Alone in his bed, sleep had mocked him. He closed his eyes, and her face appeared on his eyelids. He stared at the ceiling, and she was there, too—that full lower lip smiling…laughing. Not just her face, her limbs splayed across the picnic quilt while she dozed in the sun. He felt again those long legs wrapped around him as he tasted her kiss. How satisfying it was not to have to bend down to kiss a woman.

Maybe drawing her face—capturing it on paper—would chase it from his mind.

The drawer of his night table was full of such drawings. Drawings he hadn’t shown a soul. Not since Elizabeth died. Elizabeth, always in his heart but now in his past.

He’d found a new love—a love born of freedom. Tessa’s love opened a whole new world.

He cursed and threw the pencil. It bounced off a cabinet and rolled under the counter. Freedom? He choked a laugh. His existence was nothing but bounds and borders, rules and walls. He was chained to this farm, and he was never going anywhere.

Lightning turned the night to day. A cannon blast rattled the windowpanes and blew open the back door. As thunder ricocheted down the valley, he heard something else.

His name.

His name as he heard it called for years in his nightmares.

“Jonas!”

He stilled. Night after night, the cry tormented him until he woke in a sweat to the sound of Elizabeth’s dying voice. Night after night, she pleaded in vain. Snared in his sheets, he shook, a useless mass of muscle and bone.

But her voice faded years ago. Elizabeth slept in peace. His heart had healed.

“Jonas!”

Who summoned him now?

He closed his eyes, and wind parted his hair like a September breeze through a cornfield. He felt a faint thrum of wings across his face.

“Jonas!”

He opened his eyes, and the sketch seemed to glow from within. It shimmered for a heartbeat and shot across the table in a gust from the open door. This was no dream.

He sprang up, launching his chair into the cabinets. Throwing on a coat, he caught the drawing and stuffed it in his pocket. Then he grabbed the lantern and sprinted into the storm, praying he’d find her in time.

Chapter 18

Chapter 18

Soft pillows. The trilling coo of a mourning dove. Crisp, sun-scented sheets. Darkness.

Tessa wiggled and registered somewhere in her body that movement was bad. She lay completely still, boneless on the edge of oblivion, until consciousness hummed like a mosquito she couldn’t quite shake, tugging her back to a world of hard edges.

She rolled her head to one side, and her temples pounded. Her mouth tasted like cotton. Through slitted lids, she saw Jonas slumped in a chair, asleep. Her lips formed the shape of a word intended to be his name. A barely voiced whimper came out.