Free Darkwater by V. J. Banis

go much further, she told herself. She felt confident that she was in no danger of getting lost. Liza had told her quite clearly that the path would eventually lead her back, but she did not want to face too long a walk home.
    The walk had served one purpose, though. She felt calmer than before, her troubled thoughts at last settled into some sort of observable pattern. Here in the swamp, cut off from the sight of other people, from any sound of civilization, she felt truly alone and as if her problems were distant. She could face them now with ease and she took her thoughts out as she would take clothes from a trunk, shaking them and holding them at arm’s length to examine them.
    What a strange situation she had walked into. Driven by necessity, she had come to this little backwater town expecting to be nurse to an ill woman. Instead she found herself part time companion to a woman who, so far as she could see, had nothing wrong with her physically but who was insanely possessive of her husband.
    But was she being quite fair? For the most part, Alicia’s problems seemed to be more hysteria than anything else, but at other times, it did seem as if she were in actual pain. Or could the mind simply play that kind of trick on the body. She wasn’t educated enough to know the answer to that.
    As for Walter...if only her heartbeat did not quicken when their eyes met. If only she did not thrill so to the sight of him, to the sound of his voice. He was only a man, after all, and not the first one she had ever met. She’d had a beau, whom she had fully intended to marry, had he only come back from the war.
    And there was another soldier, a gallant young defender of the Confederacy, who had come back and she had dressed his physical wounds and tried to salve the other, deeper ones.
    And a Northerner briefly, arrogant, cocksure...but what did any of that matter now? She was here, and Walter Dere was married, however unhappily.
    Did she only imagine that light she saw in his eyes when he looked at her? Or did he feel something for her, too?
    â€œAnd if he does?” she asked herself crossly, speaking aloud because there was no one here to overhear, “what of that? What good could ever come of it?”
    Perhaps she ought to go away from here, leave Darkwater and the temptation that he had come to represent. This was not what she had bargained for in coming here. There was nothing here for her but increasing confusion and perhaps, if she did not guard her thoughts and her actions very carefully, if she should ever give in to the wild desire that had begun to tremble within her at the mere sight of him—why then there would be shame and great unhappiness for everyone.
    It was no use to tell herself how it had all come about, how this had happened to her. Her loneliness after her mother’s death, her feeling of desolation. Caring for her mother these last few years had left her no time for romance. Perhaps, looking back, she would have been wiser to have become that Northerner’s mistress as he had so obviously wanted. Money would not then have been the problem it had become for her, that had driven her here.
    All of that was behind her, though. She was hundreds of miles from home, with no ties, no responsibilities except to herself. She had met a man, handsome, soft-spoken, intelligent, charming. A man who shared her love of books, with whom she could discuss things. A man of strength and purpose. For the first time she felt the desire to be able to lean on someone else, she on whom others had always leaned. Suddenly she wanted to be a woman, and belong to a man. She was tired of being strong, of being wise, and most especially of being independent.
    It would never do, though. She could never give in to the urge she had begun to feel, to put herself in his arms, to lean her head against his powerful chest, and abandon herself to his will, however briefly. They were wicked thoughts, but she could not