Beloved Enemy (House of Winslow Book #30)

Gilbert Morris

Description

Book 30 of The House of Winslow. Kefira Reis, a young Jewish woman, works in a sweatshop in the New York garment district. When her boss abuses her, she fights back and flees. Joshua Winslow has just been released from prison, but when he sets out to find honest work, he is attacked by tramps and badly beaten. A timely encounter with Kefira saves his life. Kefira encourages Josh to live out his dream of becoming an archaeologist, but when they finally arrive in Egypt, complications arise that threaten their budding romance--and test their beliefs.

Sujets

• Love
• Love (disambiguation)

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781441260055
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

© 2003 by Gilbert Morris
Published by Bethany House Publishers 11400 Hampshire Avenue South Bloomington, Minnesota 55438 www.bethanyhouse.com
Bethany House Publishers is a division of Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan. www.bakerpublishinggroup.com
Ebook edition created 2012
Ebook corrections 06.02.2020
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
eISBN 978-1-4412-6005-5
Scripture quotations identified KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.
Cover illustration by Bill Graf
Cover design by Becky Noyes
Dedication
TO MARY MOYE How wonderful it is to meet those who are loving, cheerful, honest—and love my books!
Johnnie and I have found a friend in you, one who brings some light into our lives.
Gil and Johnnie Morris
GILBERT MORRIS spent ten years as a pastor before becoming Professor of English at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkansas and earning a Ph.D. at the University of Arkansas. During the summers of 1984 and 1985, he did postgraduate work at the University of London. A prolific writer, he has had over 25 scholarly articles and 200 poems published in various periodicals, and over the past years he has had more than 175 novels published. His family includes three grown children, and he and his wife live in Gulf Shores, Alabama.
CONTENTS


Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
About the Author

PART ONE
Kefira
1. Dreams
2. Sing Sing
3. “Learn to Love God”. . . .”
4. Flight
5. A Desperate Prayer
PART TWO
Josh
6. The Door Opens
7. Homecoming
8. Two Become as One
9. A Matter of Pride
10. “Eternal One, You Got Me Into This!”
11. “I Guess I Belong to You”
12. When a Man Sees Beauty
PART THREE
The Dream
13. Just a Dream
14. A House Filled With Love
15. A Notable Miracle
16. Two for the Price of One
17. Last Night in New York
18. Meeting on Deck
PART FOUR
The Prize
19. At the Dig
20. “Jesus Held Me Together”
21. The Find
22. Miracle in the Desert
23. The Needle
24. The Prize

