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Secondhand Bride

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Overview

To win his father's ranch, a hard-living cowboy settles down and takes a wife -- another man's wife! The youngest McKettrick brother, Jeb, is the wild one who never could stay out of trouble. And trouble is what he gets when he proposes to Chloe Wakefield. No sooner had he and the pretty schoolteacher tied the knot than Jeb discovers she's already married! After a major dustup with Chloe in a Tombstone barroom, an irate Jeb hightails it back to the Triple M Ranch, certain that his chances of winning the spread in a marriage race with his brothers are dashed.

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Author Information

Bio of Linda Lael Miller

In 2006, New York Times bestselling author Linda Lael Miller left the Arizona horse property she's called home for the past five years and listened to the call of her heart. Packing up her dogs, Sadie and Bernice, and her four horses, the author of more than seventy novels bid farewell to her home in the desert and returned to the place of her birth, Spokane, Washington. The daughter of a town marshal, Linda grew up in Northport, WA, a community of 500 on the Columbia River, 120 miles north of Spokane. Her childhood remembrances include riding horses and playing cowgirl on her grandparents' nearby farm. Her grandparents' spread was so rustic that in the early days it lacked electricity and running water. As delightful as this childhood was, Linda longed to see the world. After graduating as valedictorian of her high school class, she left to pursue her dream at the age of eighteen. Because of the success of her writing career, Linda was able to live part-time in London for several years, spend time in Italy and travel to such far-off destinations as Russia, Hong Kong and Israel. Now, Linda says, the wanderlust is (mostly) out of her blood, and she's come full circle, back to the people and the places she knows and loves. Before Linda begins her writing day, she takes her first cup of coffee while enjoying the scenic view of the wooded draw behind her new home. The first morning there, a snowfall blanketed the pine trees, something she had missed in the desert outside Scottsdale. Still enamored with the people she came to love in Arizona, she says she will still set books in that starkly beautiful area, and, of course, Washington. Devoted to helping others pursue their dreams, the author will launch her seventh round of the Linda Lael Miller Scholarships for Women in May 2007. A talented speaker, she donates all her speaking honoraria to her scholarship fund. The stipends are awarded to women who seek to better their lot in life through education. It's no wonder the protagonists in Miller's novels are women her readers admire for their honor, courage, trustworthiness, valor and determination to succeed, despite overwhelming odds. "These qualities make them excellent role models for young women," Miller explains. "The male leads possess equally noble traits that today's woman would be delighted to find in her life's mate." The author traces the birth of her writing career to the day when a Northport teacher told her that the stories she was writing were good, that she just might have a future in writing. Later, when she decided to write novels, she endured her share of rejection before she made her first sale.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Pocket

Filesize

751.85 KB

Number of Pages

448

eBook ISBN

9781416514534

Excerpt from: Secondhand Bride by Linda Lael Miller

Triple M Ranch, Arizona Territory
Fall 1885

There was no place to run to, no place to hide.

Jeb McKettrick, always careening recklessly from the core of his being to the circumference and back again, was caught between the bunkhouse wall and the manure pile, with all the rage of a woman scorned bearing down on him in redheaded, whip-wielding, chicken-scattering fury.

Chloe Wakefield had found him, as surely as the needle of a compass finds due north, and chased him all the way from Indian Rock. Pretty much kept up, too, even though he'd been on a fast horse.

He was dead meat.

The buggy she drove might have been a chariot, drawn by the four horses of the Apocalypse, instead of a battered conveyance and a single lathered and huffing nag, both hastily procured at the livery stable in town. For the length of a heartbeat, Jeb actually believed she meant to run him down, grind him into a pulp under the wheels of that spindly, black-bonneted rig. For all his reckless love of life, he could not help but conclude that there would have been a certain mercy in oblivion. At least then he wouldn't have had to deal with the problem.

Clearly, he was not to be spared.

After a minute or two, his stepmother's chickens settled down a little, though, and went back to their ground-pecking and feather-shuffling. Maybe that was a good omen.

The only rooster in evidence, Jeb scrambled for his trademark grin, his one talisman, found a shaky semblance of it, and stuck it to his mouth. He put his hands out from his sides and made himself the picture of innocent affability, though on the inside, he was a tangle of contradictory emotions ' sweet terror, bitter amusement, and anger, too, because, dammit, he was right, and she was wrong. And because he had never guessed, before that day, that among his many secret and interchangeable selves lurked a yellow-bellied chicken heart.

"Chloe," he said, making a plea of the word, as well as a smooth reprimand. A red hen tapped briefly at the toe of his right boot; he ankled it aside impatiently.

Standing up in the buggy now, drawing back on the reins with powerful, delicate hands, Chloe fixed him in a sapphire glare. "Don't you 'Chloe' me, Jeb McKettrick!" she commanded. "You're a liar and a cheat and three kinds of devil ' you've all but ruined my reputation and my life, you sorry excuse for a man, and I have half a mind to whip the hide off you right here and now!"