Heartland Courtship Read Online Free Page A

wonder once more. The horrible war had ended slavery, yet tensions between the North and South had not eased one bit. And after four years of war, the South was devastated. What had brought this Southerner north?
    She watched his jaw work. She wondered what he was getting up the nerve to say to her. She hoped he wasn’t about to repeat the usual words of discouragement.
    “Are you sure you’re ready to set up a place all by yourself?” he asked finally.
    Rachel did not sigh as loudly as she felt like doing. Her stepmother’s voice played in her mind. An unmarried woman doesn’t live alone. Or run a business on her own. It’s unnatural. What will people say?
    “Brennan Merriday,” Rachel said, “if thee only knew how many times that has been asked of me. I am quite certain that I can homestead on my own land.” Her tone was wry, trying to pass his concern off lightly—even though it chafed her. She had become accustomed to being an oddity—a woman who didn’t marry and who wanted to do things no woman should want.
    “Why do you say thee and thy and your cousin doesn’t?”
    This question took her by surprise. “I don’t really know except there isn’t a Quaker meeting here.”
    “I take it that Noah’s the preacher hereabout, but not a Quaker.”
    She barely listened to his words, still surveying him. His body still needed feeding, but he had broad shoulders and long limbs. Most of all, the sense of his deep inner pain drew her even though she knew he didn’t want that. She turned her wayward eyes forward again. “Yes, he seems to have reconnected with God.”
    “Don’t it bother you that he’s not a Quaker no more?”
    “We were both raised Quaker but I don’t consider other Christians to be less than we are. Each Christian has a right to go his own path to God.”
    “And what about those who don’t want to have nothin’ to do with any church?”
    She heard the edge in the man’s voice and wondered how to reply. She decided frankness should be continued. “When he enlisted in the Union Army, Noah was put out of meeting.”
    The man beside her said nothing but she felt that he absorbed this like a blow to himself. She recalled praying for God to keep her cousin safe and reading the lists of the wounded and fallen after every battle, hoping not to see his name listed. The horrible war had made a dreadful impact on all their lives. Still did.
    She brushed away another fly as if sweeping away the sadness of the war, sweeping away her desire to hold him close and soothe him as she would a wounded bird.
    Brennan remained silent. His hands were large and showed that he had worked hard all his life.
    Just as she had. “I know that people will think me odd when I stake a homestead,” she said briskly, bypassing his digression. “But I intend to make my own way. I’ve worked for others and saved money enough to start out on my own.”
    Any money a woman earned belonged to her husband or father. Still, in the face of her stepmother’s disapproval, her father had decided that Rachel should keep what she earned. No doubt he thought she might never marry. His wife would inherit everything and leave Rachel with nothing. This had been her father’s one demonstration of concern for her. How was it that when she’d lost her mother, she’d also in effect lost her father?
    Except for Brennan murmuring to the team, silence again greeted her comment. Finally he admitted, “I see you got your mind made up.”
    They rode in silence then. The homestead Noah had told her about lay north of town within a mile and had been abandoned just before deep winter the previous year. Rachel gazed at the thick forest and listened to the birdsong, trying to identify the different calls.
    Her mother had taught her bird lore. She heard a bobwhite and then a robin and smiled. A pair of eagles swooped and soared overhead. She realized she already loved this place, the wildness of it, the newness.
    Another mile or so and Brennan