did the founding father have a frog in his throat when he pronounced it Lubbock?"
    He threw his head back and laughed. She loved the music of it, hearty and deep and wholly masculine. Twice now, he'd treated her to the sound. Bess decided right then and there to make him do it again, and again, and as often as possible. But before she could conjure up another joke to inspire a repeat performance, he saluted and grinned and left her alone with the mountain of dirty dishes. To her regret, Bess didn't see him again until dinner time.
    At least, she didn't see him in person.
    Bess saw plenty of him, though, whenever she closed her eyes.
    Once she'd cleaned up the breakfast mess, Bess set some bread dough to rising near the warmth of the cookstove. Savory beef stew bubbled on the stovetop, and a batch of Apple Betty baked in the oven. Just before the men came in, she'd whip up some potato dumplings and drop them onto the gently boiling stew. Meanwhile, she'd tidy the house, then the bunkhouse.
    Clean laundry flapped colorfully on the clotheslines out back. The chickens had been fed and the eggs gathered. She'd save the mending and darning for evening, when she and the boys and Pa gathered around the parlor fireplace until bedtime. At last, her least favorite morning chores completed, Bess could indulge her other passion: ciphering.
    Bess loved few things more than adding up columns of numbers in her father's blue-lined ledger books. She'd learned precisely when to order seed, what kind and how much to order, and which peddler would give her the best price. She'd learned to wrangle a fair deal from old Samuel down at the livery stable when saddle cinches and blankets wore out, too. While other young women her age were having babies, organizing tea parties, and crocheting doilies, Bess was busy running Foggy Bottom, and loving every minute of it.
    Well, almost every minute....
    One Sunday after services, Pastor Higgins told her that she should pray long and hard about her future. "'A prudent wife is a gift from the Lord,'" he quoted Proverbs.
    " Yes," she quoted the same book, "but 'even a child makes himself known by his acts, whether what he does is pure and right.'"
    The reverend's jaw sagged and his eyes bugged out. Bess felt fairly certain that her retort stunned him sufficiently, and doubted he'd discuss marriage with her any time soon.
    The following week, at the church social, his wife took up the gauntlet. "Don't you sometimes see your girlfriends with their little ones," Mrs. Higgins asked, "and wish you had a baby of your own?"
    Years ago, when her friends began falling in love and setting up house, Bess thought maybe there was something wrong with her...that a maternal heart did not beat within her bosom, for she truly didn't yearn for a husband, a home, an infant to suckle at her breast. She'd shared her fears with the Widow Reddick, who owned the general store.
    "Bess, my dear," the old woman had said, "babies and husbands are grand, and I've had a couple of each, so I know what I'm talking about. But babies spit up, and husbands, they just plain spit." The joke inspired a round of laughter to bubble from the old woman's throat, and once she'd regained her composure, the Widow said something Bess would