Little Love Affair (Southern Romance Series, #1) Read online

  “Miss, please—” He took a step forward.

  “I’ll scream,” Clara said desperately. “My sister knows I’m here, you know. She’ll be getting help.”

  “The one with the brown hair,” he said. His eyes softened slightly. Regret, or desire?

  “You stay away from her, too!” She would kill him if he went near Cecelia. How, she wasn’t exactly certain, as he seemed a good deal taller than she was, broad-shouldered and with strong arms. She’d manage somehow, she had to. She had promised Solomon.

  Only she thought a bit desperately now that he really should have had Cecelia look out for her, instead of the other way around. Clara was the one who did foolish things like face men down when they came out of the forest. Cecelia had the good sense to run.

  “Miss, I beg you.” He got down on his knees, hands still held up. She could see the hollows of his cheeks, and the light caught the outline of his torso, dangerously thin.

  Of course, she could also see the shape of his ribs, the place where the muscles rippled as he breathed. Clara swallowed and looked away before remembering how ridiculous that was. This was not a dinner party, and he was not a man of good standing. He was a rebel soldier. He was trying to tear the Union apart, wasn’t he? He was a good-for-nothing and probably had no manners as well.

  Only he did seem to have manners, and it would really help if he weren’t so handsome.

  “What do you want?” Clara asked finally. Her voice sounded unsure to her own ears, terribly young. He would know she wasn’t going to kill him, wouldn’t he? He was going to see her weakness.

  But he did not try to move towards her again, and a look over her shoulder confirmed that no one was sneaking up behind her either.

  “I need food,” he said desperately. “And bandages. Clean bandages. We’ve used everything we have.”

  “We?” Clara seized on the word.

  “My...friend...and I. I beg you—” He broke off and looked away. “I’d never take charity for myself, miss. I’d not ask, but my friend’s wounded. He’ll never make it back to his family if I can’t bind his arm.”

  Clara was shaking. “A lot of people aren’t going to make it back to their families.” She wanted her voice to be harsh, to remind him of everything his kind had done, but all she could think of was Solomon lying wounded and dying, and she knew she sounded lost.

  “I know.” His eyes said that he did know. They spoke so much pain that she looked away from him. “But he still could make it back, don’t you see?” His voice was low, pleading. “I’ve no one to go back to, but he does: a sister, he said. Like you, miss. A sister who’s waiting for him to come home.”

  “Stop,” Clara whispered, shaking her head. I can’t help you. Not you.

  “Please,” he said again. Just one word, nothing more. His hands were still up, his eyes full of pain, and Clara could feel herself crumbling inside. God help her, she wanted to tell him that she would help. What was it about this man? Were all Confederate soldiers so charming?

  “Clara?” A call echoed in the fields, and Clara looked over her shoulder desperately. Footsteps were approaching.

  It was Cecelia that made up her mind: Cecelia, sixteen and perfectly pretty.

  “Get off my property.” She made her voice as hard as she could.

  “I promise, I won’t hurt—”

  “Go!” Clara stepped forward, desperate to drive him away before he could see Cecelia again, before he could hurt one of them, or have a chance to steal her sister away from her. “Go, or I’ll call the constables! I’ll call them anyway! Go!”

  “Miss, he’s going to die.” The man pressed his palms together, beseeching.

  “And he should!” Clara yelled back at last. “He has a sister? Well, I had a brother, and you’re the reason my brother’s not coming home! You and your friend! Go! Go, or I’ll kill you myself! Just leave!” She could hardly see for the tears, but when she opened her eyes at last, he was gone and Cecelia’s arms were around her.

  “Clara!”

  “Child?” Their mother’s voice. Millicent, still in the same grey dress she had worn since her husband’s death, was holding Solomon’s rifle. Her eyes, the same blue as Clara’s, measured the girl’s tears.

  “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.

  Was it insanity, or did he think he saw the same in this Yankee woman’s eyes? Her grief was buried deep, a wildness behind her eyes, and she had been terrified of him. There was desperation there. She was armed with nothing and facing down a soldier, but he didn’t doubt for a moment that she would have fought if he had come closer. She was protecting something, driven by duty to go beyond what she would do for herself.

  He could not possibly know that after just a few moments in her company, could he?

  A sound from behind him made him turn, and he saw Horace’s eyes open to slits. Not for the first time, Jasper tried to keep from wincing. His friend’s muscular frame had withered to nothing from poor rations, cheekbones standing out sharply below pale brown hair and blue eyes that shone with a rising fever.

  Never would Jasper have thought Horace could be brought low by a mere wound. It was seven months since the man had rescued him on the battlefield, when Jasper was too gone with delirium to know if he faced a comrade or a Union soldier. Horace had always been a bulwark, as solid and unshakeable in his stature as he was in his defense of the Confederacy. And now... the last battle had been messy, a brutal affair, and in the wake of it, Horace was no longer the same. The wound was enough to kill him on its own, and yet it wasn’t even the wound that scared Jasper the most but instead the way Horace seemed to have sunk away from the world.

  Jasper swallowed. He must not let the man see his fear. “How do you feel?”

  “Like death.” The twitch of a smile told Jasper this was his friend’s attempt at a joke. “But I thought I smelled bacon.”

  “You did.” Jasper plucked a thick slice of bacon from the makeshift roasting spit with his knife and laid it on a slice of bread. “You should drink some water while this cools. Here.”

  Horace struggled to sit up, and grimaced when Jasper put an arm behind his back to help. “You don’t need to do that.”

