Read Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel for Free Online

the rain. He would come for the money if nothing else. She remembered, too late, the third valise left behind in the hayloft, but at that moment it was less use to her than a pile of dry firewood would have been.
    Gradually they grew warmer, but no more comfortable or less frightened. When the children grew hungry, Rosa fed them biscuits and cheese, and she almost wept from despair when Miguel promptly vomited. What was she thinking, fleeing across the mesa and cowering in a cave? Ana and Miguel could not endure the cold and damp long, and soon even strong Marta and bright Lupita would become listless and ill. But where could she go? She had no friends except Elizabeth, who had placed herself in grave danger by racing off to warn Lars. John had had a head start and a faster car, and he was armed. Even now Lars might be dead by John’s hand, ambushed in the Jorgensens’ garage or apricot orchards.
    She clamped her lips tight to hold back a moan of grief and despair. She could not bear to think of Lars dead—Lars, the only man she had ever truly loved, the only man who had ever truly loved her.
    From the time Rosa was a very young child, her mother had warned her never to trust a Jorgensen, never to set foot on the lands they had unscrupulously wrested away from Rosa’s great-grandparents, and never to speak to the Jorgensen children at school.
    An obedient daughter, Rosa avoided the Jorgensen boys, but she could not resist studying them from a distance with apprehensive fascination—Oscar, a serious, towheaded boy two years younger than she, and Lars, his grinning, confident older brother, two years ahead of her in school. Quiet, diligentOscar interested her less than his elder brother, who was popular and admired, given to pranks outside the classroom but intelligent and studious within it. He was quick to anger and quick to forgive, tall and fair-haired, with eyes as brown as a walnut shell and a smile that suggested that he found life endlessly amusing.
    One spring day when Rosa was eight years old, two older boys followed her and Carlos home from school, taunting them with gibberish in a cruel imitation of Spanish. When she told the bullies to leave them alone, they laughed and knocked her books out of her arms. Suddenly Lars was there, seizing each bully by the scruff of the neck and pulling them roughly away. “Pick ’em up,” he ordered, indicating the scattered books with a jerk of his head and shoving the bullies toward them.
    Red-faced, the other boys scrambled to do as they were told.
    “Now clean ’em up and give ’em back,” Lars commanded.
    The boys wiped off the dirt with their shirtsleeves and returned them to Rosa.
    “Now tell her you’re sorry.”
    As the humiliated bullies stammered out apologies and promises to leave her alone, Rosa clutched her books to her chest, seized Carlos’s hand, and ran home without a word of thanks to their rescuer.
    The next day at school, she ignored Lars as determinedly as ever, but at lunchtime, instead of joining his own crowd, he strolled over to the oak tree where she and her friends always sat, settled down on the grass beside her, and greeted all the girls with a smile. Inevitably they smiled back, but Rosa could only stare at him as he opened a paper sack and offered it to her. “No thank you,” she said, turning away in disdain. “I don’t want your candy.”
    “It’s not candy,” he replied, holding the bag so she could see the dried apricots within. “It’s better than candy.”
    She hesitated, a refusal on her lips, but the sweet, enticing fragrance and soft orange color of the fruit proved irresistible. Lars’s grin widened as she reached into the bag and took out a single apricot. Everyone said that the Jorgensens grew the juiciest, most delicious apricots in Southern California, and even dried, they retained every bit of their succulent sweetness, the very flavor of summer. One bite told Rosa that the praise was well deserved. “It is