Little Love Affair (Southern Romance 1)

“He’s gone. I told him I’d send the constables after him.” Clara tried to keep the sob from her voice, and failed.

“You’re so brave,” Cecelia whispered. “Come home now. We’ll send someone into town.”

“No need,” their mother said briskly. She nodded for her daughters to precede her back through the fields. “They’ll run off, if they have any sense at all. And mind the wheat, girls, that’s the harvest you’re trampling.”

“Mother...”

“She’s right,” Clara told her sister softly. She wiped tears away from her eyes and tried to smile over at Cecelia. “You shouldn’t have come back. It wasn’t safe.”

She expected a retort, but Cecelia only looked down at the ground.

“Cee? What is it?”

“I thought...” Cecelia looked away. “I know it’s foolish, you don’t have to tell me...the other one has blond hair, Clara. I saw him in the trees and I thought for a moment...I thought...”

“You thought Solomon had come back,” Clara whispered. She could hardly speak for the lump in her throat.

“Then I saw it wasn’t him. I shouldn’t have screamed,” Cecelia said so earnestly as they walked through the doorway of the farmhouse. “The other one...his whole sleeve was bloody. They wouldn’t have hurt me. Clara, I’m so sorry.”

“You did the right thing,” Clara said simply. She tried to smile. I thought Solomon had come back. “You should go brush your hair out.”

“You need to, too,” Cecelia said, and Clara shook her head.

“I’ll be up in a minute.” She stood aside to let her mother usher Cecelia up the stairs, and then she went to the window.

A wind was rising, a welcome breath of cool air over the fields, and clouds were gathering above. There would be rain tonight.

His whole sleeve was bloody.

He has a sister—like you, miss. A sister who’s waiting for him to come home.

“No,” Clara said softly. She turned away to shut the door, but froze with her hand on the latch. She could still see the man’s brown eyes, his hands up in defeat. As if he had already lost everything.

I’d never ask for charity for myself.

Before she could think, Clara snatched a loaf of bread from the shelf nearby. Apples, bacon—food they could ill afford to spare. She slipped an old shawl by the door, faded but clean, over her arm.

She should go back inside and shut the door, she thought, but her footsteps carried her outside once more, down the path that led to the forest. She shouldn’t have left the farmhouse. She should stay with her mother, calm and well-armed. She should have saddled Beauty and ridden for town. Still her footsteps carried her onwards in the fading afternoon light, a breeze stirring her tumbled hair.

There was no sign of them in the clearing. Clara looked up the hill to the old tumbled-down cottage that her father had always spoken of taking down. The glow of a fire came from within, and fear gripped her at last. Confederate soldiers on her family’s land. The enemy, come here to Knox.

A shadow appeared in the window, a figure looking down the hill, and Clara froze, terrified. Even too far away for him to call to her, she felt trapped, a rabbit in a snare. She thrust out the food and the shawl, deposited it on the ground, and then turned and ran as fast as she could, birdsong in her ears and the world carrying on as if God didn’t care in the slightest that she was aiding the enemy.

Then, if God hadn’t cared that Solomon was gone, she didn’t see why He would care about this. At the door to the farmhouse, she peered back up the hill. Was that a man in a grey coat she saw picking his way down the hill? Clara whirled into the house and slammed the door.

“What was that?” Cecelia asked her, and Clara clenched her hands behind her.

/> “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

Chapter 3

He could not stop thinking about the girl. Jasper sat on the floor of the ruined hut and stared into the fire, arms wrapped around his knees and his brown eyes narrowed as they watched the flames. Beautiful blue eyes and that stubborn chin, rosebud lips pressed together in determination. She was as slender and golden-haired as any southern belle, but there were blisters on her hands, and her skin had turned golden with the sun, just a hint of too-bright pink in her cheeks. Did she work out in the fields? She must. She had been holding a horse’s bridle in her ungloved hands. Not a pampered lady, this one.

Yet she was so lovely that he had wanted nothing more than to court her, to bow over her hand at her door, to steal a kiss in some summer night. He could imagine the softness of her lips. The pale column of her throat invited a kiss, and her slender waist would fit perfectly into his arms—

Stop!

She should not affect him like this. He had seen beautiful women before in his life. He had wished he had the courage to court Daisy back home, with her red-gold hair and her soft voice, but when the war had come up, he marched without even saying goodbye. He told himself that she would be more likely to think well of him if he came home a hero, defending the Confederacy; in truth, he was shy. He always had been, hiding behind manners. He liked to think he would have the courage to court Daisy now, but she seemed worlds away from him, unhardened by the war. He was no longer sure if he belonged there. Or if there was anywhere, truly, that he belonged.