A Beau for Katie Read Online Free Page B

again. The itch on his leg remained persistent, and he wondered if he could run something down inside the cast to scratch it without causing any harm.
    â€œFreeman could do a lot worse,” Uncle Jehu went on. “He’s not getting any younger.”
    â€œThan Katie?” Ivy pursed her mouth. “You’re right, Jehu. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that myself. She’d fit in well here. And it’s long past time—”
    â€œDon’t talk about me as though I’m not here,” Freeman interrupted. “And I’m not courting Katie Byler.”
    â€œAnd what’s wrong with her?” Grossmama demanded, turning to him. “She seems a fine possibility to me.”
    â€œAbsolutely not,” Freeman protested, pushing his tray away. “And if this is something you’ve schemed up with Sara Yoder, you can forget it. Katie may make a great wife for someone else, but not for me.”
    * * *
    Katie tossed a handful of weeds into a bucket. “Freeman wasn’t as bad as I expected,” she answered when Sara asked her how her day had gone. She, Sara and two of the young women who lived at Sara’s had come into the vegetable garden after supper to catch up on the weeding. Ellie and Mari had started at the opposite end of the long rows of lima beans, while she and Sara had taken this end, giving the two of them an opportunity to talk privately.
    Sara grinned. “I knew you could handle him.”
    Both she and Sara were barefooted and wearing a headscarf and their oldest dress. The warm soil felt good under Katie’s feet. She loved the scents of rich earth and the cheery chorus of birdsong that seemed present in any well-tended garden.
    â€œI think he’d be a good match for someone.” Sara used her trowel to chop the sprigs of grass and work up the soil around the base of the lima bean plants. “What with the mill and the farm, he’s well set up to provide for a family.”
    Katie rolled her eyes. “I don’t know about that. Any woman who takes Freeman Kemp for a husband is asking for trouble. The man thinks he knows everything. Even when he doesn’t. He tried to tell me how to scrub the floor. Can you imagine? And the man doesn’t know where butter goes in the refrigerator. And when I tell him the truth of the matter, he gets all cross.”
    Sara added another handful of weeds to the bucket. They would go into the chicken yard and the scavenging hens would make quick work of them. Nothing ever went to waste on an Amish farm. “Men naturally think they know the best way to do things,” she said. “But the wisest of them learn to think before they speak when it comes to women’s chores.”
    â€œI guess no one ever told Freeman that.” Katie tugged at a particularly stubborn pigweed. It came away with a spray of dirt, and she shook it off and added it to the pile. Sara’s garden was as tidy as her house, row after row of green peppers, sweet corn, beets, squash and onions. Heavy posts set into the ground made a sturdy support for the wires that supported lima bean vines. Lima beans were one of Katie’s favorite vegetables and they were the concern this evening. A summer garden that wasn’t worked regularly soon became a tangle of weeds and a haven for bothersome insects.
    â€œDoes Freeman seem to be in a lot of pain? Ivy told me the break was a bad one. If he’s irritable, that could be the reason,” Sara suggested.
    â€œHard to judge how much pain a person is in.” Katie pulled the weed bucket closer to them as they moved down the row. “I think he’s more bored from having to stay in bed than anything else. I know it would drive me to distraction if I couldn’t be up doing.”
    â€œJehu is nice, though, isn’t he?”
    â€œHe is. He was very welcoming. He told me not to pay any mind to Freeman’s grumpiness. He’s an amazing