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  More enthralling novels from

  Linda Lael Miller

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  bestsellers of romantic suspense!

  DON’T LOOK NOW

  NEVER LOOK BACK

  ONE LAST LOOK

  “Exciting…. Linda Lael Miller

  at her intriguing best.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  All available from Pocket Books

  and Pocket Star Books

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  For Harriet Vick,

  who has the very special gift

  of enjoying the little things in life

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

  > POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1990 by Linda Lael Miller

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN-13: 978-0-671-67636-0

  ISBN-10: 0-671-67636-9

  eISBN 978-1-451-65527-8

  First Pocket Books printing December 1990

  10

  POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Cover credit: Deborah Chabrian

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or [email protected].

  BOOKS BY LINDA LAEL MILLER

  Banner O’Brien

  Corbin’s Fancy

  Memory’s Embrace

  My Darling Melissa

  Angelfire

  Desire and Destiny

  Fletcher’s Woman

  Lauralee

  Moonfire

  Wanton Angel

  Willow

  Princess Annie

  The Legacy

  Taming Charlotte

  Yankee Wife

  Daniel’s Bride

  Lily and the Major

  Emma and the Outlaw

  Caroline and the Raider

  Pirates

  Knights

  My Outlaw

  The Vow

  Two Brothers

  Springwater

  Springwater Seasons series:

  Rachel

  Savannah

  Miranda

  Jessica

  A Springwater Christmas

  One Wish

  The Women of Primrose

  Creek series:

  Bridget

  Christy

  Skye

  Megan

  Courting Susannah

  Springwater Wedding

  My Lady Beloved

  (writing as Lael St. James)

  My Lady Wayward

  (writing as Lael St. James)

  High Country Bride

  Shotgun Bride

  Secondhand Bride

  The Last Chance Café

  Don’t Look Now

  Never Look Back

  One Last Look

  Dear Readers, Old and New,

  It is with joy that I give you one of the novels written earlier in my career. Some of you have read it, and will feel as though you’re meeting old friends; to others, it will offer a completely new reading experience.

  Either way, this tale is a gift of my heart.

  The characters in this and all of my books are the kind of people I truly admire, and try to emulate. They are smart, funny, brave, and persistent. The women are strong, and while they love their men, they have goals of their own, and they are independent, sometimes to a fault. More than anything else, these stories are about people meeting challenges and discovering the hidden qualities and resources within themselves.

  We all have to do that.

  We are blessed—and cursed—to live in uncertain times.

  Let us go forward, bravely, with our dearest ideals firmly in mind. They’re all we have—and all we need.

  May you be blessed,

  Linda Lael Miller

  Prologue

  Lincoln, Nebraska

  December 9, 1865

  It was snowing, and the cold twilight wind swept up under six-year-old Lily’s skirts to sting her bare knees, but she did not bend down to pull up her stockings. She was intent on the small crowd of people gathered in front of the railroad platform to stare at her and the other children traveling west on the orphan train.

  There was a paper pinned to her shabby coat, with a two and a seven written on it. Lily knew that the two digits together m another number, but she couldn’t reckon what it was because she’d never been to school. Her sisters had probably told her, but Lily’s mind was amuddle with all the other things she was expected to remember.

  Her name, no matter what anyone might say to the contrary, was Lily Chalmers, they’d said. Her sisters were Emma and Caroline. Her birthday was May 14, 1859, and she’d been born in Chicago, Illinois.

  Lily felt Caroline’s fingers tighten over her shoulders and stood a little straighter. Her heart beat faster as a huge, bearlike man wearing a woolly coat stepped forward, assessing the small band of orphans with his narrowed eyes. She had not given up the hope that someone might want a family of three girls, even though Emma and Caroline had been preparing her for separation from the moment the train had rolled out of Chicago.

  The bear-man chose two boys, and Lily gave a sigh of mingled relief and resignation. She looked at Emma out of the corner of her eye and saw a tear slide down her sister’s cheek. Emma was seven and, by Lily’s calculations, much too old to cry. She reached out, slipped her hand inside Emma’s, and held on tight.

  That was when the heavy woman stepped forward, stomped up the snow-dusted plank-board steps onto the platform, and marched over to the three girls huddling together.

  “I’ll take you,” she announced imperiously, and for a moment Lily was full of joy, thinking she had been right in expecting someone to want all of them. Then she realized that the woman was speaking only to eight-year-old Caroline.

  Caroline made a curtsy. “Ma’am, if you please,” she ventured, in a breathless rush, “these are my sisters, Emma and Lily, and they’re both good, strong girls, big enough to clean and cook—”

  The woman shook her head. “Just you, miss,” she said.

