V.C. Andrews - Fallen Hearts (Casteel Saga)

One

I SAT ON THE LONG FRONT PORCH OF THE CABIN, READING and rereading my letter to Pa. It was a warm May morning, spring already ripened into hot summer. It seemed my Willies world had awakened along with mefrom the cold dark winter of death and mourning, gradually warming with the promise of spring, finally bursting into warm, burgeoning summer. The sparrows and robins were singing, flitting from branch to branch, gently shaking the leaves. Sunlight wove its way through the woods, threading strands of gold from birch to hickory to maple, turning the leaves transparent where the light bathed them. The world looked glorious and alive.

I took a deep breath, inhaling the sweet, fresh perfume of blossoming flowers and rich green leaves. Above me, the sky was deep cerulean blue and the little candy cotton puffs of clouds stretched and curled in delicious shapes, like babies stretching in sleep.

Logan had been there from the day I returned to Winnerow. He had been there through the terrible days after Tom's death, while Pa was in the hospital. He had been there after Pa had returned with Stacie and little Drake to his own home in Georgia. He had been there when Grandpa died, leaving me alone in the cabin of my childhood, now rebuilt and refurbished into a cozy home. He had been there on the first day I began teaching my dear students at the Winnerow Grammar School. I laughed to myself now, recalling that first day, getting ready to test my competence, to see if I really could be the teacher I'd always dreamed of being.

I had come out of the cabin, just as I had this morning, intending, as I did most every day, to take a moment's pause to sit in Granny's old rocker and look out through the Willies before starting my journey down to the school. Only on this first morning, when I opened the door, there was Logan standing by the steps, a wide, happy smile on his face, his dark sapphire eyes brightening in the morning sun.

"Good morning, Miss Casteel." He performed a grand bow. "I have been sent here to escort you to your classroom. It's a fringe benefit of the Winnerow School System."

"Oh, Logan!" I cried. "You got up so early to walk up here."

"It wasn't so early. I get up this early to open the drugstore. It's three times the size it was when we were high school students," he said proudly, "and demands a lot more work. Miss Casteel," he added, holding out his hand. I walked down the steps to take it and we started down the mountain path, just the way we had when we were high school sweethearts.

It seemed so much like the old dayswhen Logan and I trailed behind Tom and Keith and Our Jane, with Fanny taunting us, trying to provoke and tease Logan away from me with her lewd and lascivious behavior, finally giving up and running off in a sulk when she saw that he wouldn't divert his attention from me. I could almost hear my brothers' and sisters' voices ahead. Despite how hard our lives were then, the memories brought tears to my eyes.

"Hey, hey," Logan said, seeing my eyes begin to fill with tears, "this is a happy day. I want a big smile and I want to hear your laughter echo through the Willies, just the way it used to."

"Oh, Logan, thank you. Thank you for being here, for caring."

He stopped and turned me toward him; his eyes were serious and full of love.

"No, Heaven. It's I who should thank you for being as beautiful and as lovely as I remember you. It's as if"he looked around, searching for the words"as if time stood still for us and everything that we thought happened since was only a dream. Now we are waking up and once again you are here, I am here with you, and I have your hand in mine. I'll never let it go again," he vowed.

A tingle traveled through my fingers laced through his, a tingle of happiness that reached my heart and set it pounding the way it had that first day we kissed, when I was only twelve years old. I wanted him to kiss me again, I wanted to be that same innocent girl again, but I wasn't. And he wasn't, either. Why, only a few months ago rumors were flying that he intended to marry Maisie Setterton. But Maisie seemed to have disappeared from the picture of Logan's life as soon as I returned.

We walked silently along the wooded path. Red cardinals and brown speckled sparrows followed along, flitting through the shadows of the forest, moving so quickly and gracefully we barely saw a branch shake.

"I know," Logan finally said, "that both our lives took strangely different directions since the days when I walked you home from school, and all the promises we made to each other then might seem more like foolish dreams. But I would like to think that our love for each other was so strong that it has outlasted all the tragedy and all the hardship since."

We stopped to face each other again. I knew he could read all the doubt in my eyes.

"Logan. I'd like to believe that, too. I'm tired of dreams that die, dreams that were really too airy and weak to last or grow stronger as we grew older. I want to believe in someone again."

"Oh, Heaven, believe in me," he pleaded, taking my hand into both of his now. "I won't disappoint you. Ever."

"I can try," I whispered and he smiled. Then he kissed me, a kiss meant to seal a promise, but all my life I had seen promises broken. Logan sensed my hesitation, my fear. He embraced me.

"I'm going to make you believe in me, Heaven. I'm going to be all you could want in a man." He pressed his face to my hair I felt his breath on my neck, his heart beating madly against mine In this forest on the old trail, I felt myself wanting desperately to hope again; I felt myself softening. The Heaven Leigh Casteel who had been wounded badly as a child, tormented and seduced as a young girl, heartbroken as a young woman, turned hungrily toward the promise of happiness.

"In time I think I will believe in you, Logan." "Oh, Heaven, dear Heaven, you've truly come home." Logan kissed me again and again.

Why was it then, that as he kissed me with all the love and passion in him, I thought of Troy, my forbidden fiance, my dark, dead love? Why was it Troy's lips I felt pressing against my own? Why was it Troy's taste I craved? Troy's arms I felt pressing me against him? But then Logan kissed both my eyes, and I opened them, to his young, fresh, loving face, a face that had never known the depths of anguish and despair my sad, doomed Troy had succumbed to. I knew in my heart that Logan would bring me the kind of life I and my mother before me had been deprived ofa life of calm, respect, and honor.

Logan and I courted throughout the school year, and one day he knocked on my cabin door and said, "Have I got a surprise for you, Heaven." He looked like a mischievous little boy with a frog in his pocket.