Seduced Read Online Free Page B

check on him.
    “Has he eaten anything?”
    “Broth. Some water.”
    Melody sighed and sat next to her sister. Mr. Baywood was getting pale and thin. Which made the yellow, purple and green bruising on his temple and face even more striking.
    “Perhaps I should have bled him,” Annie said. “Perhaps the pressure there on his temple is what keeps him asleep.”
    Annie had been rolling this decision over for days, first one way and then the other, constantly blaming herself for Mr. Baywood’s not fully waking up.
    “Last night,” Melody said, leaning into her sister’s side. “When I was out here, he told me that I was a good soldier. That my mother would be proud.”
    She thought of Mama, whose pride in her dead son did nothing to assuage her grief. But as useless as they might be, she hoped her brother had heard similar platitudes from other soldiers as he lay dying.
    “I don’t know what to do for him.” Annie’s thin shoulders were bent under her defeat. “I keep looking in this bag like I’ll find something.”
    Melody pressed the turkey and fruit into her sister’s hand and said what she’d been thinking for days. “It would be better if he died.”
    “Melody—”
    “Jimmy will be back. We can’t hide him forever.”
    Annie gave her one of her disgusted looks, took the turkey and left.
    Later that day, Melody came out of the barn with eggs only to find Annie digging up the clearing, through all the white and purple blooms.
    “What are you doing?” Melody asked, as Annie drove sticks into the ground.
    “I’m counting,” she answered, using her lurching step to measure off another parcel of land. When she stopped she drove another stick in the ground, twisting it into the soil until it stayed upright. “Planning the garden.”
    “Why?”
    “Mr. Baywood is dying.”
    Annie pushed her hair from her forehead and Melody saw the tears on her cheeks. The sight ran through her like a knife and she wished the right decisions could just stay right. That for once pain was not their constant companion.
    “This isn’t our land.”
    “Jimmy means to make it so.”
    The sun fell down between them in great golden sheets, from a sky so blue it seared the eyes. Truly Melody had never seen such light, such a pureness of air. She wished she could suck it all in, and through some alchemy apply it to her own black heart.
    “I want to tend the living, instead of the dying. What is the harm in that, in planning for something that will grow? That we can tend and it will survive? I want to care for something and be nourished by it in return. That is what I want.” Annie wiped the tears from her face and crossed her arms over her thin cambric shirt. She wore it tucked into her durable brown skirt and looked like a defiant farmer’s wife.
    Melody wore an old silk ball gown. The seed pearls had been sold off. The ribbons and lace were long gone. Now it was just a tawdry red silk that did not keep out the cold.
    She’d been married in this dress, and the thought was so black, she fought it. Pushed it away as best she could. With as much force as she could muster she shoved all the black thoughts away and conceded once more to her sister’s better self.
    In the ten months of hard travel, the year of her marriage and the war before that, in the times when she would give in to despair or anger, her sister always managed to find some branch of hope to cling to.
    A garden. Why the hell not?
    “Let’s plant,” she said.
    It took the better part of the afternoon, but when it was done they had turned over the loamy black soil and gotten rid of the rocks. They'd created a plot, far smaller than the one they'd had at home, but still respectable.
    Melody was dirty and worn out, but pleased in a way she hadn’t been since after Fort Sumter when she’d watched Christopher in his dress uniform, her lips still buzzing from his kiss, march off to what she’d been so convinced was sure, heroic victory.
    Melody lifted the