Paxton and the Lone Star by Kerry Newcomb Read Free Book Online

dominated their room. A moment later, her gown swept away, their bodies joined in a union of sultry motion and driving energy that rose to a peak and, while they held one another close, only slowly subsided.
    â€œNo woman need fear time,” Adriana said at last, reaching up to touch Thomas’s cheek, “as long as her husband makes love to her in the morning.”
    â€œYou will never need to fear time, then,” Thomas said. He rolled off her and, one hand on her stomach, lay watching her. “You are too beautiful not to make love to in the morning.”
    Adriana curled onto her side, molded her body to his, and parted her hair to let him kiss the back of her neck. “You did remember,” she purred, drowsy from the exertion.
    â€œAlways,” he said, shutting his eyes against the sunlight that gradually filled the room.
    â€œThey’ll be here today,” Adriana said. “This morning.”
    Thomas did not ask how she knew, for his wife was of the gypsies, and there were secrets he could never share. He nodded in simple acceptance. It was good to have his wife at his side. It would be good to have his sons home.
    Solitary.
    The swamp guarded it. Water brooded over by a dense forest of cypress gleamed to every side. To pass through, one had to keep to the path.
    Solitary hadn’t always been so far away from the Atlantic. Not until the first rumblings of the war for independence did Jason Behan Paxton, Thomas’s father, move back into the deep woods and lay the foundation for the great house. That was ancient history, though, of no importance to the roan hammerhead stallion who plodded through the swamp with unerring accuracy. In the distance, a stone curlew piped insistently. True rode with his hands crossed on the pommel of the saddle. His mind wandered. Joseph was whistling out of tune. Behind him, his mouth pinched and his shoulders tight, Andrew studied the swamp. He had no love for this part of the journey, for he had been lost here once as a child, and had wandered for two nights and a day before Vestal found him. Andrew could remember the nights as vividly, as if they were only yesterday.
    Mosquito hawks of all colors, bottlefly blue, bright red, irridescent green, and jet black, flashed in and out of the sunlight. The water turned from green to red to dark brown. A water moccasin parted the brackish scum with its head, leaving a long V wake that caught a cypress limb. A heron stood one-knee deep, peering into the water. When he moved, his beak stabbed the water and emerged with wiggling silver fish which he tossed expertly into the air, caught, and swallowed. Then he stood motionless again. Above him, spiders hung suspended on glistening lifelines dangling from vines and limbs and leaves. So many eight-legged puppets performing the tiny choreography that nature had instilled in them, they toiled mindlessly through the stillness. Ever so slowly, the brown muck shelved and rose out of the cypress to become a meadow clear of cover for a good three hundred yards before it ended in a line of oak forest.
    To come to Solitary, it was necessary to pass the graves where three generations of Paxtons lay. Many markers dotted the lush, vine-shrouded glade. As always, True sought out two in particular, for they were inscribed with the names of those who had brought their name and sunk their roots into the new land. Jason Brand Paxton and Marie Ravenne Paxton. They had been pirates before forsaking their wandering, plundering ways. A diary kept by Grandmother Marie—as Thomas, True’s father, referred to her—had recounted their adventures at sea and chronicled the first years of their new life in South Carolina. The diary was moldering now, but where it was incomplete or illegible, tales told to children and the children of their children had left an indelible record to be carried in the hearts and minds of the Paxtons.
    They were stories True treasured, perhaps more so