Read Online Heartbreak Creek by Kaki Warner - Free Book Online

first syllable—Deck-lan. “ Robert Declan Brodie. But some folks call me Big Bob.”
    Her husband . Good Lord. She truly was the nitwit Pru said she was.
    Pru! Whipping around, Edwina scowled at her half sister who grinned back at her from her nest of burlap sacks and blankets in the back of the wagon. “You knew,” she accused.
    Pru nodded, her dark brown eyes alight with laughter.
    “How long?”
    “About ten miles. I can’t believe you’re just figuring it out.”
    She turned back to glare at her husband— her husband, for heaven’s sake. “Why didn’t you say something? Tell me who you were?”
    “I thought you knew.”
    “Knew what? That you had a pseudonym? Why would I think Big Bob was Declan Brodie?”
    “Who’d you think I was?”
    Some nincompoop sent to fetch us, she almost shrieked in his face. Then realizing she was about to make a fool of herself—again—Edwina took a deep breath. By the time she slowly released it, she had regained her composure. Somewhat.
    “I am not calling you by that ridiculous name. Big Bob. It’s absurd.” Blithely, she brushed a chaff of straw from her skirt. “Sounds like a character in a dime novel. Hardly dignified.” Clasping her hands in her lap, she stared down the road. “I shall call you Mr. Brodie.” You great hulking lump.
    “ Mr. Brodie. I like that. Sounds respectful.”
    She didn’t look his way, but could hear the laughter in his voice. It was an odd voice, low and rich and . . . rumbly. Perhaps it was damaged. Perhaps in a fit of pique, some poor woman he had pushed beyond the limits of sanity had tried to choke the life out of him. She smiled, imaging it.
    “I don’t much like Edwina, either,” he added after a pause.
    “Oh?” She turned with raised brows. “And why not?”
    “Sounds like something a shoat would say.”
    “Shoat?”
    “Baby hog.” His gaze slid over her in a way that made Edwina’s skin quiver and her temper flare. “And since you don’t look much like a hog, maybe you’ve got another name we could use?”
    Edwina was too provoked to respond. No one had ever criticized her name. Admittedly, it was a horrid name, but . . . a hog ?
    “No? Well, we could call you Ed, I guess. Short and simple. Ed.”
    “My middle name is Pricilla,” she informed him coldly. A name she liked even less, since it had been her mother’s, but at least it was more feminine than Ed.
    “Pricilla.” He said it thoughtfully, as if testing the name for suitability. “Prissy. Miss Priss. Yeah. That’ll work.”
    Edwina stared silently ahead, ignoring Pru’s muffled snorts of laughter.
    It wasn’t until the last rays of the setting sun backlit the western ridges like a distant fire and the air had grown so cold Edwina was shivering in her thin coat that she spoke again. Turning wearily to her husband—that scoundrel—she asked through numb lips, “How much longer?”
    “Not long.” He nodded toward the jagged silhouette of a rise in the road ahead. “Soon as we top that ridge, we’ll stop for the night.”
    Stop for the night? Surely that didn’t mean what Edwina suspected. Dreading the answer, she forced herself to ask, “Is your farm that near?”
    “It’s not a farm. It’s a ranch. And no, it’s still a ways.”
    She waited for him to offer further enlightenment.
    He didn’t.
    “Then exactly how much longer will it take to reach your . . . ranch ?”
    “With the late start”—he paused to send her an accusing look—“and the washout, it’ll take longer. If all goes well”—another pointed glance, this one more of a warning than an accusation—“we should get there by noon tomorrow.”
    Tomorrow! She looked around for a hotel, boardinghouse, dwelling of some kind. There was nothing but woods, then more woods. “What about tonight? Where will we sleep?”
    “You ladies will sleep in the wagon. I’ll sleep under it.”
    He said it like that was the most reasonable statement in the world. As if sleeping