“Please do,” he told her, bending his face close to hers, and he felt her shiver with the sound of his voice. “I haven’t stopped thinking about that moment. Or about our kiss.”
“Neither have I.” He cupped her face gently in his hand and drew her close. When her arms came up around his neck, he shuddered.
Their lips met, tentatively at first, before the kiss deepened. Her mouth opened under his, and their tongues tangled. She pressed herself close, the length of her body meeting his, and he wrapped his other arm around her waist, possessive. She melted at his touch, standing on tiptoe to meet his lips.
“We should...”
As if on cue, a shout came through the trees.
“Solomon?”
“In a moment!” Solomon called back, and silence was his only answer. He grinned down at Violet, and saw her blushing.
“They’ll know.”
“They’ll know I can’t keep from kissing you,” he agreed, and followed the statement with a kiss. When her fingers tangled in his hair, he groaned aloud. “My goodness, woman!”
“Yes?” Her eyes were wide.
“Do you have any idea what you do to me?” he demanded, but he was smiling.
She shook her head, blushing all the more, and he ran one finger down along the side of her neck, watching her breathing change in response to his touch.
“You’re the perfect mix of angel and temptress,” he whispered. “I’ve never known another woman like you. You are exquisite, Violet.”
“Even in breeches?” she asked him, a laugh in her voice, but she turned to kiss his palm, and her eyes drifted closed as her lips moved.
“We’ll have you out of those soon enough,” Solomon promised.
“But I hate wearing...ohhh!”
“Mm-hmm,” he agreed, and his lips found hers once more.
Chapter 18
It was five days back on foot, days when Jasper and Cecelia spent rather a lot of time walking very far ahead of Violet and Solomon. The two could hardly look away from one another, their faces transformed by love and their manner at once subdued and leaping with joy.
They dawdled, the two of them, and Jasper wanted to snarl at them to keep walking. As they grew closer, he thought he might vomit for nervousness. What would Clara think when she saw him again?
“That you’re all manner of interesting colors these days,” Cecelia opined tartly, when he asked. She pointed to a particularly vivid bruise on his neck. “That one’s green. I didn’t know people turned those colors.”
Jasper said nothing. His heart was still pounding, his mouth dry.
“Jasper, she’s going to be glad to see you.”
He could only hope. He wanted to run all the way to the farm, to fall on his knees and beg her forgiveness for doubting. He had thought, all this time, that he might not be Northern enough, Union enough. He had not trusted that her love would land only where it belonged...and that he deserved it, and now he was no longer sure she would forgive him.
But when he saw her running to him, her red dress vivid against the bare fields, he doubted no longer. He broke into a run as well, pounding across the hard earth where he had threshed wheat, carried apples for cider, driven oxen to turn the soil. This was his home, the farm house rising prettily in the background, wood smoke curling from the chimney against a blue autumn sky. This was his home, and the woman running to him with her golden curls flying in the wind would be wife.
“Oh, my goodness!” Her mouth was open in horror as she saw his bruises. “Jasper, what did they—”
“Nothing important.” He crushed her into his arms, feeling her warmth against him. She was laughing against his mouth, and yet crying.
“I thought you were never coming home.”
“I’ll always come home to you.” He held her close, whispering into her hair. “Nothing can keep us apart, Clara. Nothing.”
“What did they do to you?” she whispered back.