The Winter Bride (A Chance Sisters Romance)

The Winter Bride (A Chance Sisters Romance) Read Free Page A

Book: The Winter Bride (A Chance Sisters Romance) Read Free
Author: Anne Gracíe
Tags: Historical Romance
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food she could find along the way. She could not approach the captain of a European ship looking like a filthy beggar.
    She scanned her surrounds and spied a ragged line of green meandering across the dusty brown landscape. A stream. Just what she needed.
    In the stream she washed, head to toe, immersing her body, fully clothed, in the water, then stripping to the bare minimum for modesty; it would not do to be caught naked in the open. She scrubbed as best she could without soap, using sand on her skin and beating her wet clothing on the rocks, as the women back home did.
    No, not home; the mission would never be home again. England was home, no matter that she had no memory of it. It was where she’d been born.
    She rinsed, scrubbed and rerinsed until her skin and scalp tingled and she felt clean again. She combed out her hair in the sun, using her fingers to ease out any tangles. She braided it neatly and wound it around her crown in a damp coronet, tucking the ends in and fastening them with her last two pins. The heat of the sun ensured her clothing dried quickly, wrinkled, but clean looking, at least.
    She wished she had a proper English dress, but she’d worn her simple black Chinese peasant tunic and pants to the market so she wouldn’t stand out as foreign, and everything else had been destroyed when the mission was burned. She had no other clothes, no other possessions at all, only her mother’s locket on its thin gold chain. She never took it off.
    She did a quick check that she was as neat as possible, put on her hat and set out toward the three black masts silhouetted against the strip of shimmering blue.
    Pray that the ship was English.
    A small port, with a straggle of buildings scattered around it. In her faded black tunic and pants and her conical straw hat she drew no notice from the coolies busily loading bundles and boxes and rolls of fabric onto smaller boats and ferrying them out to the big ship that floated serenely at anchor a few hundred yards from shore.
    She squinted against the glare of the sun on sea to read the name.
Liverpool Lass.
English. Thank God. Tears of relief pricked at her eyelids. She blinked them back.
    She searched among the swarming coolies for an English face and found a tall young seaman with ginger hair supervising the loading of a boat, checking items off on a list and rapping out orders in a mix of pidgin English and bad Chinese.
    She approached him quietly and, when he had a moment, said in English, “Excuse me, sir, could I speak to the captain, please?”
    “He’s bus—” The young seaman stopped and looked up. “
What
did you say?”
    She repeated the request.
    His jaw dropped. He stared at her in disbelief for a moment, taking in her faded coolie clothes and hat. “You can’t be
English
!” He pulled off her hat. “And what the hell—you’re a
girl
?”
     • • • 
    S he couldn’t move. The weight pressed her down, crushing the breath from her lungs. The heat, the sweat, the stench sickened her. She struggled to resist, to block out the words echoing insidiously in her ear—
    Damaris jerked upright, gasping for breath, fighting desperately to get free . . . and encountered nothing but cold air and tangled bedclothes. She closed her eyes briefly, trying to catch her breath—she was panting as if she’d run a mile—and waiting for her pounding heart to slow to normal. Her body was slicked with sweat. It chilled slowly in the cold predawn air.
    The dream again. The third time in as many days. It was getting worse.
    She sat in her bed with her arms wrapped around her knees, hugging them to her chest and rocking slightly. The weight of the dream hung over her. The weight of memory.
    She was not that girl, she told herself. Not anymore. She’d left Damaris Tait behind; she was Damaris Chance now.
    It was supposed to be a fresh chance, Abby had said; a chance for a new life for them all. And it was true. Mostly.
    But the dreams, the memories stayed

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