Freedom For A Bride: A clean historical mail order bride romance (Montana Passion Book 2) by Amelia Rose Read Free Book Online Page A

land. I remember it well, and I at least had the advantage of knowing how to speak the tongue. I can naw imagine how fearful it must be to feel so lost.”
    Nathaniel looked embarrassed at having been so lovesick only a matter of hours after meeting his wife for the first time. He felt he shouldn’t be so smitten right away, and certainly not in front of others, but he’d waited for Katia for so long that he felt he already knew her.
    “Here. Eat your supper, and get your rest. You’ll feel better, you’ll see. Everything will be sorted out by morning, and you’ll laugh at yourself for feeling so forlorn tonight. If you wish to head home in the morning, I’ll rouse Miss Noryeva to see you off if you’ll be so kind as to send Mr. MacAteer for his wife when you go.”
    She nodded her head in acknowledgment and turned back to the cabin, leaving Nathaniel to his sleep and his misery.
    The next morning dawned brutally cold but sunny in much the way that Gretchen had predicted. In some ways, Nathaniel was as bitter as the temperature. What right did the sun have to shine so brightly when he was so miserable? He had put all his hope in these correspondences over the past few months, and the letters from Katia—letters that he’d assumed were from Katia, he realized—had made the Montana winter all the more bearable.
    Instead, the letters had been filled with lies. Even if the sentiments had been true or her feelings about meeting him and marrying him were genuine, the words had all belonged to someone else, and that was just as bad as pretending in his book. All the promises of wanting to be a frontier wife, of longing for land and wide open spaces, all the talk of wanting to marry a decent, hard-working man and raising a family with him… how could he be sure those were really Katia’s wishes? What if all of that had been someone else’s thoughts, meant to lure him into signing on for a wife?
    Nathaniel couldn’t help but feel cheated. True, Katia had arrived just as promised, but there was little else about the silent woman that carried the ring of truth to it.
    But also as Gretchen had assured him, today was a new day like any other. There were chores to be done in his place, and he still had to go to Mac’s property and pass along the message to send for Mrs. MacAteer and Matthew.
    The thought nearly made him weep. Mac had it all, even if it hadn’t all gone according to plan the first time around. He had a thriving homestead that was nearly completed, and would belong to him outright in a matter of months. The wife he wrote off for hadn’t turned out the way he’d expected, but it had turned out all right in the end just the same. And now, of course, that wife had not only given him a healthy son, but she’d turned out to be a suitable help for Mac. She was no slugabed who laid around all day, or kept to the house and feigned weakness just because she’d had a child. She was already up and about, despite their child only being a month old. That was a woman who could be a help to a man with acres and acres of frontier land to farm, that was for sure!
    Nathaniel shook off the dark thoughts that were putting him in a bad humor that morning. Lying in the barn and feeling morose would not get the day moving, as he knew all too well. All he could do was keep a good thought in his mind and carry hope in his heart about this turn of events. There would be plenty of time for bitter sorrow once he knew for sure that the woman who’d barely looked at him, let alone spoken to him, was done with him.
    When he finally stepped outside, he found a plate covered with a cloth, and beneath the cloth were a couple of biscuits, some smoked fish from the creek, and two boiled eggs. The empty tin cup beside it told him there would be coffee inside the cabin, but he surmised he’d have to have it on the porch again, what with all the ladies and small babe inside the house.
    He climbed the wooden porch steps and knocked on the