The Purity of Blood: Volume I (79 page)

“What is it,
Daniel?
 
Is something wrong?”

“I brought you
here for a reason, Sara.”

I was starting
to get worried.
 
Daniel usually seemed so
calm and confident.
 
It wasn’t like him
to act so unnerved when it was just the two of us.
 
That was my job.

He took a deep
breath like he was trying to draw courage from it and said “I asked your father
for permission to date you … and I asked Randall for permission to court you,
but I still need to ask you. – Sara, will you do me the honor of allowing me to
formally court you?”

What?
 

I think I must
have scrunched my face up in a question mark.

“Court me?
 
Exactly how is that different from dating?”

“Dating has no
specific destination in mind.
 
You’re
just going out and doing things together.
 
Where it’s leading isn’t necessarily important.
 
Courting means that you’ve selected someone,
someone who you believe may be the one you want to marry someday.
 
It means you want to pursue a relationship
that hopefully will lead in that direction.
 
It’s a much deeper commitment than dating
would imply.”

“How is that
different from being engaged?”
 

I loved Daniel,
but I wasn’t sure if that was what I wanted right now.
 
Marriage?
 
I’d always thought these were things we’d
discuss after I graduated.
 
That is if he
still wanted me then, which always seemed doubtful in my mind.

“Honestly, it’s
not that much different if you’re already in love.
 
It’s not something many people do nowadays,
but this is how it was done when I was your age.”

I looked into
his eyes, those sky blue eyes that I’d lost myself in a thousand times
before.
 
I wasn’t sure what I was looking
for in them, but I found myself saying “Yes,” before I had a chance to think
about it.
 

Daniel’s face
instantly transformed as a wide smile spread across it.
 
He laughed with excitement as he reached out
and pulled me into is arms.
 
And for some
reason, I found myself laughing as well.
  

Then I felt his
lips as they covered mine, and his hand on my shoulders as he gently pushed me
down on my back.
 
Under my head I heard
the sound of the frozen grass as he laid me down underneath him.
 
It softly crunched in my ears as I began to
slowly run my fingers through his silky hair.
 

As our lips
intertwined in a lingering kiss, I heard an “Oh, Sara” escape his lips in a
moan as those same lips began to move south, gently nipping and kissing their
way down my neck.
 

Boyfriend?
 

No, Daniel was
much more than that.
 
I think he was more
my suitor now.
 
Suitor, I liked the sound
of that.
 
Despite all our vast
differences, it made us somehow sound suited for one another.
 

After a minute
he leaned up and wordlessly stared down at me with something like joy behind
his eyes.
 
Rolling off me, he laid at my
side looking down at the valley.
 
I think
what I saw in his eyes was contentment.
 

Still on my back
in the grass, I gazed upward.
 
I laid
there smiling, looking up as the snow softly fell on me.
 
Closing my eyes, I felt each flake as one by
one they caressed my face.
 
It
tickled.
 

When I felt
Daniel’s hand take mine, his thumb gently caressing my knuckles, I realized
Randall was right.
 
This was a decision I
had to make with my heart, not my head.
 
I suppose that’s why I’d answered so quickly.
 
My heart had responded with the only answer
it could possibly give.

The End

Please continue
reading The Purity of Blood series in

The Purity of Blood: Volume II

Purity Lost

Christmas
vacation now over,
it’s time for Sara Donnelly to head back to New Paltz University.
 
What promises to be a happy semester and
future with the man of her dreams turns out to be just the opposite when Daniel
mysteriously disappears only a few weeks into term.
 

Torn by feelings of betrayal not
only for the man she loves for abandoning her, but also for the grandfather who
isn’t telling her everything he knows, Sara finds her way into the arms of
another.
 
Desperately searching for
stability in a life that feels as if it’s coming apart at the seams, Sara turns
to her best friend Ben.
 
Finally giving
in to the feelings she’s always had for him, she finds a quiet spot in the eye
of the storm.
 
But can she be happy with
a love that seems only a shadow of the tumultuous emotions she still feels for
Daniel?
 
After she discovers that Ben
isn’t exactly who he’s claimed to be, Sara decides to take a chance on him, but
mysterious forces in her life may already be taking that decision out of her
hands.

This exciting second novel in
Jenifer
Geoghan’s
popular The Purity of Blood series
is not to be missed.
 

