The war is over. The wounds are not.
In the smoldering quiet after the last battle of the Revolution, British Captain James Hawthorne is left for dead on American soil. Bleeding, abandoned, and haunted by the fiancée waiting for him in England, he prepares to take his final breath.
Until she finds him.
Eliza Carter, daughter of a famed Revolutionary commander, should leave the enemy officer where he lies. Instead, driven by conscience—and something she refuses to name—she hides him on her family’s land, risking her safety, her reputation, and her heart.
As James heals, the fragile truce between them deepens into something neither expected. But secrets stand between them: his engagement to a noblewoman across the sea, her loyalty to a father who would never forgive her betrayal, and the truth of who they were before the war ended.
ONE
The smoke had not yet lifted. It clung to the trees in low, ghostly ribbons, drifting over the bodies strewn across the field like discarded uniforms. So many lives. So many men. But one man, Captain James Hawthorne, blinked his eyes open, tasting ash with every breath. The metallic tang of blood was thick on his tongue. Men groaned for life around him, and somewhere in the distance, a raw, tearing sound of a horse screaming. He flinched, even though he could not move.
“So this is how it ends,” he thought as pain flared white behind his eyes. He tried to lift his head.
He had imagined death before in the heat of battle, in the crush of bodies, in the roar of musket fire. But not like this, never like this–abandoned and alone–with the image of Eleanor rising unbidden in his mind.
“Come back to me,” she had said, her gloved hand slipping from his as he boarded the ship for America. He promised he would. A promise he could no longer keep.
The hazy sky above him blurred. He blinked, but the world tilted, darkening at the edges. His fingers twitched uselessly at the cold earth as he felt the warmth of his own blood seeping beneath him, soaking into the soil of a country that had never wanted him here.
But then, footsteps. Too light for a soldier.
James forced his eyes open. He tried to turn his head, but the pain was too much. He let out a noise, low and soft, that was just loud enough for the passerby to hear. The footsteps stopped.
A woman stood over him, holding a lantern in one hand, its glow catching the edge of her jaw and the curve of her cheek. She was framed just enough by the fading light for James to make out her dark hair that was pulled back hastily, wisps escaping around her face.
He tried to reach for his pistol, but his arm refused to obey. He was injured more than he knew.
She knelt beside him. Her breath caught as she took in the wound at his side.
“Are you alive?” she whispered, half disbelieving, half in something similar to fear.
James groaned.
Her fingers brushed his forehead with a cool, steady, unbearably gentle touch, and her blue eyes looked into his hazel eyes as she said, “God help me.”
Create Your Own Website With Webador