Free Not Quite Right (A Lowcountry Mystery) (Lowcountry Mysteries Book 6) by Lyla Payne Page B

tattered clothes, this boy with a smile that could light up the whole lowcountry if people only took the time to see it. I scooted closer, turning my face up to his with a smile that came from a new part of me—a womanly part, one that wanted things I didn’t understand and couldn’t name, but James saw it.
    He sucked in a quick breath, his cheeks flushing. His silky, dark eyes clung to my face, hungry, and one hand lifted to cup my cheek, the pad of his thumb running along my lower lip.  
    A thrill ran through me over and over, like a strike of lightning or that moment you get away with filching a hot bit of bread and honey without Lillie noticing. I struggled to breathe. We shouldn’t have been touching. We shouldn’t have been sitting that close. We shouldn’t have become friends at all, and it was unnatural, according to most folks, for our feelings to have stretched beyond that.
    But they had, long ago. My feelings for James have always been huge, too big to even think about holding on to or tying down—they fly where they wish, but they’re always wrapped tight around the two of us.
    But today—oh, today! I can still feel the press of his lips against mine, the glorious meeting of our mouths in a way my body and his seemed to agree upon and understand. They still feel swollen and hot with the wonder of it all. I can’t wait to do it again and again and again. He is my future, he must be. A life without him would be too awful to bear, and I think—I hope—that Mama and Papa wish for me to be happy.
    At any rate, they have Charles Jr. and Bessie to take over the Hall. If they won’t give me their blessing, at least it will not break their hearts when I leave.
    I have to blow out the candle before Bessie comes in to bed. She’s been out in the parlor reading for hours, but I hear her shuffling around now. She mustn’t find out about James or about my plans. No one can, not before it is too late for them to stop me from leaving. It is already too late to put a halt to my loving him. I exalt in the fact that nothing can do that, not in this world or the next.

    I put down the journal with tears in my eyes, touched by Charlotta’s youth and passion, and devastated by the benefit of my hindsight. Even without knowing what parted them in the end—whether it was the pregnancy, the baby, her father, his mother, or a combination of the whole mess—I know her statement about nothing in the world being able to put a stop to her love will not turn out to be true. Still, it’s terribly romantic.
    And as all truly romantic stories are, horribly sad at the same time.
    I need to know what happened to the two of them. If Charlotta’s journals end in 1905, Mama Lottie had likely still been living. Her ghost, at least the one that appeared as a grown woman, seemed to be well into her sixties. If Charlotta couldn’t tell me what had become of James, perhaps Mama Lottie could.
    If I ever see her again. And if she’s willing to divulge painful family secrets to a strange woman she doesn’t seem to like all that much.
    It’s hard to say which is the bigger “if.”
    A knock on the front door startles me out of the past and dumps me in the present, which feels dreary and monotonous after Charlotta’s lush descriptions. I wipe my cheeks on a dishtowel before letting Leo, who’s laden with a couple of paper bags and a pizza box, back into the house, but he gives me a look anyway.
    “Good Lord, Graciela. You know those people are already dead, right? Isn’t your grams the one who used to get on people for cryin’ at funerals?” He thinks for a moment, going ahead of me into the kitchen to set down his burdens. “Only reason to bawl over the dead is if ya think they’re dancin’ with the devil. And even then, at least they’re still dancin’. Was that it?”
    The memory of Grams and her way with words makes me crack a smile. I nod, lifting up the pizza box lid to find half-pepperoni and half-sausage. Half my