Rough Hands on the Prairie (The Original Mountain Man #1) Read Online Frankie Love

Categories Genre: Alpha Male, Contemporary, Novella Tags Authors: Series: The Original Mountain Man Series by Frankie Love
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Total pages in book: 15
Estimated words: 13933 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 70(@200wpm)___ 56(@250wpm)___ 46(@300wpm)
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We take to the path towards the town, which I know by heart after all this time. I haven’t even been here a year yet, still have to see how this place changes through the seasons, but it feels like home.

Or maybe anywhere would feel like home, as long as I had him at my side to share it with.

Epilogue

ELIAS

"You know something?"

I lift my head from where I’ve been sitting by the fire, warming my hands after spending all day emptying traps and skinning my catches for the week. Normally, she’d be out there helping me, insistent on pulling her weight, but now she is just a few months away from giving birth, there’s no way I’m letting her wander anywhere further than a few yards away from home.

"I don’t know a damn thing," I shoot back playfully, and she sticks her tongue out at me from where she’s leaning by the kitchen table.

The new kitchen table, that is.

In the last few months, since she fell pregnant, it’s given me the motivation to turn this place into a real home.

Before she arrived, it was nothing more than the place I happened to live, the bed nothing more than where I happened to lay my head.

But with her here, it’s more than that.

It’s a home, a true family home, and I have done my best to prove that to her any way I can.

I’ve turned the single cot into a double bed for us to share, crafted an enormous table that has enough space for a family of ten or more, filled the pantry with enough food to last us all the way through the winter.

She says I’m overdoing it, but I want everything to be perfect. I have already lost a family before, and I know I will not let the same thing happen again, not for anything in the world.

The protectiveness I feel towards her and our unborn child is almost more than I imagined possible, an all-consuming certainty that drives every action I take.

She keeps trying to convince me that everything will be alright, that she hasn’t even really suffered in the last few months she’s been with child, but she knows better than to try and argue.

"It’s been exactly a year since I arrived here."

I raise my eyebrows.

"Is that so?”

She nods, as she rises to her feet and makes her way over to me, discarding the journal she had been flicking through on the table to wind her arms around my neck.

"Mhm. I have it noted down right there..."

I glance back at the page where it has been left open, covered with her chicken-scratch scrawl. I grin.

"You going to read these to the baby when she comes along?"

She cocks her head to the side.

"You’re really certain it’s going to be a girl?"

"More certain than I am of anything in the world."

"Well, I think they’re a boy," she replies, as she cups her hands around her swollen belly. "No idea why. I just get the feeling. And yes, I’m going to read them my journals when they’re born. They’ll be sick of the sound of my voice before they get to a year old..."

I laugh, and reach out to pull her into my lap, bringing her on to my knee.

"Careful, I’m probably too heavy for you now," she warns me, and I roll my eyes fondly.

"You could weigh a ton more and you wouldn’t be too heavy for me, ma’am," I remind her, and she softens into me, resting her arms on my shoulders.

"You’re too sweet."

"Just speaking the truth, nothing more."

I rub my hands along her waist, glancing back to the journals on the table beside us. She must have filled out a half-dozen of them since she arrived, detailing the stories that we have shared in the last year. I never had an issue with it, even if I wasn’t entirely sure why she was so committed to it – and then, when she came to me a few months ago to tell me that she was with child, it all fell into place.

She was keeping these stories for them, as a way to share the strange, beautiful shape of how we had come into each other’s lives.

And strange it was, and still is, at least as far as everyone in town is concerned. We’re not married – no need for that, when the commitment we share to one another runs deeper than anything some minister could confer on to us.

Whatever we have, it defies the limits of anything else I have ever known, even anything else I have ever experienced. I don’t care what people think of us, as long as she is at my side. Let them talk. Our story is far more complex than they could ever imagine.

"I can’t wait till this baby comes along," she sighs sweetly in my ear, as she rests a hand on her stomach. "I’m going to have to get a dozen new journals just to keep up with this part of our story..."



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