Truett’s heart pounded against his breast bone. His mind flitted, unbidden, to the image of a noose around his friend’s neck.

“Where were you last evening?”

“Why, Sheriff?” He hoped his fear did not show on his face or in his tone. “Did something happen?”

Suggs rolled a wad of tobacco from one side of his mouth to the other and then leaned forward. A stream of brown spit exploded from his mouth, raising a puff of dirt beside the horse’s hoof. “Have you seen James Burwell?”

“Not since yesterday.” Lord, forgive me for the lie. “Is something the matter?”

“Yeah, something’s the matter.” Suggs’s voice boomed. “James Burwell assaulted a white woman and then lit a shuck out of town. Forgive me, Miss Wilcox, for speaking of such matters before you.” He nodded and tipped his hat again at her. “But molesting a lady is no small matter in my county.” He pierced Truett with his dagger gaze.

“I fully agree, Sheriff.” Truett raised his eyebrows and let his facial muscles go slack. “I can hardly believe James would do such a thing, but if he did, he should be punished just as the law dictates. As the great poets say, ‘To molest a fair maiden `tis of the baseness of beasts.’”

“Yeah, well, let me know if you see him.” Suggs backed away, as though Truett’s poetry was a disease that might rub off on him.

“My good sheriff, I shall.” Truett performed a kind of bow from his driver’s seat. He flicked the reins and left the sheriff behind. Then he blew out a long breath . . . and turned to find the fair Celia with her delicate brows drawn down in the middle.

“What great poet wrote that? Truett Shakespeare?” Celia let out a surprising and unladylike snort.

“Actually, I prefer Tennyson.” He grinned at her, but she only stared, pursing her down-turned lips.

Having grown up in Nashville, she probably thought all the people of Bethel Springs, including him, were ignorant country folk. He couldn’t let her think that. So he would make a wager with himself: Not only would he cheer her up and make her smile, he would get her to acknowledge that he was a gentleman of education and culture.

“You think I don’t know any poetry?”

Her brows shot up. “Do you?”

The bemused look on her face was just the challenge to get his blood pumping. Staring straight between his horse’s ears, he began,

“Strike for the king and die! And if thou diest,

The King is king, and ever wills the highest.

Clang battle-axe and clash brand! Let the King reign!”

He peeked at her to see if she was impressed yet. Her mouth hung open and her eyes had widened. When she saw him looking at her, she closed her mouth.

He went on:

“Blow, for our Sun is mighty in his May!

Blow, for our Sun is mightier day by day!

Clang battle-axe and clash brand! Let the King reign!

The King will follow Christ, and we the King,

In whom high God hath breathed a secret thing.

Fall battle-axe and clash brand! Let the King reign!”

He turned toward her. “Are you not now convinced of my culture and refinement?”

She simply smiled, as if he’d just told her a mildly amusing story. “I’m not sure I’ve read that one. Is it Tennyson?”

“It is.”

She nodded, then she picked up her letter from her lap and began to read again.

She was unmoved by his charm. Incredible. But perhaps she was only pretending. At least he had made her smile. But as he drove along, and even when she’d had time to read the letter several times over, silence reigned.

Why did he have such a desire to get a reaction from her and make her talk? James would say he was playing the knight in shining armor again. James was always looking at things scientifically. But Truett was simply a Southern gentleman, with a bit too much emotion.

But it was more than that. Celia Wilcox was beautiful.

His challenge for himself would be to make Celia Wilcox smile again by the time he got her home, and before two weeks were over, to get her to verbally repent of her low opinion of him. If he couldn’t, he’d give up and accept that she was beyond even his considerable charm.

Celia pretended to read her letter, but her thoughts went back to the interchange between the sheriff and Dr. Beverly, whose aim seemed to be making the sheriff think he was a poetry-sotted swain. But why? Did he know where this James Burwell was hiding? If he did, why would the town doctor, ordinarily one of the town’s most respectable citizens, try to fool the sheriff?

And the assault of a woman? This town seemed worse by the minute.

Then Dr. Beverly had surprised her by quoting Tennyson, though she wouldn’t for the world let him know she was impressed. No, she had no interest in the backwoods doctor. Although he was uncommonly handsome, with hair the color of well-sanded wood that curled perfectly against his forehead and temples, and the darkest blue eyes, which had looked so sad when he told her how sorry he was about her father’s death.

