Grass Widow by Nanci Little

Author:Nanci Little
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2010-08-13T18:00:25.016000+00:00

“I’ll never agree to such a lie, Joss! And I’m not going anywhere until this baby’s born. If you’d let me help you—”

“The hell! If you weren’t with child—”

“Next year I won’t be with child. Joss, I’m not—”

“Next year you’ll have a child, an’ twice the work under this roof you have now an’ too much already! Do you think I don’t know how you sweat in here? Do you think I reach for a shirt not knowin’ your labor in boilin’ an’ hangin’ an’ ironin’—an’ why you iron ’em!”

“I iron them for loving how you look in a pressed shirt, however long it may last. I’m not overworked or I’d not do it. What did Marcus say?”

“He said it’d grieve Pa for this land to lay fallow but how there’s nothin’ but that to do with it, an’ how I’ll kill myself tryin’

an’ he’s right—”

“Then let him farm it!” She knew that if she felt betrayed by Marcus’s offer, Joss must be writhing under the ache of it, but the words had flared unbidden from her; she went on with it. “Gid Jackson’s a strapping boy! He could have that claim shack looking like a home in short work if he’d but put his back into it, and if they’re so joe-fired heartsick at the thought of land laying fallow, let them pay for the privilege of planting and harvesting it. It’s called rent,” she snapped. “Even in this godforsaken backwater, they must be familiar with the idea.”

Joss’s eyes showed a brief, baffled hurt before that familiar dilation of temper blazed in them and Aidan knew: too much, too far, too harsh... “Joss, I’m—” Joss’s chair tumbled halfway across the kitchen when she uncoiled from it. “—sorry!”... and too late.

“Joss, I didn’t mean—

“I don’t want your pity for my trouble no more’n you ever wanted mine for yours,” Joss snarled. “If you’re stayin’ in this godforsaken backwater for pityin’ me, you can go the hell back to Maine!”

The momentum of anger carried her across the yard, her long legs eating the uphill distance to the woodlot she shared with Marcus, but by the time she got to the coldwater spring

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