Back Cover
PART ONE
Kefira
CHAPTER ONE
Dreams
High overhead, huge billowy clouds drifted across the light blue sky, driven along by a soft summer wind. The clouds looked like giant pillows, whiter than anything Kefira had ever seen. Even the pure blue in the sky was unlike any other color, without blemish as it spread its ethereal canopy over the horizon. It was, Kefira thought, like a great round bowl set over the earth and illuminated by the glowing sun, which threw its beams upon the fertile ground beneath.
On her left, fields stretched all the way to where the mountains, low and humpbacked, scored the blue of the sky. On her right, the fields stretched to a verdant forest, a brighter green than the mountains, so colorful it almost hurt her eyes. Far off she could see cows grazing on the emerald grass, and overhead a bird was circling slowly and majestically.
The pungent smell of the rich, loamy earth tickled her senses. Her nostrils tingled at a sweetness she couldn’t identify, perhaps the fragrance of the red, yellow, and orange blooms that lined the roadside and spotted the landscape like fiery sparks.
She sauntered along, her senses fully engaged with the enticing smells and sights and sounds. The road bent in a dogleg, and she picked up her pace, anticipating a new vision beyond the turn—at once wonderful, beautiful, exotic. As she passed a stand of trees around the bend, her eyes were drawn to a lone house straight ahead, with tall, stately oaks lining the road up to it. This was strange to her. In her world, houses were always crowded together, side by side, but this one stood alone, rising two stories with four columns along the front porch and chimneys on either end. The house was as fresh and white as the clouds, and puffs of pearly white smoke rose from its chimneys. A picket fence surrounded the yard, where a woman was hanging clothes on a line stretched between two trees. In the front of the house, a large bluish dog with floppy ears was reared up on a tree, barking shrilly toward the upper branches.
Kefira had never seen such a house, but somehow she knew it was filled with people who loved each other. She broke into a run, her arms outstretched, longing to embrace the vision before her—but even as she did, the house faded from view. She looked wildly around, and the colors were fading also. The vibrant yellows, blues, and greens sank into a dull, monotonous gray. She choked out a cry as it all disappeared. . . .
Kefira awoke with a start and opened her eyes to the darkness, fragments of the dream still more real than the hard, narrow bed in which she lay. She could still smell the flowers, the loam-scented earth, the enticing greenery that had filled her dreamland.
But gradually the real smells of her life assaulted her, even in her closet-like room—the sewage-filled drains, the sweat of human beings crowded closely together, the rotting stench of old cabbage, and the foul odor of leaky gas lines. She sat up in bed, throwing back the thin, moth-eaten blankets, then stopped as the damp chill of the room engulfed her. She did not move as a sense of loss came over her.
“It was so beautiful,” she whispered aloud. “So very beautiful!” For an instant, she could still feel the earth under her feet as she moved down that road—and she knew she would never be able to forget the vivid dream of the inviting house, the woman hanging up her freshly washed laundry, and the dog barking up the tree.
With no window in her dreary bedroom to admit the morning sun, Kefira had to depend upon her inner clock to know when to get up. Somehow she always knew the time, within a few minutes, but she could never explain why. Even throughout the day when someone asked what time it was, she could tell instinctively. It was an intuition that was not in other people. Although it was pitch black in her room, she knew with certainty that outside those brick walls, the gray January dawn was creeping up over the streets of New York City, and there was no more time for dreams.
Climbing out of bed, she winced as her feet hit the icy floor, and when she reached up and turned on the light, the room seemed uglier to her than it had ever been. There was nothing pretty about it. A few pictures clipped from old calendars and magazines were pasted to the walls, but compared to her dream, their colors seemed faded and tired. A single bed was covered with threadbare sheets and blankets; an old chest of drawers sagged to one side, propped up by a brick. A few tattered clothes hung from pegs on the walls. A glass of artificial flowers offered its bit of color, a sad reminder of the vivid freshness of the flowers along the wayside and scattered about the fields in her dream. She at once pushed all such vain imaginings out of her mind.
Quickly she shucked off her flannel gown and shivered as she pulled on the warmest underwear she had. It needed washing, but that would have to wait. Kefira loved the touch and smell of clean clothes, but washing was a luxury in her home, so she pulled on three pair of dirty woolen stockings, faded and worn thin, then a pair of awkward black shoes stiff with the cold.
Leaving the bedroom, she passed into the main living area of the apartment. At one end was the gas stove, a cabinet nailed to the wall, and a kitchen table with four mismatched chairs. At one time they had all been painted blue, but the color had become chipped and faded, exposing the assorted layers of paint and raw wood beneath. The floor was a leprous gray, patchily covered with remnants of rugs salvaged from previous tenants. A window on the east wall admitted the first pale light of the morning sun, and Kefira noted the dust motes dancing almost merrily in the beams. Feeling no such gaiety, she turned and left the room, heading downstairs and out the back door to a smelly outhouse located in the bare and junk-filled backyard. Closing her eyes to the sights and her nose to the smell, she took care of her necessary business as hastily as she could, shivering in the icy cold, then ran back up the stairs and down the hall to the bathroom she shared with other tenants on the floor. With a sigh of relief that no one was there, she stepped inside and shut the door, bolted it, then turned to look at the bathtub. She choked back the impulse to gag at the grime that clung to its surface. She was by nature a young woman who liked cleanliness, but in this New York tenement she had to fight a daily war to salvage some bit of it for herself. Most people simply gave up and sank back into the filth that fell from skies choked with coal smoke from thousands of chimneys and that accumulated from the habits of human beings herded closely together.
She did not have time to clean the tub now, so she quickly splashed cold water on her face from the faucet at the equally grimy sink, dried her face and hands, and took a few swipes at her thick hair with a comb. The mirror was spotted and streaked, but she stopped a moment to examine her face. Staring back at her from vacant eyes was a young woman of seventeen years with black hair dulled by the ravages of her unhealthy living conditions but still framing her face softly with its natural curl as it cascaded about her shoulders and down her back. She pinned it up quickly, looking into her own eyes as she did. In the dim light, they looked almost black, but depending on the outfit she wore, they could appear a dark blue. Over her eyes, black eyebrows arched in a way that usually only great artists could invent, but hers were natural. The eyes thems