Falling into Forever by Tammy Turner Page A

business into a full trading company.
    But the sea captain needed convincing. What did he want with a trading company? He was already a successful seaman, crossing the oceans for the highest bidder, with tobacco, rum, and cotton in his hull.
    But the captain’s chance encounter with a gypsy at a port in Romania changed his mind. The fortune-teller read the captain’s palm and saw great wealth in his future if he took Charles up on the plan. Then Charles offered his hand to be read by the gypsy. She recoiled, terrified to touch his skin. Only curiosity finally persuaded her to see his palm. She said that Charles, the captain, and their families would never want again.
    When Charles returned home to South Carolina, he married Martha, and they had two children, Joseph and June. With Charles’s grit and determination, the shipping company was highly successful, and he built the estate by the ocean for his family. Joseph grew up strong and smart. Granny June told Alexandra how much she loved her brother Joseph, who helped their father run the business while she attended tea parties and auditioned dashing young men to be her worthy husband.
    Joseph embarked on a military career. When June bid her brother farewell for West Point, she would not see him again until the Army sent him home, a wrecked veteran of General George Patton’s Third Army, which had rained hell upon the Germans. Not long after coming home, Joseph died in a hunting accident on the grounds of the estate. But that was all Alexandra knew about Joseph, because her grandmother had gotten strangely silent about him. She did know that when Granny June married her beau Thomas, her parents accepted him almost as another son, allowing the couple to share their large estate and bringing Thomas into the family business.

5

Invitation
    After what happened to Taylor in the attic at Peyton Manor, June made sure to lock the door to the room. She saw Patrick leave to get groceries. Then she gathered the invitations for her Labor Day barbecue and went out with Dixie. She couldn’t be gone long, because Ian, her brother’s closest friend, was supposed to visit.
    With his mistress in tow, Dixie lunged eagerly down the winding gravel driveway toward the mailbox, which was just outside the security gate. Singing birds and blooming flowers kept the dog distracted while June ambled slowly behind her.
    â€œWhew!” puffed June, mopping her brow with the back of her hand as she plopped the invitations into the mailbox. “That driveway gets longer every day,” she told Dixie. The dog tugged on the leash as they passed back through the gate.
    Dixie’s ears pricked at the sound of rustling leaves in the trees around them and scampered toward the edge of the driveway. The dog made a low growl and stared intently into the woods. Then Dixie began to bark furiously at the dense, silent trees.
    â€œHush,” June scolded. She looked up into the trees and spied the remnants of a battered and abandoned tree house. “Good heavens,” she said, gazing at the treetops. “Jonathan!” June suddenly exclaimed her son’s name, thinking of his adventuresome childhood. Where was he now? No one knew. Perhaps he was not meant to have been born. When she was pregnant, she had nearly lost the baby when she slipped climbing the steep staircase to her bedroom at the manor house, where she and her husband lived with her parents. Jonathan arrived a month early and had never looked back. Tall and lean from birth, June and Thomas Peyton’s golden child grew swiftly and precociously. This thought reminded her of someone she must speak with.
    â€œQuiet down girl,” she commanded to the dog and pulled her into the woods. “This way,” she told the dog, whose eyes searched the ground for a trail.
    Moss dripped from towering oaks above their heads as they walked further into the forest. Dixie whimpered at her mistress’s side. Under a