Once I Had A Sweetheart

By Nikki Salem

Farmer's daughter Claire goes to check on the livestock in her barn during a storm when she finds a young man named Richard hiding inside. He takes pity on him and allows him to stay the night...But there has been a murder in town and the sheriff shows up asking if she's seen Richard. Claire is soon faced with a dilemma...Should she turn Richard in for a crime she believes he could not have possibly committed? And if he did do it, can she conceal her growing feelings of romance she has for him?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trellis Publishing
• Release date: Jul 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201595739

Book preview

Chapter One

At first she didn't realize she wasn't alone.

Her farm was settling in for the evening.  The setting January sun dripped warm orange light over the snow covered fields, shimmering off the farmhouse windows and frozen pond around the back.  Where the sun couldn't kiss, long blue shadows were starting to form.  Claire was trying to convince her livestock into their pens for the evening, not wanting to risk the chance of them freezing completely.

Her parents hadn't left her much when they passed.

Her brother got the money, and she got the property.  There was a lot more money than the property was worth left behind, and yet her brother blew through all of it within the first year after they passed.  Claire rented out a room on the farm to him in exchange for him taking care of the crops.

She didn't think much of what she would have done with the money, or why they divided it up the way they did, but she loved the farm.

Claire hadn't lived anywhere else in her entire life, was almost born on the farm if the ambulance had been even five minutes later.  Instead her mother always loved to say that she was born 'between Main and First Street'.

She sighed to herself, locking up the last pen and wiping away the sweat from her brow.  This place was her home, she wasn't sure if she ever wanted to know anywhere else.

Gathering her things to take them up to the house, she heard something that didn't fit in.

She knew every inch of the property, knew every tree standing and felled, knew every wild animal that visit.  The sound she heard wasn't of anything that had been on her farm before.

Someone was walking through the trees.

Someone she didn't know, with