  Jasper did not bother to respond. It was a refrain he had heard many times before. Horace would not accept any charity easily, much like Jasper himself—and yet it would have been more than Jasper’s conscience could bear to leave his friend to die. Even in a time of peace his wound might have festered, and this was no ordinary year when the town doctor might be summoned from his house. The doctors tended too many, and the wounded died on the battlefield as often as they made it to the field hospitals. So here they were: Jasper struggling across the hills of Pennsylvania with his friend in a haze, emerging only rarely to chastise him for his aid.

  Jasper helped Horace eat with the same seeming indifference he’d learned to use for it all. A proud man, Horace did not like to have his food torn to pieces, though his jaw was so weak now that he could barely eat the bacon. Jasper made sure to busy himself with the shawl so that he did not witness his friend’s frustration, heating water in one of their battered cups so that he could clean the wound.

  “Where are we?” Horace asked at length.

  Jasper looked around mutely. He had not admitted to Horace why they were here instead of making their way south, back to Confederate territory. It was a little thing Horace had said once, a lost word before he’d clamped his mouth shut: I used to go fishing on Lost Run.

  Pennsylvania.

  If Horace knew Jasper was bringing him through enemy territory to get him home, the man would insist he leave and go back to the army. So Jasper had pretended they were pursued, and then they were lost, and Horace was too gone with fever to notice. For the first time in days, Horace was lucid, and Jasper found himself wishing he hadn’t emerged from the delirium quite so soon.

  “Abandoned old hut,” he said, in hopes of not quite answering the question.

  “I can see that.” Horace lay back with a sigh. “You know, the rain on the trees and the smell...it’s very like home.”

  “Oh?” Jasper began to unwrap the bandages at his friend’s arm and wondered how to ask his friend more about his home without tipping his hand.

  “When I was young—” Horace hissed in pain as one of the bandages came away. “We would play blind man’s bluff in the forest. A summer storm came up and we lost my sister. My father was so mad. Even when we found her, he still beat me. It was the first time he told me I had to protect her.”

  “I’ll get you back to your family,” Jasper said, and though he had meant to comfort his friend, he saw narrowed eyes when he looked up. Damn, he hadn’t meant to say that.

  “Where are we, Jasper? Yes, yes. A hut. In the forest. Now the whole truth.”

  Jasper dipped one of the makeshift bandages in the hot water and dabbed at the wound before replying.

  “Pennsylvania.” He could not bring himself to meet his friend’s eyes. He swallowed as he cleaned dried blood from the wound. No matter how he tried to change the bandages each day, the redness seemed to be spreading down Horace’s arm, and the man winced when Jasper touched the inflamed flesh.

  Horace let him bind the wound in silence, but his eyes were faraway, the delirium very far gone. When Jasper asked about the pain, headshakes were his only answer.

  “You shouldn’t have done this,” Horace said at last.

  “What was I going to do, leave you?”

  “Yes. Go home to...” Horace’s voice trailed away, but he rallied. “Your town needs you, Jasper.”

  “What’s the point in rebuilding when the Union can burn it all down again?” Jasper asked bitterly. He sighed and dipped another bandage in water, beginning to dress the wound again.

  “They’re trying to preserve one country,” Horace chastised him, and Jasper’s head came up.

  “What?”

  Horace had been one of the Confederacy’s staunchest supporters, nodding around the fire as the men spoke of their families and their defense of the south. He had given all of them courage. To hear him utter kind words about the Union was shocking.

  “Slavery.”

  “Yes.” Jasper nodded. “We need it. I know. They’ll see someday. You’ll get better and we’ll show them.”

  Horace’s lips moved and Jasper could hardly make out the words.

  “...shouldn’t...”

  “Try to rest.”

  “You shouldn’t be here. Neither of us should.”

  “What good would it have done if you died in the camp? You know they don’t have the supplies for this.”

  “You’re well,” Horace insisted. “You should go home, before someone spots you. Two people attract more notice than one.”

/>   “You’re not well enough to travel on your own,” Jasper said bluntly. “And without this food, we’d be close to starving. Two people attract more luck than one too.”

  “Luck?”

  “A woman in the farmhouse down the hill gave us this.”

  “You were seen? Jasper, we have to leave.”

  “She brought food, not soldiers. It’s been hours. If they were going to kill us, they would have. She’ll...I think she’ll let us be. What?”

  “Your face looks...odd.” Horace coughed slightly and winced.

  “It’s nothing.” Jasper realized he had been staring into the middle distance and shook his head to clear it.

  “You’ve been away from civilization too long if you’re getting misty-eyed over some old farmer’s wife.” Horace lay back with a wince.

  “She was...young.” Jasper busied himself trying to wash out the old bandages. He would need to take them to the creek nearby, but there was time enough for that at dawn. His mind was only half on the task, however. “She was beautiful.”

  “A young famer’s wife.” Horace tried to laugh and his breath caught.

  “Unmarried.” Jasper thought back to her hands without a ring on them and felt a ridiculous stab of hope. Nothing more foolish than a young man’s heart, his father had said once, and it was surely true. Jasper’s heart, apparently, could not tell the difference between an upstanding southern woman and a Yankee oppressor.

  “Oh?”

  “Yes.” He tried to harden his heart, and could not. “Fair-haired, and blue eyes like....”

  “Jasper?”

  “What?”

  “You’re just staring at the fire.”

  “Apologies.” Jasper smiled distractedly.

  “Are you going to leave me here to waste away while you go off wooing her?” Horace asked plaintively, with a spark of the humor that had kept the men cheerful around their campfires, and Jasper laughed.

  “Oh, she wants nothing to do with me. She ran me off. I think she thought I was trying to go after her sister. Also a beauty.” He looked meaningfully at Horace and though the man laughed, he sobered quickly.