Would-Be Wilderness Wife by Regina Scott Read Free Book Online Page A

off her emotions. It did no good to question her past. She must look to her future, to the health of the community she could improve, the lives she could save. She had no intention of entering into marriage, with anyone.
    For once she opened the door to feeling, she was very much afraid she’d never be able to close it again.
    * * *
    At the far edge of the clearing in his own cabin, Drew yanked a pair of suspenders off the ladder to the loft. As he tidied the place so Catherine could sleep there that night, all he could think about was Simon’s ridiculous demand that one of them must marry the pretty nurse.
    He ought to be immune to such antics by now. But after years of proximity, his brothers knew just how to get under his skin like a tick digging for blood.
    Oh, he’d heard ministers preach on the subject. A man had a duty to marry, to raise children that would help him subdue the wilderness, make a home in this far land. Children were one way a man left a legacy. To him, the fact that his brothers had reached their manhood alive and ready to take on the world was enough of a legacy.
    He knew the general course of things was for a man to find his own land, build a house, start a profession and marry. He had this house and was top in his profession, but he couldn’t simply leave his mother, Beth or his brothers to fend for themselves. They were his responsibility, his to protect. That was what any man did who was worthy of the name. That was what his father had done.
    How could he call himself a man and leave his family to tend to a wife? In his mind, a wife took time, attention. She’d have requirements, needs and expectations. He already felt stretched to the breaking point. How could he add more?
    Oh, he had no doubt Simon and James were looking to marry one day, and John and Levi would eventually follow. But to stake a claim on a lady after a few hours of acquaintance? That was the stuff of madness.
    Or legend.
    He snorted as he gathered up the dishes he hadn’t bothered to return to the main house. Their father had claimed he’d fallen in love with their mother at first sight when he’d met her at a barn raising.
Her hair was like a fire on a winter’s night, calling me home
, he’d told his sons more than once.
    Before his father had died, Drew had dreamed it would happen that way for him. Though there were few unmarried ladies in Seattle, he’d thought someday he might turn a corner, walk into church and there she’d be. But at twenty-nine, he knew better. Love was a choice built from prolonged presence. And with six lives already depending on him, he had chosen not to participate in adding more.
    â€œHello, brother Drew!” Beth sang out as she opened the door of his cabin, basket under one arm. She stepped inside, glanced around and wrinkled her nose. “Oh, you haven’t gotten far, have you?”
    Drew looked around as well, trying to see the place through Beth’s eyes. He’d built the cabin himself, his brothers lending a hand with planing and notching the logs and chinking them with dried moss and rock. He’d crafted the fireplace in the center of one wall from rounded stones gathered along the lake. As his father had taught him from what he’d learned in his homeland of Sweden, Drew had built a cabinet for his bed tick, setting it next to the hearth for warmth. A table and chairs of lumber cut from trees he’d felled rested on the rag rug his mother had woven for him. A plain wood chest sat against the far wall, waiting for him to start carving. All in all, his cabin was a solid, practical place to sleep between long hours of working. Very likely, Beth considered it far too plain.
    But it didn’t matter what his sister thought. It mattered what Catherine Stanway thought, and he had no doubt she’d find it lacking.
    He pointed his sister to the corn-tassel broom leaning against one wall. “If you think the cabin needs