She wasn’t sure what to make of him. But her hope, her future, was in Nashville. She would not marry anyone who would keep her in Bethel Springs.

Celia focused her attention on her sister’s letter, the catalyst for her departure from Nashville. Lizzie’s pleading words were uncharacteristic of her calm and patient sister.

She pressed her lips together to stop the tears that sprang to her eyes and stuffed the letter into her fringed silk purse, an item that seemed frivolous now that her family was practically destitute.

Perhaps it was ungracious to criticize, even secretly, her father’s decision, but she still couldn’t understand him leaving all their friends, not to mention his livelihood at the university. She’d been helpless to talk him out of it. She just tried to be happy for him, happy that he was doing what he’d always dreamed of doing.

Mama went along with whatever Father said, and Celia half believed her father didn’t care about her mother’s feelings. She’d never in her life heard him ask his wife her opinion of anything, never seen him listen to her as if he was interested in what she had to say. He treated Celia with more respect than he did his own wife. It had always irked Celia and made her wish her mother, just once, would stand up to him.

There was no use thinking about that now. As soon as Mama was herself again—Lord, please let it be before the end of summer—Celia would catch the first train back to Nashville. And she hoped by then she would have convinced her family to go back with her.

Just the thought that the dress shop might permanently replace her with someone else, that she would lose her job when she had calculated it would only take her nine more months to save up enough money to open her own shop, sent her heart racing in panic. Was she being selfish to want it so badly? But after all, with the income, she could help her family. They would naturally want to move back to Nashville, and her money could make that happen.

Celia held on to the buggy’s seat as it jounced her around over the bumpy road. She gazed into dark woods crowding the edge of the road—pecan trees, magnolias, and oaks mingled their leaves of varying shades of green. Cedars stood like thick, tall brushes in a straight line along the edge of the fields. Mimosa trees, with their tropical foliage and fuzzy pink pom-pom flowers, dangled over the edge of the dirt road. Farther along, honeysuckle vines draped the fences and permeated the hot afternoon with heady perfume.

The countryside had a natural, exuberant beauty one couldn’t find in the city. But nature’s charm could be dark and dangerous, as it had been for Father.

With God’s help, they could find the runaway horses and sell them and the farm and buy a small house near where Celia would open her shop. Then she would no longer have to board with old Mrs. Beasley and endure her snide remarks about a young woman, alone and unmarried, opening her own business as if she were a man.

A thousand humphs on old Mrs. Beasley and everyone like her.

“So what do you think of our beautiful countryside, Miss Wilcox? Or may I call you Miss Celia?”

“Either is fine.” She smiled, then hoped he didn’t think she was flirting with him. “It is beautiful, in a wild sort of way.”

“Your family will be overjoyed to see you. They speak of you quite often, about what a talented seamstress you are and how you plan to open your own shop.”

“My family is very kind. I shall be happy to see them.” Tears pricked the back of her eyelids in response to the sharp longing in her heart. It would be so good to feel her mother’s and sister’s arms around her.

Down the road and beyond some trees, a column of dark smoke danced lazily toward the sky. It seemed too big to be simply a cooking fire.

She glanced at Dr. Beverly. His face was set in grim lines. He even looked a bit ashen.

“What is it? Is someone’s house on fire?”

“I think so.” His voice was hollow.

The acrid smell of smoke burned her nose as they drew closer. The doctor grew stiffer and taller in the seat, the reins clenched tightly in his fists, as he urged the horse to move a little faster. Finally, a burned-out house came into view. Its charred stone chimney rose in the clearing from amidst blackened, smoking logs. Flickers of fire licked the remains of the small house.

Celia bit her lip. “Do you suppose whoever lived here was able to get out in time?”

“I reckon they did.” His teeth clenched so tight a muscle twitched in his jaw. His eyes narrowed and color returned to his face. He must know something he wasn’t telling her.

“Did someone deliberately set this fire?”

“I don’t know.” He spoke softly and looked away from her.

“Then why do you look angry?”

