Free Linda Needham by My Wicked Earl Page A

furniture was draped in sheets, which made everything appear a bit ghostly, the place was dust-free and welcoming. When she reentered the parlor with a mind to begin settling in, that feeling of being watched came again.
    And again a moment later, when she was giggled at from beneath the wriggling sheet that covered an easy chair under the window.
    Her new little shadow.
    “Aye, me,” she said grandly, creeping up to the chair and its little ghost. “I’m weary to my bones from my long walk.” She yawned loudly and stretched. “I think I’ll sit myself… here! ”
    She pretended to sit on the squirming boy, who screamed in delight and rocketed up to stand on the chair, all legs and arms beneath the sheet.
    “I’m here! I’m here!” The boy was hiccoughing with laughter.
    “Who be you, oh spirit of the gatehouse?” Hollie found his ribs with her best tickling fingers and he collapsed completely onto the chair.
    “It’s me!” He squirmed and laughed and toreat the sheet, finally yanking it off his head. “Don’t be scared, Miss Hollie! See, it’s me!”
    The boy was red-faced and sweaty, his hair sticking up in a hundred different places. Hollie gasped in mock horror and threw her hands across her eyes.
    “Oh, oh! Who is me?”
    “It’s Chip! You remember from this morning.” He leaped down from the chair and pulled her fingers away from her face. “It’s me, Hollie! Meeeee!”
    She opened her eyes to his gap-toothed grin and his apple cheeks and those dark, dark eyes. “Oh, Chip! It is you. You scared me!”
    “I didn’t mean to, but you scared me too!”
    She couldn’t resist brushing the jumble of curls back into place. “You know something, Chip? I sometimes like to be scared.”
    He giggled again. “Me too.”
    She loved having him here, but he needed corralling. “Well, now, young man, what are you doing in my house?”
    “Your house? But you live in the big hall with my father.”
    It was no wonder he believed that. A new father, why not a new mother? “No, I live here, sweet.”
    He stuck out his lower lip and scrubbed shyly at the plank floor with the toe of his scuffed shoe. “Then you’re not really going to be my mama?”
    “I can’t be, Chip.” Though she wouldn’t mind that one bit. He needed a mother to love him. A father would do, but his chances there looked dismal. “However, I’ll be living here for a while. And you’re welcome anytime.”
    “ Any anytime?”
    “Absolutely anytime.” Hollie scooped the boy up into her arms, because he’d fit so well and he smelled of the fog and the wood-smoked morning. “As long as you ask Mumberton if you can come. Do you promise?”
    “I do.”
    “Because I’ll ask you that every time you come here. ‘Chip, my good man, did you ask Mumberton if you could come to see me?’ And you’ll say honestly back to me…”
    “I’ll say yes. ’Cause I will ask. I promise.” He squinched up his little face, worried to his bones by the rickety, changeable world around him. “But I didn’t tell him this time, ’cause I didn’t know I was coming here.”
    “This one time, then, I’ll tell Mumberton that you helped me straighten things up.” She set him down, and he clapped his hands together.
    “ Can I help you?”
    “Are you a good sheet folder?”
    “The very best.” He rolled up the sheet he’d been tangled in and bunched it into her arms. “See! And I’m a good deer chaser too. I was following that big red one when I saw you come in here.”
    Country-raised, wild-limbed. What had his life been made of before three days ago? Four now. Oh, what a change a day could make. “So you must have deer where you come from?”
    Chip scrunched up his brow. “I come from here now, Ringum Hall. Mr. Draskel, the ’torney, says I do.”
    Dear God, she hoped so. Prayed that Everingham wouldn’t dispute the obvious, that Chip was his flesh and blood. There was no mistaking the fierceness of his little frown or the dark whorl