An Unlikely Love by Dorothy Clark Read Free Book Online Page A

e’d done it. He’d found Marissa Bradley. Well, truth be told, it wasn’t his efforts that had brought them together tonight. Grant threw his tie over the back of the Windsor chair, sat and yanked off his shoes. His mother would say the Lord had taken a hand. He frowned, shook his head. He was a man of faith, but he was also a man of science, and that was difficult to swallow. Still...
    He
had
given up. The lateness of the hour and the multiple hundreds of people sitting on the grass or milling around listening to the concert had him admitting defeat. But seeing her standing on a deserted portion of the shore was serendipitous, to say the least. His mother would, of a certainty, say it was God.
    He crossed to his bed and flopped down onto his back. Marissa was beautiful. His pulse quickened. He laced his hands behind his head and stared up at the plastered ceiling, remembered the way she’d looked with the soft evening light falling on her upturned face, glowing in her blue eyes. Truly beautiful. The delicate cast of her features, the cleanly arched eyebrows over her long-lashed blue eyes, her finely molded nose and cheekbones, soft, full mouth and small, rounded chin were perfection.
    He jerked to his feet and walked over to his window, opened it to the warm August night and looked toward the lake. He’d met beautiful young women before. Paid court to a few until he’d lost interest. That was what he had intended to do with Marissa Bradley—see her a few times, satisfy his curiosity about the sadness in her eyes and then say goodbye. But tonight, when he’d looked into her eyes in that first, unguarded moment, something had happened—something beyond the jolt of his heart. There’d been a
knowing
in him that was irrefutable. A sort of...
connection
he didn’t understand and couldn’t explain. Whatever it was, it was foolish in the light of reason and knowledge. It was also undeniable. It was still there.
    He frowned, looked down at the grapevines silvered by the moonlight, turned and headed for his dressing room. He was a young, healthy man. Miss Bradley was a beautiful young woman. His was a simple physical reaction, easily explained by science. He had no reason, time or inclination to examine his response to her more fully than that. He had a busy day tomorrow with the coming harvest to prepare for. The matter of Miss Marissa Bradley would straighten itself out. The odd feeling was, no doubt, because of the circumstances of their meeting—a chance encounter in highly unlikely circumstances was intriguing. That’s all it was. The attraction of mystery. He was a man who liked to find answers. The feeling would go away after his planned meeting with Marissa tomorrow night.
    â€œMarissa...” He turned on the tap, shrugged out of his shirt and splashed water on his face. The name suited her. It was soft and beautiful and...haunting. He toweled off, tugged on his nightshirt, turned down the wick in the oil lamp and headed for bed, Marissa Bradley’s name and beautiful face lingering in his mind.
    * * *
    Marissa tugged the quilt up closer around her chin and stared at the sloping canvas roof over her cot.
    I took a chance that it was you.
    A tingle ran up her spine. Grant had come to walk with her. The other meetings might have been accidental, but tonight, he’d chosen to come and spend time with her. And he wanted to see her tomorrow night. Her pulse quickened, shot energy through her. She turned onto her side, winced at the crackle of the corn husks in the mattress and glanced over at Clarice. Her tent mate was sound asleep in spite of the snores and snorts issuing from the tents around them. Nothing seemed to disturb her.
    She edged closer to the side of her cot and slipped her legs out from under the covers, froze at the sound of footsteps outside their tent. She drew her legs back under the covers and waited. Moonlight threw a misshapen shadow on the