Free Yankee Wife by Linda Lael Miller Page B

Lydia approached.
    Lydia smiled. The cook's methods looked none too sanitary, but she'd already surmised that Mr. Feeny kept his kitchen clean and his person tidy as well. On the frontier, one had to make certain concessions.
    She joined him, smoothing her skirt beneath her before she sat. “Is there another knife?” she asked, reaching into the basin for a potato.
    Mr. Feeny surrendered the blade he'd been using, giving Lydia a pensive but not unfriendly look as she began to scrape away the thick brown peel. “You scrape many spuds back where you come from?”
    Lydia laughed and nodded toward Brigham's peak, with its long, noisy flume and rich stands of timber crowded so close together that it seemed there would be no room for a tree to fall. “Enough to make a pile the size of that mountain over there, Mr. Feeny,” she said.
    The cook didn't return her smile, but he rubbed his beard-stubbled chin and looked her over with solemn respect. “Jake,” he replied gruffly. “Call me Jake.”

5
    B RIGHAM SWEATED AS HE WORKED HIS END OF THE CROSS-CUT saw. Despite years of such labor, the muscles girding his stomach and lower back ached with a poignant violence, and the flesh beneath the calluses on his palms stung where he gripped the handle. He set his jaw and continued to thrust and draw, but his mind would not be so easily controlled as his body; every time he let down his guard for so much as a moment, his thoughts went meandering off after Lydia McQuire.
    He'd already considered her womanly figure, which needed some plumping up, in his view, and her soft, glimmering hair, but it was her violet eyes that haunted him. They'd seen much suffering, those eyes, and there were still faint smudges beneath them, shadows of the bitter sights they'd looked upon. And yet he glimpsed a capacity for joy in their depths, as well as an almost pagan capacity for passion.
    Brigham shook his head. He was imagining things, he told himself. Lydia was tough and strong, but all the whimsy and the poetry and the fire that went into the making of a woman had been crushed by the ugliness she'd encountered.
    If he had any sense at all, he decided grimly, he'd write out a bank draft, load her on the next mail boat out of the harbor, and forget she'd ever existed.
    He smiled and ran one arm across his brow to soak up some of the perspiration burning his eyes. Then he took a firm grip on the saw handle again, falling gracefully back into the rhythm. Trust Devon to bring home the sauciest little Yankee ever to sprout in New England, and hand her over like one of those souvenir cards with the silly pictures on the front.
    His partner let out a yell, and Brigham was so distracted that he barely thrust himself back away from the tree in time. It fell with a rushing sound, made thunder as it struck the ground, and for a moment the earth quaked beneath Brigham's cork boots.
    â€œDamn it, Brig,” the other man yelled, gesturing furiously toward the tree, “that was my own personal lucky saw, and you let it go right down with the timber!”
    Brigham wiped his face again. He would have liked to strip away his shirt and work bare-chested, but that was dangerous; the branches of a falling tree could rip a man's hide open like the point of a fine sword. “Quit grousing and try to pry it out,” he said shortly. It wasn't Zeb he was riled at, though; he was angry with himself for breaking one of his own rules: a man should never think about whiskey, food, or women when he was working in the woods. The indulgence could get him, or someone else, killed.
    Zeb, a skinny young South Carolinian with the testy temperament of a bullwhacker, plunged into the fragrant branches to search for his saw.
    Brigham turned away, only to find his nervous clerk, Jack Harrington, hovering behind him. The boy's round spectacles had slid to the end of his nose, and he pushed them back with a practiced middle finger. He had a pencil