Forged by Love Read online

  Table of Contents

  Excerpt

  Praise for Laura Strickland

  Forged by Love

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  Josie stared at the man who spoke, afraid to believe her eyes. Tall and with bare shoulders that gleamed in the sun, he had a crop of wavy black hair and skin almost as dark as her own. Though he spoke to Daniel, his brown eyes sought hers and held them, his wonder evident to see.

  Not remember him? From the instant he stepped on the wharf, Josie’s attention had been snagged—and not just because he was a good-looking man. No, for the pull she’d felt from the first they sighted this place heightened almost unbearably, every one of her inner instincts sitting up and howling.

  Not remember him? Had there been a moment since that night he hadn’t been, somehow, with her?

  Her lips parted, but she didn’t speak. Daniel’s deep voice sounded instead.

  “Of course, of course we remember you, sir. How could we forget?”

  “Good to see you again.” The man focused on Daniel at last and extended a hand to him without hesitation. “But what sort of happenstance has brought you here where we might cross paths again?”

  “A long story, sir, and one with a full measure of sorrow.” Daniel shook the man’s hand with the innate courtesy that always marked him.

  The fellow’s gaze stole back to Josie, and she promptly went breathless. “I’m very glad to see you safe. That night—well, I never did get your names.”

  “Daniel Freeman, sir. This here is my son Michael, his wife Eunice, and their child Hetty. And my own girl, Josie.”

  Praise for Laura Strickland

  “The world building is phenomenal.”

  ~Daysie W. at My Book Addiction and More

  ~*~

  “Laura Strickland creates a world that not only draws you in, but she incorporates it…seamlessly. …the kind of book that keeps you awake well into the wee hours, and sighing with satisfaction when you’ve finished the very last page.”

  ~Nicole McCaffrey, author

  ~*~

  “As I read I became so involved with the story, I found it difficult to put down the book. …Definitely …an author to watch.”

  ~Dandelion at Long & Short Reviews

  Books by Laura Strickland

  available from The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  Dead Handsome: A Buffalo Steampunk Adventure

  Off Kilter: A Buffalo Steampunk Adventure

  Devil Black

  His Wicked Highland Ways

  Daughter of Sherwood

  Champion of Sherwood

  Lord of Sherwood

  The White Gull

  Forged by Love

  Honor Bound: A Highland Adventure

  ~*~

  Christmas Stories:

  Mrs. Claus and the Viking Ship

  The Tenth Suitor

  Forged by Love

  by

  Laura Strickland

  The Lobster Cove Series

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Forged by Love

  COPYRIGHT © 2015 by Laura Strickland

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Contact Information: [email protected]

  Cover Art by Diana Carlile

  The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  PO Box 708

  Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708

  Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com

  Publishing History

  First American Rose Edition, 2015

  Digital ISBN 978-1-5092-0458-8

  The Lobster Cove Series

  Published in the United States of America

  Chapter One

  Lobster Cove, Maine, August 1865

  Douglas Grier flipped the glowing bar of orange-hot metal over on the anvil and struck it a measured blow. Sweat trickled freely down his naked back, prompted by a combination of heat and effort. The door of the forge stood open to the afternoon—bright and sunny after last night’s storm—but nary a breath of breeze stirred.

  He scrutinized the metal, destined to become part of a spar on a lobster trawler, and pumped up the fire without conscious thought. When he’d been away fighting in the south, attached to the second Maine regiment, he’d longed for just this—long days of hard work, the skill and labor of coaxing the metal to his will, the comfort of this place that so often seemed the closest he’d ever known to a real home.

  Who’d think that, back at last, he would have such a hard time adjusting?

  War changed a man. He’d heard that over and over again since he returned—sometimes spoken to his face in philosophical tones by men who hadn’t been there, sometimes whispered and accompanied by sidelong glances. He supposed anything repeated that often must be true.

  He grunted and flipped the bar again. He felt rather than saw his boss, Rab Sinclair, shoot him an inquiring look. Rab frequently kept an affectionate eye on him, one of the things Douglas had missed most while he was away. But Rab, standing with his brawny arms crossed and talking to a customer, didn’t pause in his conversation.

  To be sure, the shop seemed uncommonly crowded this afternoon. No fewer than five customers had made their way in, and Rab’s children were underfoot as well, the two youngest ducking and playing tag as they so often did. Douglas couldn’t count the times their ma had scolded them for that. And the eldest, Dorothea, sat on the top of a workbench swinging her feet and talking for all she was worth to Douglas’s former teacher, Mrs. Applegate.

  Douglas stole a look at her and smiled to himself, his mood instantly improving. No one could stay gloomy in Dorothea Sinclair’s company. Douglas would warrant she’d make the Devil himself grin in delight.

  If Douglas had a little sister—he didn’t, he had a younger brother instead, only a year or so older than Dora—he’d want her to be just like Dorothea Sinclair, bright as a brass button and twice as pretty, with black hair like her father’s, and her mother’s dreamy eyes.

