Collision of The Heart Read Free Page A

filled her boots. She should have gone into town with Mr. Goswell. His wife would have all the fires going and hot coffee on the stove. But duty called.
    Euphemia approached a group of women huddled together. “Are any of you missing a child about a year and a half old?”
    The women stared at her, their faces blank with shock in the flickering light of the burning train.
    “No,” one finally answered.
    “If you hear of anyone, send them to the Goswell house.” Euphemia turned away.
    She went around, asking another group and then another. The answer remained the same—no one had heard of anyone seeking a baby like the one she described. Plenty of people sought loved ones. They wandered through the snow and stench of burning coal like sheep without their shepherd despite the dozens of townspeople who moved through them, talking, soothing, gathering the stranded passengers to transport them into town. Every conversation focused on the train—or more specifically, the trains . Off their schedules, the eastbound and westbound locomotives had crashed.
    “The eastbound didn’t have no headlight,” one man said again and again. “It didn’t have no headlight.”
    Frozen to her bones, Euphemia paused on snow packed as hard as ice from scores of feet and the heat of the fire. Mere yards away, the trains blazed, some of their cars broken free of their couplings and toppled over. Others leaned at a precarious angle, and the cars farther back, like the one she’d ridden in, appeared undamaged.
    “What a mess.” She took in each detail, committing it to memory.
    If only she owned a camera and knew how to take photographs, this incident would do more for her journalism career at Ladies’ Monthly Fashion than any of the stories she wrote. She should take notes, write down snatches of conversations. The conflagration provided enough light for her to see a page in her portfolio.
    Careful of her throbbing wrist, she opened her writing case and extracted a pencil and paper. Stray toddler. Woman broken leg. Old woman . . .
    “What are you doing?” Ayden snatched the pencil from her gloved fingers.
    “I’m taking notes so I don’t forget any of my impressions.” She held out her hand. “Please give me back my pencil.”
    He did so. “You always were taking notes on something.” He smiled. A dimple flashed in his left cheek, and her heart performed a somersault inside her ribs.
    No, no, no. She would not succumb to the charm of that smile, that boyish dent in his cheek, his deep, resonant voice.
    She took a step away from him. “I should get into town, I suppose. I heard something about the churches opening up to help stranded passengers. Perhaps I can find that boy’s people there. Did you get that woman help? I suppose Dr. Clark is run off his feet help—”
    “Hush.” Ayden laid a gloved finger across her lips. “You don’t need to be nervous around me, Mia.”
    She laughed. “Why would you think I’m nervous around you?”
    “Because you’re talking too much.” His smile faded. “And to answer your question, no, I did not help that woman. She wasn’t there. The car was empty of people.”

Chapter Two

    M ia’s eyes widened, dark against her face, which was washed of color in the lantern light and snow reflection. Ayden gazed into those green eyes, and his heart performed an acrobatic flip inside his chest. It was perhaps the tenth or so flip his heart had performed since he looked up at the doorway of the railroad carriage and saw her, the woman he had adored for nearly eight years now, returned to the town he loved.
    She came home! his heart had cried.
    Even if she had returned to stay in Hillsdale, he did not—would not—love her now, whatever his heart believed. Loving Mia Roper brought too much pain into his life. Charmaine Finney, daughter of the director of the Hillsdale College Classics Department, who was Ayden’s superior, was the lady in his life. She, not Euphemia Roper, held the key