  Caroline lingered long enough to embrace both her younger sisters. Her brown eyes were shimmering with tears, and the snow crested her dark hair like a circlet of flowers. Lily knew that, as the eldest and most responsible, Caroline had hoped to be chosen last, for she was the most likely to recall where to look for the other two.

  “Remember all that I told you,” she said softly, crouching in front of Lily and taking both Lily’s hands in hers. “And when you get l
onesome, just sing the songs we learned from Grandma, and that’ll bring us close.” She kissed Lily’s cheek. “I’ll find you both again somehow,” she added. “I promise.”

  Caroline rose, turning to Emma. “Be strong,” she said. “And remember. Please remember.”

  Emma nodded, tears slipping down her cheeks. She was the prettiest of the three sisters, by Lily’s reckoning, with her copper-blond hair and indigo eyes, and she had the truest singing voice.

  When it became apparent that no more would be chosen, the conductor herded the remaining children, Lily and Emma among them, back aboard the train. Lily didn’t cry as Emma did, but there was a hard, cold lump in her throat, and her heart ached fit to shatter.

  “We’ll sing,” Emma said, with inspiration and a sniffle, when the usual supper of dry bread and milk had been passed out to the children.

  But the familiar songs sounded peculiar without Caroline to sing her part, and the words only made Emma cry again. In the end the little girls clung together in silent misery and tried to sleep.

  Lily closed her eyes and remembered her mother talking with the soldier in the dusty blue suit.

  “But they’re my babies,” Mama had cried, slurring her words the way she did whenever she had too much brandy. “What do you expect me to do with them?”

  “Send them west, Kathleen,” the soldier had answered, holding back the curtain that hid Mama’s bed from the rest of the small flat and gesturing grandly.

  “West?” Mama had echoed with a hiccup, preceding him around the curtain. She always did what men told her to do, but she got a swat on the bottom for her trouble all the same.

  That was when Lily had first heard of the orphan trains. The soldier had told Mama what good homes those poor kids were finding out west, his clothes and hers dropping to the floor as he spoke. Their shadows were sleek against the curtain when Lily had gone outside to sit on the stoop and think, her chin propped in her hands.

  She brought herself back to the present and snuggled closer to Emma, who was staring forlornly out at the night Lily voiced the words no one had said before then. “Mama sent us away because of the soldier.”

  Emma’s dark blue eyes were filled with gentle anguish as she nodded. “He wouldn’t marry her if she kept us,” she answered.

  “I hate soldiers,” said Lily, and she meant it.

  Emma put an arm around her sister and held her close. “There’s no point in hating anybody,” she said. “Besides, we’ll all be together again someday, just like Caroline promised.”

  Lily sighed. “I have to go,” she told her sister.

  Emma looked annoyed. “Oh, Lily, why didn’t you take care of that when the train stopped? Now you’ll have to use that awful slop pail in the back of the car!”

  Lily’s eyes, brown like Caroline’s, grew wide. “I have to go,” she repeated insistently.

  Properly disgruntled, Emma led her sister to the rear of the car and waited while she used the pot hidden behind the back of the last sooty seat. Some of the boys tried to look, but Emma gave them a piece of her mind and shielded Lily with her skirt.

  The girls were back in their seats when it occurred to Lily that Emma might be among the orphans chosen next. Suppose Emma found a family and she didn’t? If that happened, she wouldn’t be able to go when she had to, for there would be no one to take her past those nasty boys and make a curtain for her when she pulled down her drawers.

  Lily was afraid she’d wet, and the others would laugh and call her a baby.

  Other worries soon gathered around, nipping at Lily like the dogs that frightened her in the streets at home. Maybe the people who took her in wouldn’t like her, or they’d be mean-spirited. Or worse yet, maybe no one would want her at all, and she’d to ride in that cold, smelly train forever and ever.

  After a very long time Lily drifted off into a fitful sleep and dreamed that Mama had changed her mind and wanted her children back. She called them her precious darlings and promised that they were all going to live in a lovely cottage close by the sea, just like the one Lily had seen in one of her grandmother’s picture books.

  The lurching of the train brought Lily awake with a cruel start. It was dawn, and she and Emma trooped out onto the platform once more with the others to be looked at by strangers.

  A tiny, thin woman wanted to adopt Emma, who stood rooted to the platform, stiff and silent, while Lily clung to her skirts.

  “Take my sister, too,” Emma choked out after a few moments. “Please, ma’am—don’t make me leave Lily.”

  The woman made a grunting sound of contempt. “I’m lucky to get one girl to help out around the place,” she said. “If I brung home two, Mr. Carver would black my eyes.”

