Anna Schmidt - Second Chance Proposal

Homecoming Reunion

John Amman left his Amish community and sweetheart Lydia Goodloe to make his fortune in the outside world, while Lydia stayed behind to devote herself to teaching. She can accept spinsterhood, and even face the closure of her beloved school. But John’s return after eight years tests her faith anew. Lydia hasn’t forgotten a single thing about John Amman—including the way he broke her heart.

John risked becoming an outcast to give Lydia everything she deserved. He couldn’t see that what she really wanted was a simple life—with him. Lydia is no longer the girl he knew. Now she’s the woman who can help him reclaim their long-ago dream of home and family…if he can only win her trust once more

“Do not say things you will regret,” Lydia whispered.

“Please. You are too soon trying to set things the way you remember them—the way you want them to be. But you are not the boy who left here, John. And I am not that girl. We cannot go back in this world—only forward.”

She pulled away from him and continued walking back to her house—her house, her school, her life.

“We could be if you’re willing to work things out with me,” John said and was gratified to see her step falter. “We could find a way to…”

She turned around, but her features remained in shadow. “I am glad that you’ve come home, John. Is that not enough for now?”

“It’s a beginning,” he admitted. “But—”

“And that’s the point, John Amman. We are beginning again, and you must allow time for things to develop according to God’s will.” She took half a step toward him, but stopped. “You must think of me as someone you are just getting to know, John.”

“Is that how you see me? As some stranger?”

“Not a stranger exactly. Just not…” Her voice trailed off.

“Just not the same person you once loved?”

ANNA SCHMIDT

is an award-winning author of more than twenty-five works of historical and contemporary fiction. She is a two-time finalist for a coveted RITA® Award from Romance Writers of America, as well as a four-time finalist for an RT Book Reviews Reviewer’s Choice Award. Her most recent RT Book Reviews Reviewer’s Choice nomination was for her 2008 Love Inspired Historical novel, Seaside Cinderella, which is the first of a series of four historical novels set on the romantic island of Nantucket. Critics have called Anna “a natural writer, spinning tales reminiscent of old favorites like Miracle on 34th Street. class="roman">” Her characters have been called “realistic” and “endearing” and one reviewer raved, “I love Anna Schmidt’s style of writing!”

Second Chance Proposal

Anna Schmidt

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Show me thy ways, O Lord; teach me thy paths.

—Psalms 25:4

To all who have believed in the power of love.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Epilogue

Dear Reader

Questions for Discussion

Excerpt

Chapter One

Celery Fields, Florida

January 1938

L ydia Goodloe. Was he seeing things?

Sweet Liddy.

John Amman closed his eyes, which were crusty with lack of sleep and the dust of days he’d spent making his way west across Florida from one coast to the other. Surely this was nothing more than a mirage born of exhaustion and the need for a solid meal.

But no, there could be no doubt. There she was walking across a fallow field from her father’s house to the school. He watched as she entered the school and then a minute later came outside again. She pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders and began stacking firewood in her arms. They might be in Florida, but it was January and an unseasonably cold one at that. John pulled up the collar of his canvas jacket to block the wind that swept across the open fields.

Lydia went back inside the school and shut the door, and after a few minutes John saw a stream of smoke rising from the chimney. He closed his eyes, savoring the memory of that warm classroom anchored by a potbellied stove in one corner and the teacher’s desk in the other. He tried to picture Lydia at that desk, but he could only see her as the girl he’d known—the laughing child with the curly dark hair that flew out behind her as she gathered the skirt of her dark cotton dress and raced with him along the path. The teenager—a quiet beauty, the luxurious hair tamed into braided submission under her bonnet and the black prayer covering girls her age wore after joining the church, as he and Liddy had done when they were both sixteen.

He started running across the field, his heart pounding in anticipation of the reunion with this woman he had loved his whole life. This woman he had come back to find after eight long years—to ask why she had not answered his letters, why she had not believed him when he told her that it had all been for her. He had risked everything even to the point of becoming an outcast from their Amish community and indeed his own family so they could have the life they had planned.

But abruptly he stopped. What was he thinking? That he would go to her and she would explain everything and they would be happy again? How could he face her after all this time and admit that he’d failed? Even if she did open her heart to him, what did he have left to offer her? No job. No money. The disdain of his own family...of the entire community unless he agreed to publicly admit his wrongdoing and seek their forgiveness.

He crouched down—half from the need to catch his breath and half because the wind was so sharp. The door to the school opened again and, this time when she emerged, Liddy was not wearing her bonnet. She hurried back to the woodpile and took two more logs—one in each hand. But it was not the logs that John noticed. It was what she was wearing on her head in place of the bonnet.

When she had entered the school that first time, her head and much of her face had been covered by the familiar black bonnet that Amish girls and women wore when outside. John had assumed that beneath that bonnet she still wore the black prayer kapp of a single woman. But the kapp he saw now was not black but white—the mark of a married woman, someone else’s wife. The loose ties whipped playfully around her cheeks as she gathered a second load of wood.

His heart sank.

“Fool,” he muttered. “Did you really think you would come back here after all this time and find her waiting?”

His stomach growled as he caught the scent of bacon frying, and he glanced toward the house where his family had once lived. After he’d left—and been placed under the bann for doing so—his mother had gotten word to him when the farm was sold. She’d written that she and his father and the rest of his siblings were moving back to Pennsylvania. After that he had not heard from his family again, and now someone else owned the small produce farm that would have been his.