Read Into the Woods for Free Online

thinking. Wondering why I always felt... strange. I was fourteen when I came here to live with my grandmother, ten tears ago, and I hadn't been here three days before I knew what had been missing from my life."
    "Witchcraft?" he asked, almost afraid to say the word aloud.
    She wasn't offended. In fact, she smiled. "Purpose, Mr. Harper," she said. "Purpose."
    Purpose, he understood.
    The tree-lined road was silent and deserted, but for the two of them. Here there were no plans to be executed, no calculations to be made as they passed in and out of the shade.
    "Don't you mind that people call you a witch?"
    She shrugged her shoulders. "No. Who knows? Maybe they're right."
    "But..." He paused as he looked around him, at the deserted road and the deep woods on either side. "Don't you ever get lonely?"
    "No," she answered quickly, her voice as light as the breeze through the trees. "I like my life. I enjoy living alone. I am free, I answer to no one." She cast a quick glance in his direction. "And if I ever get tired of living alone, I'll marry Ezra Cotter and have a dozen babies."
    She said it with a smile, as if it were a joke, but Declan sensed there was some truth to her statement. "Who's Ezra Cotter?"
    She swung her basket twice and contemplated a moment before answering. "Ezra has a general store in Jackson. Several times a year he visits to buy beauty creams and special oils and rose water for his store, and he always asks me to marry him while he's here."
    Declan felt a strange sense of relief. He'd known dozens of merchants in his lifetime. He'd worked for them, bought them out, and competed with them. They were, for the most part, dull men. Every one he'd ever known had been middle-aged or older. Declan didn't count himself in the group, of course. He wasn't a mere shopkeeper; he was a shrewd businessman. Ezra Cotter was probably a quaint old man, charmed by Matilda's youth and smile and eyes. The frequent proposals were probably a kind of joke between them, a lighthearted jest.
    "And one day you might say yes?" he teased.
    She smiled again. "Maybe." And then she confirmed his suspicions about Cotter. "There is the age difference to consider, though."
    He didn't especially like her smile; it spoke of a hundred secrets. He wanted to ask more about this shopkeeper, but couldn't think of a way to do so without sounding as if he were interrogating Matilda the way he used to do to his sisters when they took up with someone unsuitable.
    "Well, thank you for walking me home," Matilda said. "I'd invite you in, but I'm afraid I have so much to do I'll be working straight through lunch."
    Declan was more than a little startled to find himself standing before Matilda's cottage. He'd had no intention of coming this far, had no idea he'd been talking and walking for so long. He'd lost all track of time.
    "I have to get back, anyway."
    "Let me get you a glass of water, before you go," Matilda said, opening the door to her cottage wide. "There's a spring just over the hill, and I always keep a jar or two of fresh water on hand. It's better than any well water, I can promise you that."
    He stood in the entrance to her house, not stepping inside, since he hadn't been invited. Matilda placed her empty basket on a table in the main room, and continued on to the small kitchen at the rear of the house. How could a petite woman in a plain brown dress look so tempting? Why did the way her hips moved as she walked away from him make his teeth ache?
    Perhaps Matilda Candy was oddly attractive and even tempting, in her own surprising way, but nothing ever got in the way of Declan Harper's plans. Nothing and no one. All his adult life he'd planned for this return to Tanglewood. He'd made money because he needed it for this moment. He'd saved it, spending only on his mother and his sisters, so he'd be well funded. He'd worked too long and too hard to get here and allow one woman to muddy the waters.
    She came toward him with a jar of water in her