Read Online Yankee Wife by Linda Lael Miller - Free Book Online

been aware of before that moment. “I could say the same thing to you, Miss McQuire,” he replied. “Now, take yourself back to the house, please, and read a book or sew something. I've got work to do.”
    Such a charge of anger went through Lydia that she rose onto the balls of her feet for a moment with the force of it, then she narrowed her eyes and folded her arms. “This is your property and you may certainly order me off it if you wish. However, before I go, I must say that I think you are a pompous and arrogant man, and your attitudes will certainly bring you to grief.”
    Again that lethal, knee-melting smile flashed white in his tanned face. “You are in sore need of taming, Miss McQuire,” he drawled, and even though she knew his words were designed to make her furious, she fell right into the trap.
    â€œOf all the nerve!”
    He laughed. “As if you lacked for gall,” he scolded mockingly. “Go home and behave yourself.”
    â€œI will not be dismissed like a child,” Lydia replied evenly, seething. She couldn't remember the last time she'd felt such dangerous anger. “I am not your ten-year-old daughter!”
    Brigham's gaze traveled leisurely to the pulse point at the base of her throat, her well-rounded breasts, and then back to her face. “No. You are definitely not my daughter. But I run Quade's Harbor and you will find that it's best to obey me.”
    Lydia could not remain without doing bodily harm to Brigham Quade. So, turning, she lifted the skirts of her pink and gray dress above the mud and marched away, hurling intermittent looks back at him as she went.
    A shout of laughter followed her.
    Millie was waiting behind a blackberry bush, just past the last of the six empty saltbox houses, her eyes wide.
    â€œI've never heard anybody besides Uncle Devon talk to Papa like that,” the child said, admiration plain in her voice. “If Charlotte or I sassed him that way, we'd probably have to sit in our room for a week.”
    Lydia smiled, even though Brigham had thoroughly ignited her temper. Until she'd met him, she thought she'd never be truly angry again, and the emotion thrummed painfully beneath the veneer of numbness she'd so carefully cultivated. “You're a child, Millie,” she said, in a remarkably normal tone. “It is fitting that you and Charlotte should speak respectfully to your father.” Even if he is an insufferable ass , she added to herself.
    Millie looked up at her in honest question. “Don't you have to speak respectfully, too? Uncle Devon does, and so does Aunt Persephone.”
    Lydia automatically took Millie's hand. She'd developed a strong affection for the child already, and hoped she would somehow be able to find common ground with Charlotte as well. “I don't think I was impolite,” Lydia pointed out, and she supposed she sounded a little defensive. Brigham had ordered her back to the house, and for that very reason she would have gone to China to avoid the place. “What else is there to see in Quade's Harbor?” she asked.
    â€œUncle Devon's building a mercantile,” Millie replied excitedly, her eyes shining. “He promised to have hair ribbons and peppermint sticks and storybooks. All Papa sells at the company store is dried beans and long underwear and those boots with spikes on the bottom.”
    â€œPretty dull fare,” Lydia agreed.
    Millie pointed to a fenced cemetery, high on a green knoll. “There was an Indian fight right there, when Charlotte was three years old and I was just about to be born. Mama and Papa lived in a cabin, behind where the big house is now, and Papa hid Mama and Charlotte under the floor until the fighting was over. Uncle Devon has a scar on his right shoulder, where an arrow hit him.”
    Lydia wondered if Millie was making up the story, until she looked down into the child's sad, earnest face. “Aunt Persephone says Mama