Free A Love Forbidden by Kathleen Morgan Page A

sheer luxury of her warm bed. The smell of coffee and something frying—was it bacon?—wafted up from the kitchen directly below her bedroom.
    As luck would have it, she wasn’t assigned to breakfast duty this morning, so she hadn’t needed to get up an hour earlier than the rest of the boardinghouse residents. She had a good half hour to do her morning ablutions, dress, and read a few verses from her Bible before the bell rang for the first meal of the day. And she was in no particular hurry to jump up and face the ice-cold room.
    Just five more minutes in bed , she promised herself, and then I’ll get up and get dressed. Just five minutes more, and then I’ll face the day ahead. She tucked the quilt more snugly beneath her chin, closed her eyes, and allowed her thoughts to drift.
    Today I have to meet with Johnson and Douglas.
    After the failed visit with Captain Jack yesterday, the realization didn’t fill her with any particular enthusiasm. Though both chiefs were said to be more friendly with Meeker, the reality was, of all the children in the two camps, only Chief Douglas’s son had attended school so far. From that, Shiloh could only surmise that Douglas and Johnson had chosen not to require any of their people to send their children to school. And that didn’t bode well for her attempts today to convince the two chiefs otherwise.
    A sudden surge of frustration swept over her, followed quickly by fear. Fear that she was going to fail. That she’d accomplish nothing more than Josie had, and her contract would be canceled due to incompetence. That she’d be forced to leave in ignominious defeat, with no recommendation to ensure her finding a new job. That she’d have to slink home like some dog with its tail between its legs, pitiful and beaten. And oh, how Jordan would gloat.
    Overcome with self-pity, Shiloh felt her eyes burn and a single tear trickle down her cheek. Angrily, she swiped it away. It wasn’t fair. Nathan Meeker had withheld vital information when he’d written her all those letters. If she’d known how bad things really were . . .
    Shiloh expelled an exasperated breath. “You’d have come anyway,” she muttered to herself. “You’d have imagined you could accomplish what everyone else couldn’t. That’s always been your problem. Thinking you could do anything you set your mind to do.”
    One would’ve thought she would have learned her lesson after that fiasco with Jesse. She’d set her mind on getting him to fit in on the ranch, to become a friend to all, and look how that had turned out. But her overly optimistic outlook had led her to believe it was youthful audacity that had led her astray. And she had soldiered on, attacking every obstacle set in her path and pretty much conquering them all. Well, at least until now.
    Funny how Jesse seemed to be a part of the few—the only —failures in her life. Was he just bad luck for her and perhaps she for him? Even the consideration of such a possibility filled her with sadness. She had seen, felt something strong between them even all those years ago. As if . . . as if he were her other half, her soul mate. He had always seemed to understand her, even when she didn’t understand herself.
    But that special bond had been torn asunder, shredded by nine years spent apart and lives lived in entirely different ways. Jesse had realized that from the start, there in the Bear Dance enclosure. She, though, naïve little fool that she was, hadn’t.
    Tears flooded her eyes once more. “Dear Lord,” Shiloh prayed, “help me to let Jesse go, once and for all. I thought I had that day he rode away. I put him from my mind and heart, because to do otherwise was to endure a part of me being ripped away. But I know now that I hadn’t. I knew the moment I saw him again.
    “Yet I must let him go. I do him no favors by trying to clutch at the remnants of what we once had. So, help me, Lord. Give me the strength to do this for Jesse’s sake,