Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel by Jannifer Chiaverini

that filled the whole length and half the width of the cabin, with a kitchen on the right and a fireplace, a dilapidated chair, and a broken footstool on the left. She spotted two open doorways on the opposite wall, but it was too dark to see what lay beyond them. The air was hushed and stale, and she would have believed it had been undisturbed for centuries if not for the man’s boot prints leading from where she and Lars stood to the room on the left. Lars gave her an encouraging smile as heled her in the same direction, and when he did she realized that he must have left the prints himself, perhaps only days before.
    They entered a small room with a single window, a bureau, and a bed covered with a fresh, bright quilt that Lars must have brought over from the Jorgensen farmhouse. As they lay down upon it together and he took her in his arms, she wasn’t sure whether to feel amused or indignant that he had been so certain she would forgive him, that she would come with him to this place. But there she was, lying in his arms again, his lips familiar and warm upon hers. She thought she felt the ghosts of her grandparents and great-grandparents watching over them in stern disapproval, but Lars’s kisses soon warmed her until the ice of her worries melted and flowed off her summer skin, evaporating into the night air.
    Later, as they held each other quietly, reluctant to part and all too aware that they must, Lars said, “Let me meet your parents. If they knew me, they wouldn’t hate me.”
    “My father might not,” Rosa acknowledged, “but my mother could never see you for who you really are. You’re a Jorgensen, and that’s reason enough to hate you.”
    “I’ll change my name,” he said. “Maybe she’ll never know.”
    She laughed and slapped him lightly on the chest. “She’ll know.”
    “She probably would,” he said ruefully, and hesitated before continuing. “Rosa, we’ve talked about spending our lives together, but you won’t even ask your parents if you can come to the ranch for the apricot harvest. Years ago you promised me you’d come someday, as soon as your mother realized I wasn’t the devil and you could tell her about us. How is that ever going to happen if you won’t even let me meet her?”
    Rosa laced her fingers together, rested her clasped handsover her heart, and gazed up at a crack in the ceiling, jagged and splintered like a lightning bolt. “I don’t know.”
    “Well, I’ll tell you how. It won’t happen at all.”
    Rosa knew he was right. “I don’t know how to tell them about you without admitting I’ve been seeing you against their wishes.” That, she knew, would make everything infinitely worse.
    Silence fell over them, and as the minutes slipped past, the room grew lighter. Now the decades of accumulated dust on the limp eyelet lace curtains was readily visible, as was a steamer trunk in the shadows of the corner, and a sharp, diagonal crack dividing the cloudy mirror above the bureau. Rosa knew she should have been on her way home long ago, but just as she shifted to sit up, Lars’s hand closed around hers.
    “Rosa,” he said, “when you turn eighteen and your parents have no power to prevent it, will you marry me, or do you mean for us to keep going on like this in secret forever?”
    Her heart pounded, but she managed a weak laugh. “Was that a proposal?”
    “Yes, I guess it was.”
    She slipped her hand free from his, sat up, and finger-combed her hair. “It wasn’t very romantic.”
    “The wedding can be romantic, and the honeymoon, and every day leading up to them and every day after, but right now I’m asking you a serious question and I want a serious answer.” A single furrow appeared between his brows as he studied her. “Do you have any intention of marrying me, ever?”
    “Of course,” she said hotly. “Do you think I would sneak out of my house with you and—and lie in this bed with you if I didn’t think we were going to be husband