His chest expanded as he switched the reins lightly over the horse’s back to hurry him past the house. The heat from the fire made her dress cling to her back.

“What makes you think I look angry?” His eyebrows lifted in nonchalance.

“Your eyes are still shooting sparks.” She wouldn’t mention that his jaw looked set in stone. Like a Grecian statue. “Whose house was it?”

“James Burwell’s.”

Celia stared over her shoulder at what was left of the house. Her chest tightened for a moment in sympathy for James Burwell. Although, if he had truly molested a woman as the sheriff had said . . .

“Do you know James Burwell?”

“We’ve been friends since we were children. James has the mind of a scientist, continually making discoveries, figuring things out.” He turned and looked her in the eye. “Someday he’ll find a new way to double corn production, or invent a machine to do the work of a hundred men, or find a thousand new uses for cotton or sorghum molasses. He is a capable, gifted man, and he would never . . . ever hurt a woman.”

Something about his expression and his clear blue eyes as he gazed at her made her heart flutter, just as it had when he’d smiled at her at the train depot.

She quickly looked away from him. Heat rose into her own cheeks and an unsettled feeling came over her. How foolish to have such a reaction to a man she hardly knew. But as she thought about what he had said, she was even more certain that he had been trying to deceive the sheriff.

They rode on in silence for a while. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. Why wasn’t he married? His features were appealing, and he was tall, educated, his only physical flaw being crooked bottom teeth. She marveled that one of Bethel Springs’s girls hadn’t roped the local doctor like a prize bull. He was the pick of the county, she imagined.

The wagon bumped over the uneven road, which consisted only of two dirt ruts with grass growing down the middle. The scenery alternated from fields of cotton or corn, to thick forests, and back to cotton again. Out of boredom and an effort to make conversation, she asked, “So, Dr. Beverly, where did you attend medical school?”

“Bellevue Medical Seminary, New York City.”

“Oh. Why did you move to Bethel Springs? Did you miss the South?”

He shrugged. “I grew up here and my parents asked me to come back. There was a need for a doctor.”

“Is your father a farmer?”

“He owned a plantation before the war. Now he works near Columbia, Tennessee, helping my uncle with his brick manufacturing business. But my mother, brother, and I are your family’s nearest neighbor to the east. We’ll pass the house in a minute.”

Before the words were out of his mouth, a thundering of hooves grew closer. The rider rounded the curve a hundred feet ahead of them and Celia immediately recognized her brother.

“Will!”

Celia’s twelve-year-old brother reined the horse to a halt beside Dr. Beverly. “It’s Griff. Mrs. Beverly can’t control him, and she sent me to fetch you.”

Dr. Beverly leaped to the ground. “May I borrow your horse?”

Will slipped from the saddle.

“Take Miss Celia home in my buggy.” He swung onto Will’s horse and was off at a gallop before she could ask a single question.

“Hey there, Celia. I didn’t know you was coming.” Will grinned as though he hadn’t just ridden up like a banshee, and as though his news hadn’t just sent the doctor tearing away in like manner.

“What’s going on? And why didn’t you know I was coming? And don’t say, ‘I didn’t know you was coming.’ It’s ‘were coming.’”

He climbed onto the seat beside her, kissed her on the cheek, and took up the reins. The gelding started forward at an easy pace.

“Us country folk don’t set much store by correct grammar.”

She could tell he was teasing her by the way his eyebrows lifted and the corners of his mouth twitched. If she weren’t so irritated with him, she would throw her arms around her little brother and plant a kiss on his cheek.

“Not funny,” she said. But she had never been good at holding grudges, so she hugged and kissed him, and then tousled his beautiful blond head anyway. “Now will you please tell me what’s going on? Who’s Griff?”

“Griff is Dr. Beverly’s brother. Folks say he hit his head when he was a child, and ever since then, well . . . he ain’t been right. Most of the time he acts like a child, but when he gets agitated, he’s liable to hurt somebody. And I’ve never seen him as riled as he was a few minutes ago when I left to go fetch Truett.”

An animal-like growling came from behind a row of trees, growing louder and fiercer by the moment. She couldn’t see anything past the bend in the road. Her heart thumped against her chest as an uneasy feeling crept over her. “What is that sound?”

“That’s Griff.”