The Goblin Bride (Beneath Sands Book 1) by Emma Hamm (good short books TXT) 📕

dark out already, she would have pushed a hand down her face and hoped that she could gouge out the memory.

“I don’t have a boyfriend, Willow.”

“Yes you do!”

“You do?” Luther asked.

“Would you two stop, I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“Then who’s the big red head that you always go in with?”

Her fingers tickled her sister, digging into her ribs until the smaller child was wiggling once again in laughter.

“You little sneak! You’ve been following me!”

Luther rolled his eyes, shifting away from the two girls so that he didn’t get hit in the face. He knew from experience that Willow would start throwing punches when she got excited. How she was ever going to get married, he would never know. No man wanted to sleep with a woman that became a brawler in bed.

“Of course I followed you!” Willow managed to gasp between giggles. “And I’m glad I did, because you’re in love!”

”You are?” Luther asked, once again startled.

“No! Would you two stop it? Willow, stop moving you’re going to hit your brother.”

But when it came down to it, she was not their mother. Luther continued to pelt her with questions and Willow continued to squirm. Eventually the two older siblings would gang up on the youngest as they usually did, and tie her down with their blankets until she couldn’t move.

Laughter died down from the tent, and the three of them fell asleep with an ease that not many could have done. They only had each other in this world left now. As far as having people around went, they were lucky.

It was these things that she thought about when she made her way into the mine the next day. Her family was her utmost concern. They were why she was working so hard in the first place.

  Luther worried about her, wondering whether or not the work was too much for her. A woman was meant to be delicate. She should be home tending to their sister and making certain they were comfortable. He insisted that there were a few men in the camp that would marry her. They’d give her a good life, they would take care of her and Willow. Jane would never settle for a life in this place. There were better things out there for them. She knew it.

  Jane was far too proud to put their worries onto another person’s shoulders. She would continue her work in the mine. And she did so with such vigor that they hired her on for another week.

  She stuck close to Simon still, saying that she wasn’t comfortable with the passages just yet. He saw through it. Jane had never been a good liar, and it was a miracle that no one had figured out that she was a woman yet. Simon tolerated her because he said that the “lad he had found was a terrible miner.”

  Their tunnel had been dug the furthest so far. It was quick work for the two of them as she started to learn to handle the axe efficiently. Side by side, they spoke of their families. He had come from months of travel away just to be at this mine. A strong back and an intelligent mind was something that the mines needed. Simon had worked in another mine before and he had found one stone in his life.

  She loved it when he told stories about that stone. His eyes would turn glassy as though he was looking at a lover’s body. Gaze fogged, he would whisper words of beauty. Suddenly the rugged miner that she was slowly starting to think of as hers would become a poet.

  Once she had asked how he knew the words. Some of them she had never heard before. Simon was a man of many mysteries though. As much as he talked about his life before the mines, he never told stories of himself. Of other people, of things he had seen, but never anything about himself. How he knew the words that described the stones so beautifully, she could never wheedle out of him.

As time passed, she realized that the men in the mines were a family. They worked hard, they played hard, and they teased whenever they could. Working in darkness for the entire day would do that to a person.

Laughter was their medicine to fight against depression. She couldn’t count how many times she heard the teasing echoes from their tunnel.

It made the choice to work down here easier. Every day was a struggle to get up. There was even more of a struggle to push herself to walk to the mine. But once there, the other men made it easier. Even if they all knew that it wasn’t.

  At the end of a long day she stumbled into the tent she called home. Jane had to be quiet so that she didn’t wake up her siblings. They were always asleep when she got back in the dark hours of the night.

  But this time when she softly pulled aside the flap, she was greeted by both of her siblings sitting at the table. Luther’s face was pale and he was staring down at a paper in his hand that he was turning over and over again.

  “Did you take the test today?”

  He nodded in response.

  “Are those the results?”

  Another nod.

  She dropped her jacket onto the floor and walked over to the table. If she couldn’t breathe, it was likely he couldn’t either. The test was electronic, graded immediately, and the machine printed out the results. Whether or not he had surpassed all that they had expected would give them the answer to what their lives were going to be like from now on.

  For Luther, this was the answer to the mine. If he made it, he would have saved their entire family from this existence. If he didn’t, then he would be taking Jane’s place.

  “Well are you going to open it?” She asked quietly, her gaze caught on the paper in his hands.

  “We were waiting for you.”

  It didn’t sound like