Robin Lee Hatcher Read Online Free PDF

unfair man. He would not expect more from her than any other man, perhaps not even as much as some. No, he had no reason to feel guilty.
    “Is it much farther?” Karola asked, breaking into his reverie.
    He turned his head to find her watching him. “No. Not far.”
    “The reverend. He is expecting us?”
    “Yes.”
    She nodded.
    Jakob felt a sudden anger. Anger that Siobhan had been taken from him, that he’d been left alone to raise their children, that he needed to marry again. Why did life have to be so hard? Why did so much bitter come with the sweet? Just once, couldn’t things go his way?
    “Sure, and you know you’ll be needing a wife,” Tulley Gaffney, Siobhan’s uncle, had told him more than once since she died. “You cannot go on the way you are. The wee ones have need of a ma to care for them, and well you know it, lad. And you’ll be needing someone to look after you, too.”
    In those first weeks after Siobhan died, women from town had come to the farm to take care of the children. Later, he’d hired a housekeeper, who’d also served as a nursemaid. Three, actually, over the course of several months. Each time something had gone wrong, and the woman had left him in the lurch. Finally, he’d known his only solution was just as Tulley had said: to find himself a wife. He needed a woman who would stay, and a wife couldn’t pack up and leave at the drop of a hat.
    That only left one question: Who would that wife be?
    Dorotea Joki, the twin sister of the Lutheran pastor, had made it obvious she would willingly consider a proposal from Jakob. But Dorotea was cold and stern by nature, and Jakob couldn’t imagine putting fun-loving Siobhan’s children into her care.
    Then there was the young and very lovely Charlotte White, daughter of the town’s blacksmith. She’d begun flirting with Jakob even before the proper period of mourning had passed, and while he wasn’t immune to her inestimable charms—he was, after all, still a man—he knew Charlotte was in many ways as much a child as Maeve and far more spoiled. Jakob figured he was better off single than he’d be married to her.
    Nadzia Denys was the widow who owned the millinery shop in Shadow Creek. She was pleasant enough in nature, though a less attractive woman Jakob had never met—square-jawed, thick eyebrows, gap-toothed, tall and large-boned. But even if he’d been interested in her, she didn’t seem to want or need a husband. She was clearly content to remain independent.
    One by one, Jakob had dismissed the unmarried women of his acquaintance. Then he’d had that dream, and asking Karola to marry him had seemed the perfect solution. But what if he’d been wrong?
    He frowned. Right or wrong, sure or not, what did it matter? It was done now. She was here, and they were to be wed this very morning.
    He slapped the reins against the horse’s back and clucked with his tongue, asking for more speed.
    Karola worried the inside of her lip, her thoughts spinning faster than the carriage wheels.
    Her mother was right. Karola had always been a dreamer. From the time she was no more than five or six, she’d spun fantasies and made up pretty stories in her head. Her mother had said that every girl had to eventually grow up and put away childish things, but Karola hadn’t listened. The worlds she created in her mind were so much more interesting than the one in which she lived.
    Her father had said Karola’s pride was her greatest fault. “You are the daughter of a baker, not a prince. Beware thinking of yourself too highly, Tochter . Beware of thinking yourself more worthy than your neighbors.” Her father had predicted her unchecked pride would bring her low.
    And so it had.
    Surreptitiously she glanced at Jakob. She’d loved him once, or loved the boy he’d been. She hadn’t imagined that. It had been real. But that was so very long ago. What did she feel for him now? In Germany, it had been easy to convince herself that she loved him