Lorraine Heath by Always To Remember Read Free Book Online Page A

pain consumed her heart until it was a physical ache, and tears trailed down her cheeks.
    “I’m sorry,” he said hoarsely.
    Slowly, she shook her head. No apology on earth could atone for what he’d done. She felt utterly and completely violated.
    “I … I never took the letters out. I only touched the envelopes. I was just so damn alone, so damn lonely … sometimes I just needed to have some kind of—”
    Opening her tear-filled eyes, she stared at him. “You didn’t read the letters?”
    He shook his head. “You could take the letters out, burn the envelopes—”
    “You only touched the
envelopes?”
    Remorse washed over his face. “And smelled them. They always smelled so sweet … like honeysuckle.”
    Lifting a letter, she wondered how he managed to notice the honeysuckle when the acrid scent of gunpowder practically drowned it out. She’d been disappointed when she opened the pouch and discovered how distant the honeysuckle smelled. A smile of remembrance graced her lips as she brought the letter to her nose and sniffed. “Kirk liked the smell of honeysuckle,” she said softly. “I always slipped a few honeysuckle petals between the folds of the letters.”
    “It probably reminded him of you.”
    Blushing, she turned her face away. No conversation with this man ever went the way she planned. His sad eyes, his honesty always took the fight out of her. She wiped away any trace of previous tears and forced all softness from her eyes before she dared look at him again. “Why didn’t you
touch
your
own
envelopes. Didn’t your family write you?”
    “My ma wrote me.”
    “Then why didn’t you read those letters?” she snapped.
    “Because they wouldn’t give them to me.”
    His answer startled her. She assumed that an unwritten code guaranteed that a letter be given to the person for whom it was addressed. She shuddered at the thought of Kirk not receiving her letters. “If they didn’t give them to you, how can you be sure she sent them?”
    “Because they showed them to me just before they burned them. They’d—” Despair contorted his face as he closed his eyes.
    Meg’s hand was almost resting on top of his before she realized that she was about to offer this man comfort—the last thing she wanted to give him. She jerked her hand back, but her curiosity had been piqued. “What did they do?”
    Opening his eyes, he glanced down the river, slipped his fingers between the buttons on his shirt, and rubbed his chest. “Doesn’t matter now.”
    “But why did they burn your letters?”
    “Because they hated me as much as you do and weren’t real keen on seeing me happy.” He heaved a deep sigh. “Then Ma and Pa died while I was gone.”
    She watched his throat work convulsively as though he were struggling to keep his emotions tamped down.
    “I don’t even know what she wrote in all those letters she sent,” he said in a hoarse, ravaged voice. “I don’t know if she understood or if she was worried. I’ll never know.”
    Meg caught herself before she voiced her sorrow over the loss of his mother’s words. She could imagine the devastation she would feel if she discovered that every word she had written Kirk had been burned without his reading them.
    As though he’d revealed too much, he ran a finger along a tiny fissure in the boulder, his eyes straying toward the distant horizon. “Did you read the letter he wrote you?” he asked.
    “The letter he wrote me?”
    “Your husband. Did you read the letter he wrote you?”
    “He wrote me more than one and, yes, I read them all. Many times in fact.”
    He shifted his gaze to her, giving her the sad smile she’d come to recognize. It was almost as though he thought she’d hate him all the more if he gave her the kind of smile he’d worn for the boys in the river. “I was referring to the letter he left you in the pouch.”
    Meg’s eyes widened as her hands began to tremble. In the church, she’d gathered the letters together