Free Her Beguiling Bride by Paisley Smith

Chapter One
    February 1867
    “You can’t keep this…thing…with Alice up forever.” Granny lowered herself into one of the porch rockers.
    Ignoring Granny, Belle never tore her gaze from the red-earthed fields where Alice walked with Uncle Hewlett and Chester, one of the field hands who’d returned after the war. Belle sighed, her tight stays preventing her from taking a deep enough breath.
    She pursed her lips. Alice had been with her since 1864, and while theirs was not a conventional relationship by any standards, Belle found comfort in it.
    The barren winter landscape faded and with it the rows of withered cotton stalks in the furrowed red clay and the bleak gray hues of the trees and barn. It all blurred until the only thing Belle could see was the image of her lover looming in her mind’s eye.
    Alice.
    Belle’s stomach grew taut at the memory of her lover’s fingers thoroughly exploring her most private recesses earlier that morning. The muscles in her thighs tightened, and she shifted her weight from one foot to the other, but the movement only enhanced her need. It had been three years since the Yankees had left Alice O’Malley, dressed in a Zouave uniform, in Belle’s bed. Belle and Granny had nursed the wounded she-soldier back to health, but Belle had been unprepared for the odd bond that had formed between her and the strange, boyish Yankee girl.
    At some point in their relationship, Belle had realized she loved Alice in the same way she’d loved her departed husband, Dalton. Everyone had known Belle had suffered several great losses in a row, and the illicit relationship between the two women hadn’t been publicly questioned.
    Until now.
    Belle, herself, had avoided questioning it. She and Alice never discussed the particulars of their commitment to one another. They simply lived it. Since the war’s end, they’d both fallen into a very comfortable routine of working together to run the vast plantation before falling into bed at night and silently fulfilling deeper, darker needs.
    Biting her bottom lip in memory, Belle blinked her reverie away before turning to Granny, whose brow wrinkled in expectation of an answer to a question she’d never asked.
    “I don’t have a whole lot of choice in the matter with Grayson gone,” Belle told her. Her brother, Grayson, had run off to join the Confederate Army after the Yankees murdered their father. He’d been captured at the Battle of Nashville and sent off to prison at Camp Douglas where he died days before he was scheduled to be released.
    Belle’s gaze swept the family plot at the edge of the woods where Grayson’s body had been buried next to their poor afflicted mother, who had passed away shortly before Grayson.
    Alice had been by her side the entire time, offering unspoken comfort and a shoulder to cry on.
    Granny wet her thin lips with the tip of her tongue. Her eyes twinkled as the rocker creaked on the wooden porch. “Nathan Bailey is back from England.”
    “The man who hired your Tommy as his substitute?” Belle knew very well who Nathan Bailey was, but she could not resist uttering the wounding reminder that he’d hired Tommy to fight in his stead, especially when it was obvious Granny meant to act as matchmaker. Poor Tommy had lost both legs in battle and, it seemed, had also lost his will to live. His days were spent lying in bed, staring at the window. He only ate when Granny forced him and had lately taken to refusing all visitors.
    “The same,” Granny said, ignoring the barb even as one sparse white eyebrow lifted.
    Belle couldn’t tell if the look was from spite or some sort of conspiratorial mischief. “Has he even paid Tommy a visit?” she asked.
    “As a matter of fact, he has,” Granny said smugly. “He also paid Tommy a pretty hefty sum for those legs my boy lost in his stead.”
    “As if that redeems him,” Belle muttered under her breath. She knew Granny, who was deaf as a doornail, couldn’t hear her words.