Siege of the Heart (Southern Romance 2)

He was homesick. There was a yearning for what could no longer be: the house was gone, his family dead before their time, and Jasper thought he would give anything to have them alive once more. How could he measure his own happiness with Clara against the lives of his brothers and sisters? His life with Clara, it was true, was built on the ashes of what had been lost.

Yet it was more than that, as well. It was everything, from the way the sun rose over the mountain instead of the fields, to the different way they spiced their beer and the colors the women used to knit their shawls. Some days, Jasper could swear the sky was a different color and the clouds differently shaped. He was sick with it, for anything that smelled of home, tasted of home.

It lay deep down, in the fear of what this homesickness meant: was he not meant to stay in the north? Would this only end in despair for both of them?

A rough halt jerked him back to reality, and the blindfold was torn off as Jasper was pulled from the horse.

“Eat quickly,” Knox told him. “We’ve lost them for now, and lets you and I both hope it stays that way. And comfort that one.” A jerk of his shoulder indicated Cecelia, who was crying softly.

“Cecelia.” Jasper crunched over the leaves and broken sticks that covered the ground. His boots were filthy, he noticed, much like the shirt he was wearing and the pants that had seen far too much splattered mud.

“They’re never going to let us go, are they?” She brushed at her face ineffectually with her bound hands, and her tears began again.

“Cecelia, no matter what happens, Knox will get you to freedom.”

“And what about you?” she demanded of him.

At his white face, her own fell.

“No. Jasper, I can’t go home to Clara and tell her—”

“You may have to—”

“She’d never forgive me!” Cecelia’s voice rang with conviction. “She wouldn’t.”

“Cecelia, Clara and I both knew this might happen someday.”

“Did you?”

“...I did,” Jasper said finally. “You don’t just defect, Cee. They come for you.”

“But you... I mean, you saved...” She looked at him helplessly.

“A—” No, he could not call Solomon a Union soldier, not here. “You know what he was to them. And Cee, they must never know about him.”

“Of course.” She took a deep breath, and closed her eyes. “They’re looking for him too, aren’t they? I’ve been so stupid.”

“Nothing about what you’ve done has been stupid,” Jasper said softly. The others were still walking, trying to ease the pain of muscles too long kept in the saddle. The glares and whispered threats of the first two days had given way to occasional glowers; no one thought to watch the prisoners closely now, even Knox had drifted away.

“You’re coming back with me,” Cecelia said, barely a tremor in her voice to show that this was bravado. “I’m not going to let you get killed.”

“Cecelia...” Jasper wanted to laugh, or cry. “Do you think I deserve that?”

“What?” She shook her head. “You’re going to be my brother, you said you were going to be. I can’t leave you to die!”

“I have to stand trial,” Jasper told her heavily. “Everything they’re accusing me of, Cecelia, I did it. I left my brothers in arms when they desperately needed my help. I gave aid the Union. I...left my people, and became a Yankee. Yes. I saved your brother’s life, but that is only another in the litany of my crimes.”

“You think that? You truly think that?” Her face was growing white with fury. Truly, Cecelia was more like her sister than either of them knew. Oh, for certain, Clara had once been the headstrong one and Cecelia the timid one, but the younger sister was more confident every day. “Let me tell you something, Jasper Perry, if you think that saving—”

“I don’t. I would do it again in a heartbeat.” Jasper took her hands in his, both of them clasping fingers awkwardly around the ropes, and met her eyes. “Please, Cecelia, try to understand.”

“Understand what?” she hissed at him. “That everything you say would have me leaving you here while you wound up in the south again, and Clara alone with a broken heart?”

“Sometimes men have to pay for their crimes, no matter who loves them! Cecelia, didn’t your brother learn that too?”

She stared at him, struck dumb by the sentiment, and Jasper shook his head.

“I don’t want to go back.”