Longing for Home by Sarah M. Eden

Author:Sarah M. Eden [Eden, Sarah M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, Historical, General, Western, Fiction
ISBN: 9781609074616
Google: fyvvkgEACAAJ
Amazon: 1609074610
Publisher: Shadow Mountain
Published: 2013-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Four

Katie awoke in a panic. She smelled smoke. She tossed back her blanket and threw her legs over the side of the bed. Her heart raced in her chest. Smoke meant fire.

She rushed out the door into the dark kitchen. Where had the smell gone? She’d never find the fire if she couldn’t smell the smoke. The oven seemed the likeliest place. Had she checked before going to bed that the embers had burned down in the firebox? She couldn’t remember.

Perhaps she hadn’t been keeping the stove clean enough. A fire might start in the pipe, or under a stove lid where grime and grease dripped and collected. Maybe she hadn’t cleaned as thoroughly as she thought.

She stumbled through the dark room, unable to truly see anything. She bumped hard into the end of the work table. Stepping around it, she slammed her knee into a chair.

The pain didn’t slow her. She had to find the fire. She had to find it before it was too late.

A pile of kindling might have been left too close to the stove. A rag left too nearby could catch as well. Katie couldn’t be certain she hadn’t done something careless.

Her hands followed the edge of the table all the way to the far end. She felt through the darkness until her fingertips brushed the iron stove. The cold iron stove. Cold, not hot. Cold. Still, Katie pulled open the door to the firebox. ’Twas dark inside. Not so much as a glow of embers.

“No fire,” she whispered over the sound of her pounding heart. The words penetrated her foggy mind. There was no fire.

She didn’t smell smoke, she realized. Not any smoke at all. She hadn’t, in fact, since waking up. Relief and exhaustion took a quick and merciless toll. She rested her forehead against the front of the oven. Tension coiled tight inside.

Eighteen years and the mere thought of fire still terrified her. A moment’s contemplation would have told her she’d dreamed the smoke. She always dreamed of fire when something in life was worrying her more than usual.

But she’d not stopped to think through the possibility she had been dreaming. Instead, she’d stumbled through the dark in her nightgown and bare feet, convinced the entire place was coming down around her in flames.

“What a fool you are, Katie Macauley,” she quietly scolded herself. “A frightened fool.”

A sliver of light spilled across the floor. “Katie?”

Had she woken Joseph? She didn’t think she’d made so much noise.

“Why are you kneeling at the stove?” he asked.

How utterly humiliating. “Would you believe I’m offering homage to the gods of baking?”

“No.”

Katie sat back on her heels. One deep breath didn’t calm her enough. She took another. Confession seemed the best course of action. Otherwise he’d think her the greatest looby ever to walk the earth. “I thought I smelled fire, but I must have dreamed it. I couldn’t remember if I’d properly seen to the stove before retiring for the night.”

“So you rushed out to check?”

She nodded.

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