The Prodigal Son Read Online Free PDF

his right to hold to his faith.
    Two days later Simon kissed Joan, promised to be back in three or four weeks to see how she was faring, and sat up on his placid gelding.
    “You’ll take care of her?” he asked Alex.
    “Of course we will, she’s much better off here than in Edinburgh, isn’t she?” She made a slight face: Edinburgh was not a place she had any particular fondness for – at least not in its present state. Dark and damp, overcrowded and shrouded in the haze of peat smoke, it wasn’t the most welcoming of cities.
    “Aye, if nothing else it smells less,” Joan interjected from behind her. She walked over to the horse and patted Simon on the leg. “Go. I’ll be fine, and so will he.” She placed a hand on her belly.
    “He?” Alex asked.
    “Aye, a lad,” Simon grinned, “the first of many.”
    “As many as the good Lord gives us,” Joan smiled back. Alex shook her head in exasperation and went off to find her man.

Chapter 3
    Alex woke abruptly and for a couple of minutes she blinked at her surroundings, trying to recall where she was. The dream had been vivid and it took time to adapt to the fact that she was at home, in her bed, rather than in a berth on a small ship halfway across the Atlantic.
    She stretched lazily. More than two years they’d been back home after their travels overseas, a long roll of days punctuated by the birth of Jacob, the day the new bull made a brave rush for freedom only to sink into the swampy ground of the farthest meadow and the not so long ago afternoon when Rachel decided she could fly, leaping out of the hayloft to land stunned and with a broken arm.
    Sometimes Alex yearned for the years she’d spent looking for her abducted husband, a period in her life that at the time had seemed a nightmare but which in retrospect had acquired a nimbus of adventure and holiday. She knew Matthew wouldn’t agree. He kept the memories of those long months of slavery on the plantation Suffolk Rose in Virginia safely locked away, but even now, more than three years since Alex had found him and bought him free, there were still nights when he woke them both with his nightmares, raging in hatred at the man who had done this to him – his own brother.
    She heard her daughter’s voice floating up from below. High and demanding, Alex could imagine exactly what she was on about – too much on Mark’s plate, too little on her own. That girl could eat a horse for breakfast and still complain about being hungry before dinner. No wonder she ran all of them ragged.
    When Alex turned to look at her husband she found him already awake, his eyes resting on her half-naked body in a way that left no doubt as to how this Sunday morning would begin. Except that she wasn’t really in the mood, she was irascible this morning – over tender somehow – so she grunted and rolled away from him, only to be pulled back against his warm chest.
    “You know I don’t like it when you do that,” Matthew said. He bit her earlobe and trailed his tongue down her exposed neck.
    “I just don’t feel like it,” she said, knowing that would only make him more insistent. This was one of their more complicated games; the wife being taught that the husband would not be denied and that she must subjugate herself to him. It was a game they both played with enthusiasm, and by the time Matthew used his knees to spread her thighs open to him, she was tugging at him, telling him to hurry, please hurry.
    “You’re a very stubborn man at times,” she said some minutes later, picking at his hair.
    “And you must repeatedly be reminded of your wifely duties,” he mock sighed, kissing her on the cheek.
    “Do you think it will be today?” Alex asked, getting out of bed as naked as the day she was born. “She looks positively huge.” She caught his grin and had to smile. Compared to her in the advanced stages of pregnancy, Joan looked like an underfed waif. She rolled her eyes at him, making him laugh as he