Fire Lily_A Dangerous Hearts Romance by Deborah Camp

Author:Deborah Camp [Camp, Deborah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC027050 FICTION / Romance / Historical
ISBN: 038076394X
Published: 2012-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

“Maybe that grave doesn’t hold that Jeffers woman,” Orrie Dickens said. She sat by the window, where a reading lamp cast sufficient light on the book she held in her lap. “I don’t want to put bad thoughts in your head, but it might have been a grave to make nosy people think that woman is dead and buried.”

Sitting in the middle of the bed, Lily glanced up from the game of solitaire she’d fanned across the spread. At first, she didn’t understand where Orrie was leading, then she caught on to her meaning. “Cecille isn’t dead, Orrie. She wasn’t in that grave.”

She and Griffon had arrived in Van Buren less than an hour before dusk, winning Orrie’s scolding. After a quick dinner, they’d all retired to their respective rooms. It was still too early to go to bed, so Orrie had picked up a book, and Lily had tried to engage herself in a card game. But her thoughts kept straying to the afternoon on the barge where Griffon had made her his lover. Lover. It didn’t have the secure ring of wife or betrothed, but it had a charm all its own, she decided. It hinted at passion, bright and hot and undeniable.

“Did you hear me, Lily Jane?” Orrie’s voice rapped on her private thoughts.

“What? No, I … was concentrating on this card game. What did you say?”

“I asked you how you can be so certain that grave contained the Jeffers woman. Did Mr. Griffon sense it?”

Lily placed a queen upon a king. “Yes.” She weighed her impulse to tell Orrie that Griffon hadn’t been the only one sensing things and found it a burden she wanted to share. “Orrie … remember how we loved to play hide-and-seek?”

“Sure I do. You always found us. Me and Cecille couldn’t hold a candle to you. I swear you were better at finding us than any bird dog would’ve been.”

“That’s right. I could usually find missing objects. Sometimes I could even know things about people. Remember how I knew what was in the boxes before I opened the presents on Christmas morning?”

Orrie closed the book and set it on the table. “Lily Jane Meeker, what’s come over you?”

For a moment, Lily thought Orrie meant she’d noticed a change brought on by the afternoon of lovemaking, but her heart settled into a normal beat when she realized Orrie was talking about her knowing things before others.

“I used to ask you about this way you had … how you could guess right most of the time and how you mostly knew what was under the Christmas tree before lifting the lids off the boxes. I used to think you snooped and found those presents before they’d been wrapped, but then I suspected you just knew.” Orrie clasped her hands in her lap and angled closer to Lily. “When I tried to get you to talk about it, why it was like trying to talk to a hoot owl. You’d just blink those big eyes at me like I was plumb nuts.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.