  He cocked his ear now and picked up her conversation.

  “I’m determined for it, Mrs. Applegate. I’ve been saving all my egg money, and as soon as I have enough, I’ll send off to Augusta for that writing course. I mean to be the very next Louisa May Alcott.”

  Her listener smiled. Mrs. Applegate had been called Miss Cooper before she married the new town lawyer and went to having babies. She still mentored Dorothea, much as Rab Sinclair had him, Douglas. In fact, it had been Mrs. Applegate who’d talked Rab into apprenticing Douglas fourteen years ago, when he was nothing but a skinny, fatherless tadpole.

  Fatherless, still.

  He straightened and lowered the weighted hammer to look around the familiar, dearly loved place.

  The scene seemed to waver before his eyes and, as it had lately, memory intruded: a far different setting and images much less welcome.

  Blood and mud, an endless sea of both. The
screams of wounded horses—a sound Douglas would never forget—the cries of men strapped down beneath the surgeon’s saw. The seemingly endless boom, boom, boom of cannon that rattled his teeth and got inside him, shook his innards till he wanted to throw up.

  He’d been fortunate though, he told himself firmly. Fortunate. The Union Army had been quick to make use of his skill at the forge, attaching him to an encampment just behind their lines. He didn’t have to wear the blue uniform that strained over his burly shoulders—at least not all the time—nor carry the rifle with its deadly bayonet, which had surely been invented by the Devil himself.

  He had been called upon to use his skills for a variety of causes, from mending caissons on the fly to cauterizing the stumps of severed limbs. There had even been that one time…

  He drew a breath that expanded his broad chest, remembering, and the forge disappeared before his eyes. Instead he saw a dark night and a white moon, sharp and cruel as a sickle, flying before a hot wind. Douglas had been roused from his weary bed by his friend, Donner, who worked supply for their outfit and had his fingers in a host of pies.

  “Shh!” Donner cautioned him at once. “Don’t wake anybody up.”

  That had been enough to make Douglas swallow the curse that hovered on his lips. Only half dressed, he rose from the narrow cot and followed Donner out into the gusty darkness.

  “Fetch your pincers, hammer, or whatever else you’ll need to break iron,” Donner whispered. “I got a job for you.”

  The army had fitted out a mobile forge for Douglas that could move along with their lines. He ducked inside and snatched the required tools without looking. “What—?” he began.

  “Shush,” Donner said again. “Nobody can know.”

  Without further explanation, Donner led him off through a cornfield, half of which had been burned in the wake of the retreating Confederate army. Nearly a year before the end of the war this had been, somewhere in southern Virginia. Douglas remembered the scent of the stalks surrounding him as he struggled to push through them following the much smaller Donner. On the far side of the field stood a copse of trees, and there, close beneath their shelter, had gathered a group of people—two Union soldiers, neither of whom Douglas recognized, and five Negroes huddled close together as if they shared one heart.

  Startled, he shot a look at Donner. They had strict orders to steer clear of the local populace, brown or white, and not involve themselves in what their corporal called “politics.”

  “You’re here to fight.” Maim, mutilate, and slaughter people. Right, and what had that to do with politics?

  “What—” he began again.

  In a low voice, Donner replied. “They’re on the run. We’re helping them.”

  “Escaping?” Douglas could not tell which appalled him more, the idea that one man might honestly suppose he owned another or being dragged from his cot to become enmeshed in such a situation.

  No one said anything, and Douglas tumbled to the foolishness of his question. What else would they be doing out here behind the northern lines in the middle of the night?

  One of the Union soldiers spoke after a lengthy pause. To his further surprise, Douglas caught the glint of sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve.

  “Their plantation about five miles west of here burned—house, slave quarters, and all. They made it away in the confusion. Crosby, here, is going to smuggle them back farther behind the lines and away.”

  Douglas nodded, realizing not all the stench of burning came from the field.

  “Men after us,” said one of the Negroes, his voice deep as the night. “Don’t have much time.”

  Douglas eyed the group of two men and three women. In the light from the moon their faces had a similarity born of expression, all stoic caution. The man who had spoken had grizzled hair, and the second, who looked younger, might have been his son. One woman, clearly elderly, wore a kerchief knotted around her head and leaned on a stick; the other two appeared much younger.

  “They’re chained up,” Donner explained. “Need you to break them apart.”

  Chained?

  The older man raised fisted hands, and Douglas saw it for truth. Emotion tore through him; he didn’t lose his temper often, but it wasn’t every day he saw people constrained like livestock.

  He gave a hard nod and gestured the fellow forward to a boulder that lay at the edge of the field. “I’ll be glad to.”

  The man moved, and the others came with him. Only then did Douglas see they were not only each shackled but chained to one another, as well.