Coming Soon in 2014:

The Purity of Blood: Volume III

The Blood that Binds

The Purity of Blood: Volume IV

Purity’s Progeny

The Purity of Blood: Volume V

Blood’s Solemn Vow

Keep up to date on when Jennifer
Geoghan’s
next books are being released at

www.facebook.com/JenniferGeoghanNovels

Although
most of the characters in this book are not
based on any actual person, two of them are.
 
As a genealogist, I’ve always dreamed of meeting the ancestors of mine that
I’ve spent years researching.
 
Ancestors
such as my fourth great grandparents, Randall Wells and his wife Lois
Maxson.
 
I’ve always wondered what they
were like as flesh and blood people apart from the mere dry paper facts of
their lives that have survived all these centuries.
 

And so with this
in mind, I was inspired to breathe life into the dry facts of their lives, and
in the farthest recesses of my imagination I tried to fashion characters that
might represent these grandparents of mine in a somewhat realistic fashion.
 
Well, as realistic as one can get when
vampires become involved.
 
How close my
representation of them as people is to who they were in reality, we’ll never
know.
 
But I feel free to say that to my
greater knowledge neither of them were, or are still to this day, vampires.

The facts that I
know are the following.
 
Randall Wells,
born the thirtieth of September 1747 is my great, great, great, great
grandfather.
 
Born the son of Edward
Wells and Elizabeth Randall, he was a farmer by trade and built a beautiful
house in Hopkinton, Rhode Island that still stands to this day.
 
I did take literary license here as the house
was actually completely circa 1780 but for the sake of my story, I altered that
to the year 1770.
 
In the year 1770, he
married my fourth great grandmother, Lois Maxson, daughter of John Maxson the 3
^rd
and Sarah Burdick.
 

Randall served
in the Hopkinton Militia during the Revolutionary War, and spent most of his
service in the Militia guarding the shores of Narragansett Bay from the
British.
 

Both Lois and
Randall are buried in the family cemetery deep in the woods across Route Three
from their home in Hopkinton.
 
Although
their headstones no longer mark their graves, I feel free to say that they
still rest peacefully in that secluded spot among the other members of the
Wells family buried there.

There in that
house in Hopkinton they raised a family of six children and lived their
lives.
 
Who were they as flesh and blood
people with personalities?
 
These
centuries later we’ll never know.
 
The
only clues we have are in the emotional legacy they left behind in how they
raised their children.
 
How they shaped
their young son Russell, shaped how he raised his son Jonathan.
 
In turn how Jonathan molded his son Williams
was a reflection of how Williams trained up his son Elliot to be the man that
raised my mother.
 
All this in some form
or fashion made me the person that I am today.
 
Who we are as a family is a result of the chain of love and respect that
was originally shaped and directed by these distant ancestors so long ago.

I feel fortunate
that I’m a Wells with a rich genealogical legacy.
 
And maybe it’s because of this rich legacy
that I often find myself wondering about how strong an influence people like
Randall and Lois were on the person I am today.

Would Randall
and Lois approve of how I’ve depicted them in this work of fiction and the ones
that follow?
 
Who’s to say, but if I had
to hazard a guess, I’d like to think they’d just shake their heads with tolerant
smiles and a silent chuckle.
 
Why do I
think this?
 
I can’t say for sure, but
it’s just a reflection of the spirit of the family I was born into.

In the coming
books the story of their fictitious lives is unfolded in more detail.
 
Like an onion, layers are peeled away with
each book to reveal more and more of who they are as fictional characters based
on the facts of lives lived so long ago.

I hope my fellow
Wells family members both distant and close will look favorably on these
stories.
 
Am I perhaps messing with
things sacred, blurring the facts of the lives of honorable people?
 
I don’t think so.
 
I’m honoring them as ancestors who deserve to
be remembered.
 
Through this work of
fiction, I hope to inspire others to find those ancestors in their own family
trees that cause them to sit back and wonder, what was this person really like.
 
Is some small part of me the way I am because
of who they were?

Jennifer Geoghan (Pronounced Gay-
ghen
) was raised in Wading River, New York and graduated
with a degree in Art History from the State University of New York at New Paltz
in 1992.
 
An avid genealogist and writer,
Miss Geoghan fervently denies that any members of her family, past or present,
have ever become vampires, and that her works, while containing true facts
about her ancestors lives, are complete works of fiction.
 
The first generation of her line of the Wells
family to be born outside of Washington County, Rhode Island in over four
hundred years, Miss Geoghan maintains a love for her family history as well as
for the area surrounding the wonderful community of Hopkinton, Rhode Island.
 

Want
to know when Jennifer
Geoghan’s
next books are being
released?

www.facebook.com/JenniferGeoghanNovels