Love's First Bloom by Delia Parr Page B

perspiration on her forehead. Now that the sun was much brighter, she realized she had forgotten her bonnet again. Blinking back tears of frustration that added more exhaustion to both her body and her spirit, she sniffled, but it was the strong smell of fire, far too close to dismiss, which had her quickly scrambling to her feet.
    Heart racing, she whirled about, looking for the source of the fire. When she noticed the smoke swirling up from the chimney in the abandoned Canfield cabin, only yards away from her garden sanctuary, her heart sank down to the soles of her feet and stayed there.
    Someone had moved into that vacant cabin.
    An overwhelming sense of disappointment flooded her body, and her heart started to pound when she heard someone open the cabin door. Her disappointment flashed straight to annoyance, which lingered there for a moment. Clenching her fists, she squared her shoulders and tilted her chin up defiantly, yet she had no right to be annoyed, let alone claim an entire finger of land as her own.
    When she spied the figure of a man approaching, however, she instinctively took a step back. He was too far away to be able to distinguish his features, but he appeared to be a very old man who was wearing well-worn denim coveralls and a yellowed shirt. Leaning heavily on a makeshift cane, his shoulders were rounded, if not hunched. Even though he stopped every few steps, as if he needed to garner up enough energy to take a few more, he exuded a level of annoyance, if not outright anger, that made her heart pound even harder.

Eight

    Jake paused when he was halfway through the copse of young pine and cedar trees and feigned the need to stop to get enough energy to continue walking. He had been working so feverishly for the past few weeks, grabbing only a bit of sleep here and there, he almost did not mind using the cane he had fashioned by his own hand out of a twisted tree limb late last night.
    Because he knew and trusted Capt. Grant, he had come here to Toms River. It didn’t take long to learn from village gossip that a young woman had arrived only days after Grant delivered that wooden chest to Mrs. Garner and had moved in with the family—a woman he believed could very well be Ruth Livingstone.
    Unfortunately, Jake was still too unsure of his own abilities as a reporter to completely trust his own instincts. He was too far away from her now to see if she matched the description his brother had compiled for him from a number of sources to know if he had made a crucial mistake and wasted precious time by waiting several days before trying to actually meet her.
    Shadowed by the canopy of foliage overhead, he coughed and rounded his back a bit to give evidence of the ruse he’d devised for his temporary identity as Jake Spencer. He observed the wisp of a woman, who was standing near a pile of rocks he had seen her struggle from the ground this morning. He had been encouraged to see that she was petite in size, which seemed about right, although the dark blue gown she wore hung a bit from her frame, as if she had recently lost some weight. Her dark wavy hair was long and styled quite simply, however, just as he had expected it to be. Still, he was far from satisfied that this young woman was the one that every daily newspaper in New York City had sent their best reporters to find.
    He resumed his painfully slow progress down the rocky path toward her. Step after careful step, ever mindful of the image he needed to project, he kept his gaze locked with hers while he mentally sorted through the information he had memorized about the elusive minister’s daughter.
    According to all accounts, she was a shy, soft-spoken, reserved young woman who had only started keeping house for her infamous father five or six years ago, replacing a long series of housekeepers who had helped the young widower raise his infant daughter. While he devoted his time to the needs of the city’s fallen angels, she lived far from the