  At this the conductor interceded. He swept Lily up into his arms and hauled her back inside the train, fairly hurling her down into her seat. She was too stunned to cry out, too full of grief at so rude a parting from Emma to speak, but she got even all the same.

  She leaned over and threw up in the aisle.

  The conductor swore out loud, and that made the boys laugh, but Lily only turned her head and gazed numbly out the window.

  Just as the train was pulling away from the little cluster of buildings gathered bravely together on the snowy plains Lily saw Emma waving at her. She was in the company of a fancy lady in a green dress and a feathered hat, and the other woman who had worried about getting her eyes blacked was nowhere to be seen.

  Lily didn’t eat breakfast that day, nor would she take the midday meal of wrinkly apples, cider, and bread.

  In the late afternoon, with a new snowfall wafting down over the countryside, the train sounded its whistle and stopped again. Lily wouldn’t have moved from her seat if the conductor hadn’t grabbed her by the collar of her coat and thrust her out onto the platform with the others.

  A plump fellow wearing a black suit pointed to her as he spoke to the woman at his side. There was a young man, too, but Lily paid him hardly any notice, for by this time she’d seen the little girl.

  The child was a storybook vision, with fat yellow sausage curls falling past cheeks as perfect as Sunday china, and she wore a coat of crisp blue trimmed in shiny ribbon. She smiled at Lily and pointed.

  “I want that one, Papa,” she said clearly.

  Lily stepped forward, as though drawn by an invisible string. She wasn’t thinking or feeling much of anything, but she knew she didn’t want to get back on that dreadful train.

  The little girl climbed delicately up the platform steps and came to stand facing Lily. They were the same height, and both were fair, but there the similarities ended. Lily was wiry and thin, her pale hair astraggle, while the other child was plump and perfectly groomed.

  “I am Isadora,” the girl said importantly, smiling at Lily, “and Papa says I may have you for a playmate if I want you.”

  Lily shifted her weight from one foot to the other, unsure what to say. Now that Caroline and Emma were gone, maybe forever, it didn’t much matter who took her home. She would just have to make the best of whatever happened.

  Isadora frowned, her cornflower-blue eyes narrowing between thick, dark lashes. “You can talk, can’t you? I want a friend that can talk!”

  “I’m Lily,” came the shy but firm response. “I’m six, and I can talk as good as anybody.”

  Isadora took Lily’s hand and led her toward her beaming parents and the young man, probably her brother, who did not seem to share his family’s delight at choosing an orphan. He was a great strapping boy with curly brown hair, and although he clearly disapproved of the proceedings, the expression in his blue eyes was a kindly one.

  “This is the one I want,” Isadora announced. “I’m going to call her Aurora—no, that’s too pretty.” She turned and studied Lily somberly for a few moments. “I’ve got it. You shall be Alva. Alva Sommers.”

  Lily was taken to a waiting wagon and hoisted inside by Isadora’s brother, who winked at her and smiled.

  From that day forwa
rd everyone in the Sommers family addressed Lily as Alva, except for young Rupert. He called her by her rightful name, and when she told him about Caroline and Emma he wrote everything down so that she would always remember.

  Chapter

  1

  Tylerville, Washington Territory

  April JO, 1878

  The rinka-tink-tink of a tinny piano flowed out onto the street from the Blue Chicken Saloon, and greasy gray cigar smoke roiled out the open doors of the hotel dining room. Lily Chalmers consulted the cheap timepiece pinned to the bodice of her blue calico dress and nodded to herself, satisfied that she wouldn’t be late for work.

  Lifting her skirts with one dainty hand, Lily picked her way carefully through the mud and horse dung that littered the street. A little smile curved her lips when she reached the other side and stepped onto the wooden sidewalk. The land office was open for business.

  The clerk, a young man with spectacles and pockmarked skin, stood behind the counter. He touched the brim of his visor when Lily entered. His gaze moved from her pale blond hair, done up in a chignon at the back of her neck, to her wide brown eyes and small, slender figure. “Mornin’,” he said, with what Lily suspected was unusual enthusiasm.

  Although she had never liked being assessed in that particular way, she’d long since gotten used to it Besides, nothing could take the glow off this perfect blue-and-gold day—not even the fact that she had to be at the Harrison Hotel in half an hour to serve another meal to a lot of noisy soldiers.

  “I’d like to stake a claim on a piece of land, please,” Lily said proudly. She took a folded map from her ancient beaded bag and held it out.

  The clerk’s eyes shifted to a place just beyond Lily’s left shoulder, then back to her face. “Your husband isn’t with you?” he asked. He looked disappointed now, rather than fervent.

  Lily sighed and straightened her shoulders. “I don’t have a husband,” she said clearly.