Free Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel by Jannifer Chiaverini

of darkness or not at all.
    The next time Lars came for her, she quickly dressed, slipped soundlessly out the front door, and ran to the warmth of his embrace. Hand in hand, they stole away to a grove of live oaks out of sight of the house, and there they talked and kissed and held each other for hours until Rosa’s apprehensions overcame her happiness. At any moment her mother, a restless sleeper, might wake, go to the kitchen for a drink of water, and check in on her children only to discover Rosa missing. “I have to go home,” she murmured, her lips brushing his. Lars walked her back to her front door, where they parted with a long, wistful embrace.
    “I love you, Rosa,” he told her as she turned to go, still holding her hand. “I always will.”
    “I love you too,” Rosa said, her voice breaking. She squeezed his hand tightly before going back inside.
    As she crept silently to her bedroom, slipped into her nightgown, and climbed back into bed, she smelled Lars’s scent upon her skin and wondered how she could be so blissful and yet so miserable at the same time, and how long she could endure it.
    At least once a week Lars would knock softly upon her window in the middle of the night. After listening for a long, breathless moment to be sure he had woken no one else, Rosa would steal outside to meet him amid the orange trees. Sometimes they hastened away on foot to the live oak grove where he had tied up his horse; other nights Rosa climbed up behind him and clung to his waist as they galloped off to explore the valley by moonlight—the golden mesa, the scrub-covered foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, the pebbled banks of the Salto Creek. They would talk and laugh, or dream aloud about a future theywould spend together, or lie side by side holding hands and watching the stars until the ocean mists rolled in over the mountains and drew a soft veil over them one by one. Sometimes they lost themselves in caresses and kisses, and lost track of time too, until the brightening of the eastern sky sent them racing back to Rosa’s house only moments before daybreak woke her family. Afterward Rosa would drift through the day half asleep, daydreaming of the previous night and of the next time Lars would come for her. Sometimes she nodded off at her desk in the middle of class, but her grades never faltered and everyone from her parents to her teachers would shake their heads and declare that she worked too hard. Guiltily Rosa would assure them that she really did not, but what they perceived as her modesty and diligence only made her rise in their esteem.
    Sometimes Rosa would wake in the middle of the night longing for Lars, but when he did not appear at her window she would sink back into sleep, disappointed and lonely. Less frequently, but often enough to distress her, Lars would come to her with the smell of alcohol on his breath, talking louder than usual and more prone to boasting and silly jokes. Once, when she chided him for his drinking, he groaned and said, “Not you too. You sound like my mother.”
    Stung, Rosa retorted, “Maybe you should listen to her.”
    Lars laughed. “The way you listen to your mother?”
    Rosa sat up, straightened her skirt, and picked leaves from her hair. “It’s not the same. Do you really want me to obey my mother and never see you again?”
    Of course he didn’t, and although his words were slurred, his apology was sincere enough to mollify her, but she soon learned that although he was sorry for teasing her, he had no intention of mending his ways. A few weeks later, he showed upat her window long after she had stopped hoping for him. Dawn was less than an hour away, and as she blinked sleep from her eyes she whispered through the window that she could not come out to him. It was nearly morning and the risk of waking her family was too great.
    “Come back tomorrow,” she implored, because she had not seen him for days and she missed him. “Come earlier, at