Page from a Tennessee Journal (AmazonEncore Edition)

she would do everything within her power to keep Alex home with her.
    Alone in her kitchen with dawn finally breaking full and pale this January morning, Eula failed in her efforts to put flesh and bone to the other woman. If such a person existed, who could she be? Surely, no one Eula knew. None of the women at the ladies’ quilting bee or the church socials had ever paid Alex more than a passing glance in twenty years, despite his good looks. Eula slammed her journal to the table.
    As she stood to start breakfast, she was certain Alex was out riding the acres. Perhaps a fence had blown down in last night’s wind. Still, the missing food, her husband’s decreasing interest in her as a wife, and the early risings had all happened about the same time. Gripping her pencil, she suspended it over the margin of her journal. Pressing the pencil down hard to stop the wavering lines her shaking hand might make, she wrote down question marks next to the columns of missing foodstuff. In the margin she lettered, “Must ask Alex,” and changed her mind. As she drew her pencil over and over the words, a gnawing sensation, worse than a mouse at the corn barrel, grew in her belly. She didn’t know how or why, but her stomach told her that somehow the mid-forty was part of the answer to her quandary.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
     
    It was the sound of another blast of wind rattling the barn window rather than the sliver of pale light creeping through the shutter that finally forced Alex to open his eyes. Even without looking, he knew the ground outside would be frosty this January morning, but under two quilts with Laura’s soft body spooned inside his, he felt bathed in warmth. He awakened with his arm over the roundness of her belly. He let his hand slide even lower. She stirred and he leaned to kiss her ear. She swiveled her head toward him and peered at the slender shaft of light from above.
    “It’s morning,” she murmured as she turned back and started to scoot to the edge of the sheet-covered mattress.
    He moved his hand to her waist and held her even tighter. In the last four months he had worked on training himself to awaken just at daybreak. That way he could be in his own barn starting chores in twenty minutes. But when the weather turned cold and he put up the new shutter over the barn window, too little light entered the sleeping alcove he now shared with Laura to alert him to the breaking dawn.
    “Morning can wait.” He stroked her shoulder.
    It was getting more and more difficult to leave her. She put her hand over his and broke his hold as she squirmed to face him.
    “Daylight just about here. It’s best you get back home.” She pulled away and sat on the edge of the mattress as she reached between the two quilts for the new flannel nightgown he had given her.
    He let his fingers run down her bare back. She didn’t resist. In the past few months, he was almost sure he detected a softening in her behavior toward his embraces and kisses. Now, she followed his lead without being instructed, and sometimes, he could almost swear, he felt her lips responding to his. He knew she no longer trembled when he caressed her. More than once he heard her sharp intake of breath when he thrust inside her. He was almost certain her moan came from pleasure. Alex knew it pleased him to wait several seconds for her reaction, and when he sensed her letting go of her resistance, he plunged even deeper. Then, there were the times he felt her fingernails gently rake his back. He was convinced that Laura was fighting, and losing, the battle against the passion she didn’t want him to see.
    “I’ll put your coffee on.” She slipped the gown over her hips in the small cubicle Alex had constructed for their privacy.
    Where once the quilt had been the only thing separating them from the children in the barn loft, he had built a wood-slatted wall with a narrow opening for a doorway, which he covered with a heavy burlap curtain.
    “Watch yo’ head when you get up.” Laura pointed to the sloped roof that allowed just enough headroom for her to stand upright at its highest point in the new little bedroom but caused Alex to stoop at all times. She pushed aside the curtain and walked out into the main room.
    Despite her best efforts to get him up, Alex pulled the bottom quilt under his chin to compensate for the loss of Laura’s body heat. It was getting harder and harder to be without her embrace.
    After his first visit in September, he