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With strong but gentle hands he turned me around and pulled me into an embrace.
“I would never ask such a total sacrifice from you. My older brother is a good steward, both of the family name and the lands. He will not miss me should I decide to spend part of my life in South Carolina...”
“Part?”
“Would you object to returning at some future time?” He drew a cautious finger down my cheek as his gaze probed my face, my eyes, my soul. “You have had no great experience here... I would not want to make you unhappy.”
“How could I be unhappy returning to a country where I met...” metaphorically I flew off the cliff “... my love, my darling, my future husband?”
With a cry of pure delight, he held me the tighter and kissed me. There are no words which can describe the feelings which shot through me as he held me close and claimed my lips with his own.
Unnoticed by us, Saracen neighed, and shook his head up and down as if in full approval.
The End
I hope that you enjoyed ‘Saracen’s Gift’.
You’ll find a preview another of my books ‘Miss Morrison’s Second Chance’, after the About the Author section.
About the Author
Janis Susan May is a seventh-generation Texan and a third-generation wordsmith who writes mysteries as Janis Patterson, romances and other things as Janis Susan May, children’s books as Janis Susan Patterson and scholarly works as J.S.M. Patterson.
Formerly an actress and singer, a talent agent and Supervisor of Accessioning for a bio-genetic DNA testing lab, Janis has also been editor-in-chief of two multi-magazine publishing groups. She founded and was the original editor of The Newsletter of the North Texas Chapter of the American Research Centre in Egypt, which for the nine years of her reign was the international organization’s only monthly publication.
Long interested in Egyptology, she was one of the founders of the North Texas chapter and was the closing speaker for the ARCE International Conference in Boston in 2005.
Janis married for the first time when most of her contemporaries were becoming grandmothers. Her husband, a handsome Navy Captain several years younger than she, even proposed in a moonlit garden in Egypt. Janis and her husband live in Texas with an assortment of rescued furbabies.
www.JanisSusanMayAuthor.com
www.JanisPattersonMysteries.com
Here is your preview of
Miss Morrison’s Second Chance
Chapter One.
Elizabeth Elinor Morrison, more familiarly known to her family and friends as Lisbet, was an extraordinarily pretty girl even when her great blue eyes were not delicately swimming in tears. Giving a final wave with the tiny scrap of cambric and lace scarcely justified with the title of handkerchief, she dropped dispiritedly onto a chair.
“Well, they are truly gone. I cannot see the carriage any longer.”
Just as she had ignored her niece’s hoydenish actions, Verity Morrison discounted the tremulous emotion portent in the young voice and calmly applied her attention to her needlepoint.
Lisbet sighed heartily with the accumulated wisdom of a young lady of almost eighteen summers. “Brothers are such strange creatures, are they not? I mean, they make one’s life miserable with their teasing when they are here, but now that the holidays are over, and they are gone… I miss them.”
“Odd, is it not? I used to feel exactly the same way toward Percy and John.”
“Pappa?” Lisbet stared at her aunt with undisguised disbelief, obviously – to Verity, at least - unable to reconcile the images of her stuffy father and priestly uncle with her wild harum-scarum brothers.
“Of course your papa. Sometimes I remember the scrapes we got into as children.” For a moment Verity slipped away to an earlier time, and the lovely, habitually sedate face beneath the incongruous spinster’s cap nearly resembled her niece’s in years as well as in classical configuration and delicate colouring.
Oh, those had been wild and wonderful times when they and the Pembertons had all run freely together like healthy young animals. Who could have foreseen Percy would become an odiously pompous copy of his autocratic father or that mischief-loving John would choose the Church? And Catherine? It had never even occurred to Verity she might become a lonely, loveless spinster, living out her days on gracious sufferance at the family home of Foxworth, nor the four siblings’ great and inseparable companion, Bradford, should ever be anything but the master of Bittermere.
Verity’s heart contracted painfully, as if it had been but days since his abrupt departure instead of the twelve long years that had passed from the time Bradford Pemberton had been cast, disgraced and disowned, into an exile as incommunicable as the grave. Now his brother, Roger, once so set upon a life in politics, walked the fields of Bittermere instead of the halls of Parliament.
Only Catherine had fulfilled her potential, Verity thought with an internal bitter sneer which was most uncharitable to bestow on one’s only sister. That most favoured child, their father’s pet, had married a much older and very wealthy lord, then gone on to become a successful London hostess. Catherine would!
