A blue that stared and probed, and looked into the heart. He might have been young, but they were a curiously disturbing blue. She was running too fast to stop, but just before she hit him she met his eyes. And impeccably dressed in clean fawn trousers, a cranberry vest and a light brown jacket. But that one glance burned itself on her memory. He came striding around the corner of the pony shed, and Marissa barely had a moment to glance at him before she plowed straight into him. Turning, she knew that he meant to knock her into the mud, and so she had started to run. She had barely walked out of the house before he had come running up behind her calling out her name. Quayle had been grateful and very kind, but Petey had determined to plague her silly. His mum had been down with the ague, and Uncle Theo had sent her over with his special chicken soup. On the day she met the stranger she had just been coming from Petey Quayle’s house. Marissa clung to her pride and her dreams as if they were floats and she were adrift in a vast ocean. Longed for it with every breath of her being.

She’d seen enough of the great manors to know that she longed for the life of a lady. She was the daughter of a Church of England minister, and she’d spent her early years in a far different life. She’d put on airs, Uncle Theo had told her. She was an outsider, and she could read and write to boot. She was as tough and determined as any of them, and they’d eventually come to respect her, but they resented her, too. Uncle Theo said it was like a sunset, but when she had first come to the coal-mining town, the children had laughed and called her carrot top. It was wild hair, a deep red blond in color. And she had brushed and braided her hair. On that day she saw the stranger for the first time, she had donned a clean dress and a pinafore she had studiously scrubbed herself, determined that it would be white. The rains merely turned coal dust to mud. And her whole meaning in life came to a longing to escape the cloud of black. To Marissa, the very color of the air was different, and where the black cleared away was freedom.

The coal dust from the mines seemed like a miasma that clouded just the land that belonged to the mine. But not even the rain could wash away the continual pall of black that seemed to hang over the town. Or maybe it was cold because there was no glass in the windows-they were covered in the winter and spring with whatever newspaper or sacking could be found.Īnd spring had brought heavy rain that year. It was always cold in the small coalmining town, for the fires were meager, and they never seemed to warm the little one-room hovels where the miners lived.

But she knew from the moment she saw him that she’d never forget him. The first time Marissa saw the stranger, she was not quite ten years old.

Eyes of Fire by Heather Graham