Gen felt Rafe’s arms wrap around her waist. She knew he’d eased closer somehow. She understood that he was going to make love to her. And she never questioned it.
She simply lifted herself into his embrace. She met his mouth with her own, as if words simply weren’t enough anymore, as if their hunger was, indeed, a hundred years old. As if the woman in her dreams had been given one more chance to hold her husband in her arms and feel joy.
Gen felt joy. She felt dizzying delight, a pleasure she’d never known at a man’s hands before. She heard Rafe’s soft, guttural moan of satisfaction as he dug his hands into her hair and pulled her hard against his body, and she knew that she had spent her entire life waiting for such a sound. Such a feeling. Such a singular sweetness in a man’s eyes.
Outside, the wind shrieked and moaned like a terrified woman. The trees clattered, and the rain pounded almost as loudly as the thunder. The house literally seemed to shake before the attack, adding its own small noises of protest.
But in Gen’s bedroom, there was a curious bubble of quiet. The hushed silence of rediscovery, of careful attention, of long-remembered desire. Gen sought Rafe with instinctive movements, and he answered. They moved in a dance both well learned and well loved, smiling, laughing, humming with a united passion few are privileged to enjoy. A passion heightened by the love of two people who drew their strength from each other, who woke each morning impatient to share their day with their love, their friend, their anchor.
In those moments, as her body awakened to a shattering life and her heart swelled with a love she had only remembered in a dream, Gen knew why that other Genevieve had loved so completely and lost so much. She knew why that other Rafe had promised never to leave. Because his memory would be so strong, so interwoven with Genevieve’s very being, that he would always be with her.
Gen thought she knew her great-great-grandmother’s terrible secret. And she knew it was for the love of a man. For the love of this man.
Gen knew it was very late. Rafe lay quiet in her arms, his hair tumbled over his forehead, those terrible lines of strain eased. She looked down on him and wondered what would happen when the storm blew over. She wondered if he would return to wherever he’d come from. Whether she, too, would be left to mourn him, when she’d only been given a day. After what had just happened, she couldn’t think of that.
Carefully she eased out of bed and threw on a robe. And, while Rafe slept, sneaked back down to the living room to pick up Genevieve O’Shea’s journal again.
Gen didn’t feel the time pass during that long, stormy night. She didn’t hear the wind that refused to ease or the rain that must surely have turned the rare freshwater stream on the island into a raging torrent. She didn’t hear the surf, except as a counterpoint to the terrible scenes Genevieve described as the war approached, as it first threatened and finally destroyed the idyllic life she had known with her husband and child.
Genevieve had been the daughter of a prominent planter near Atlanta. She had grown up amid the South’s aristocracy, never questioning her place in it, or its place in history. She had been pampered and loved and given every benefit, not only of money, but of well-educated parents. And then, one night in the spring of 1854, the seventeen-year-old girl had thrown everything away for the love of a stranger.
He’d appeared at the spring cotillion, a guest of one of the other planters. Standing there in a room swirling with the brightest and most elegant peacocks of the South, this man in his simply tailored broadcloth coat and fawn-colored slacks had stood out like a sun amid orbiting planets. Genevieve had been intrigued, then enchanted, and finally compelled. Rafael Edmund O’Shea, a sea captain who had decided it was time to find himself some land, had stolen her heart.
Her parents disowned her. Not only was her husband a Catholic, he was a man with no place in their world. No status, no family, no tradition. No patience with the practice of slavery and unable to keep his opinions to himself.
Genevieve knew all along, though, that he had potential. She recognized his power, his intelligence, his determination. She ran away with him no more than four weeks after the cotillion, sacrificing everything for a man with a flashing smile and big dreams. She worked as hard as he, surprised at how much she enjoyed it. A girl who had never questioned her family's reliance on the slave trade, helped him set up a station on the underground railroad.
Together they built Seven Sisters, their farm near Savannah, into a place that gained respect and acclaim. Their daughter, Anne Genevieve, was born there, and thrived. And then Rafe won Little Cyril Island from another planter in a horse race, and the young family fell in love all over again.
Gen read the tender descriptions of the isolated little island where the family had built the first O’Shea’s Seven Oaks. She could almost hear the laughter of those days, the excited plans and quiet reposes. The sea that had lulled her so many nights was the same one that had embraced the couple. The old trees were the ones they had planted together to celebrate anniversaries.
Gen read it all with a growing feeling of trepidation, knowing already what had happened. Wondering again how he could have fought for neighbors he didn't agree with. She paged through the entries of those terrible war years when Genevieve had battled single-handedly to save her land while her husband fought, how she’d lost two of her brothers and taken her child with her to Richmond to try and help other women's brothers. How she’d worked there until she couldn’t stand, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat.
How she’d heard the news that her husband had come in search of her.
My hands are soaked with his blood. They have tried to take him away from me. I will not let them. I cannot. He is my life, and now that he is gone, all is over.
The one thing Gen couldn’t understand was how Genevieve could have sacrificed her own daughter. But she had, delivering her to her parents, who had managed to somehow escape the worst of the Yankee fury, and survived in trade in Atlanta. Seven Sisters had been lost, but no one seemed to have any use for Littie Cyril Island. It was there that Genevieve finally retired in the summer of 1865.
And there, the last entry was written.
I have tried so hard to go on living. I know he would want it. But even for the sake of my darling Annie, I cannot. I simply do not have the strength anymore.
Genevieve O’Shea’s last words.
Gen sat for a long time, looking into the mottled shadows of her home, listening to the wind keening for that poor, lost woman, for the child she had abandoned and the love that had changed her life. Gen had no tears for her, only a terrible heaviness. Only an odd sense of relief.
“Thank you, Genevieve,” she said quietly. “At least now I know why.”
There were still other questions to be answered. Another woman whose mystery Gen needed to decipher. She felt so very tired, as if Genevieve had saved up all that sorrow these long years to finally share its burden with another person. Gen wasn’t sure she was strong enough. She wasn’t sure she really understood what magic had been wrought in this old house to finally bring Genevieve home again. But she knew that the door was truly open. She had to find out the rest, and then she had to bring it back to her mother... and her daughter.
Briefly Gen looked up toward the front windows. The noise was abating. Maybe Rafe was right. Maybe she’d actually be able to get to that other radio today. She hoped so. It was more important now than ever that she get in touch with Annie. Because somehow this psychic memory had been passed down to her own daughter. This certainty that she would be left behind, just as the other Annie had been.
Gen had to make sure that her Annie never had to think that again.
But first she had another life to look into.
She checked her bedroom on her way past, just to make sure. The sight of Rafe sprawled across the mattress made her smile. Good thing she didn’t mean to sneak out in the storm. Her protector would have slept right through it.