  Grimly, and choking back hard on his outrage, he set to work. All dignity, the old fellow bent and laid his hands across the rock; Douglas carefully placed his chisel and raised the hammer to force the hasp. The sharp sound of breaking metal seemed to echo through the night.

  The younger man shouldered the elder aside eagerly and laid his clenched fists on the rock. Moving quickly now, Douglas transferred his anger into force that made short work of the man’s shackles, which the fellow then kicked aside before he helped one of the younger women to his place.

  When she bent down, Douglas saw she was heavy with child. She, in turn, assisted the old woman; Douglas worked gently on those fetters and moved them away carefully when they came off.

  The last of the women quickly stooped to hunker at his feet. She stretched her hands eagerly across the cold rock, and Douglas glanced up to encounter her face, lit by the moonlight.

  She was beautiful. Young and willowy, with a smooth brow, prominent cheekbones, and a tapered chin, she had hair that crinkled all around her face and great, wide eyes even darker than Douglas’s own. For an instant their gazes connected, and it felt just as if someone punched Douglas in the heart. For surely he could glimpse her soul in those eyes—twice as beautiful as her face.

  “Hurry,” Donner bade.

  She had delicate wrists and slender, clenched fingers that made the shackles seem an even greater abomination. With all his heart Douglas wanted the cruel, dirty, rusted metal away from her skin. He accomplished the task with a series of sharp blows, and when the chains fell away she grasped his hands.

  “Thank you. Thank you, sir!”

  And what a voice she had! Deep for a woman’s, and soft as velvet. Douglas stood like a man struck—or stupid—while she scrambled up and, with a lingering look for him, joined her companions.

  Donner laid a hand on Douglas’s shoulder. “Best night’s work you ever did, I’ll bet.”

  Douglas nodded, giving it but half his attention, too busy regretting the loss of the young woman’s touch.

  The sergeant gathered his little flock. Another of the soldiers snatched up the broken shackles and chains. A hot wind stirred the branches, and a cloud moved across the moon, sending flickering light into Douglas’s eyes. Yet he saw how she looked back at him still, her gaze once more reaching for his.

  Laughter in the forge brought him back to himself and the scene—one he had already relived a hundred times—disappeared from his mind’s eye.

  He had no regrets about the task he’d performed that night, save one: he should have asked her name. Why had he failed to ask her name so he might hold it in his heart?

  Chapter Two

  Josie Freeman stood at the rail of the Intrepid and eyed the coastline toward which the ship struggled. Well-forested, rugged and green, to her eyes it looked like the back of beyond, or maybe the ends of the earth. She knew it couldn’t be the end, though. They were meant to sail on still farther northward, if only the captain and crew could get the ship set right.

  At the thought, her stomach roiled within her once more. She stood at the rail for a reason—no fit sailor, she. The sickness had barely left her alone since they’d embarked at Philadelphia, and last night’s storm had about finished her.

  Northward, northward…the word repeated in her head like a magical charm as it had for so long. Ever since that terrible night they’d left the plantation with fear on their backs, running throu
gh fields, hiding in barns and the occasional safe house until eventually making their way to Philadelphia.

  Josie lifted her chin in an unconscious gesture of resolve. They had lost—and gained—so much along the way. Rainie had died on the trail somewhere south of Pennsylvania, taking a big piece of Josie’s heart with her.

  She blinked away tears even now, remembering. With bloodhounds on their trail, they’d barely paused long enough to bury the old woman who’d been like a grandmother to Josie.

  But, she reminded herself, they’d gained their freedom, purchased by Rainie and so many others.

  She gazed across the deck of the ship at her father, who stood speaking with the captain. Well, then, Daniel Freeman was not in truth her father—just her mother’s husband. He’d taken the name “Freeman” on all their behalf when they reached Pennsylvania, putting that other, hated name behind them.

  Daniel it was who’d kept them strong, even as Rainie had given them heart. Josie’s brother, Michael, lent them determination with his unflinching will to live free; his wife, Eunice, and their child, Hetty, gave Josie the only sense of family she could claim.

  Still together, the five of them were now indeed destined for the unknown—a former slave settlement in another world called Nova Scotia that lay beyond Josie’s imagining. In a foreign country, it was, and Mrs. Hobbs from the Society of Friends back in Philadelphia, who had helped them for so long, claimed they would at last be beyond the reach of the hate that dogged them.

  Josie shivered in the hot, humid air. She didn’t believe that yet—dared not—for she could feel hate right here aboard ship with them. It sounded in the whispers of the crew, showed in their sidelong glances and the talk she’d overheard about bad luck and curses. Some of the sailors thought it was courting misfortune to have them aboard, even claimed a hex had summoned up last night’s storm that left the Intrepid damaged and limping.

  Daniel crossed the deck to Josie’s side. His intelligent gaze inspected her kindly before he said, “How you feeling, child? Better?”

  Josie shook her head. “We need to get off this ship. I can feel the ill will.”