Showing results by author "Bonnie Turner" in All Categories

Freya Swenson is being pulled from the sea. As the rough hands lift her aboard, she looks around. The realization hits her. It is him, the man in her yearlong nightmare. He has her now, and like a fool she delivered herself right to him. A year ago, she was planning a future--her own fleet of merchant ships and her dreams to sail the seas like her father had taught her. Then the nightmares began after her mother's death. A man so vile that she would elect death rather than ever be handed over to him.

Tilley and Faith Hall are living with their grandmother Agnes Grasdon on the plantation they now owned near Smith Mountain in Bedford County, Virginia. Agnes had obtained the massive mansion and over a thousand acres for back taxes, giving her granddaughters the love and security they had never had in their young lives. As Marcie Hall is dying, she is taking a secret to her grave: She had signed over guardianship of her twins to Judge Joe and Beth Blackwell, the last people Agnes Grasdon would want her grandchildren raised by. Once again, Marcie's bad decision will cost her daughters.

The train ride was going to be the first trip the twins had ever taken. Tilley and Faith Hall had just met their absentee father, Tillis Grasdon, a few weeks before; now they are going to live with him and his mother, Agnes. They have their new clothes in new suitcases, for their life of extreme poverty had never afforded them anything new until now. With promises of the finest schools and a better life in Roanoke, Virginia, they leave their mother, Marcie Hall, and Wilmington, NC, behind them.

It would be just another beautiful day in the Deep South, if you were not a slave. Off in the distance, the Whip-poor-will is softly singing, lying to everyone, like all is right with the world. How can it be so happy when a child is lying naked in the hay, while its very young mother, covered in blood, is worried she will be killed for having him? What if Madam Tibbs found her child, the very blonde heir to Tibb's Plantation? The hanging trees in the woods are calling her name, "Lucinda, come float from my branches, sweetmeat, for you girl, have blasphemed God and your Master Tibbs."

Tilley galloped into Judge Joe Blackwell's yard, trying not to think of what she had just witnessed. Jasper had rushed home after he had asked her to marry him yesterday, to a woman who had to be five months pregnant, his Ann. Why didn't he just tell her? But then she told him she didn't care; it was not as if she didn't have enough shit going on in her life at the moment.