Emma and the Outlaw

  More enthralling novels from

  Linda Lael MilleR

  Be sure to read her electrifying 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

  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

  4235 S. Cheney-Spokane Road, Ste. #1

  P.O. Box 19461

  Spokane, WA 99219

  ALSO 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 Back

  One Last Look

  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.

  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

  Copyright © 1991 by Linda Lael Miller

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce

  this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For information address Atria Books, 1230 Avenue

  of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN-13: 978-0-671-67637-7

  ISBN-10: 0-671-67637-7

  eISBN-13: 978-1-45165-536-0

  First Pocket Books printing June 1991

  10

  POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of

  Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  For Vicki Webster.

  Life is a dance, and she knows the Steps.

  EMMA AND THE OUTLAW

  Beaver Crossing, Nebraska

  December 10, 1865

  Emma Chalmers stood rooted to the railroad platform, braced like the other orphans, against the biting chill of a prairie winter and the prospect of being separated from Lily. The child, at six a year younger than Emma, clung to her sister’s skirts, her brown eyes huge with alarm. Caroline, their eldest sister, had been adopted back in Lincoln, and Lily was all Emma had left, except for the small photograph of them all tucked into the pocket of her pinafore.

  The tiny, wiry woman facing her studied Emma from the top of her head to the toes of her too-small, pinchy shoes. She made a tsk-tsk sound, then announced to the conductor, “I’ll take this redhaired one here.”

  It was a moment before Emma could speak. Her arm tightened around Lily’s thin little shoulders. “Take my sister, too,” she pleaded. “Please, ma’am—don’t make me leave Lily.”

  The woman grunted derisively. “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.”

  Just then the conductor scooped Lily up and carried her, fighting and twisting, away from Emma and back to the train. The parting was so cruel that, for a moment, Emma could not move. Lily was hardly more than a baby. Who would take care of her? Who would protect her from the orphan boys who delighted in teasing her?

  Emma didn’t move; she just stood on the platform, breathing hard, tears of helplessness and despair brimming in her dark blue eyes, the snow falling like a lace mantilla on her strawberry-blonde hair. She wanted to scream, just throw back her head and scream, but she sensed that the Carver woman would slap her if she did.

  “Come along, now. Mr. Carver’s down at the saloon, and it ain’t a good idea to leave him waitin’,” said Emma’s adoptive mother. She wore a colorless calico dress, a tattered bonnet, and a cloak that looked as though it might have come from the rummage pile. “Mind you don’t rile him, now, ‘cause Ben’s got him a fierce temper.”

  The train whistle moaned, and steam hissed from the train’s engine, rising in clouds around its wheels. Glancing back over one shoulder, Emma looked for Lily in the window of the passenger car, but there was no sign of her.

  She followed Mrs. Carver down the slippery, snowladen steps of the rough board platform. The cold clawed at her through her thin dress and coat, but Emma was numb to that. All she could feel was the slow splintering of her heart. The pain of it nearly took her breath away.

  “Adopted yourself a girl, did you, Molly?”

  Emma looked around Mrs. Carver’s thin frame to see a beautiful woman dressed in a green velvet cloak with a feathered hat to match.

  “What if I did, Chloe Reese?” Molly demanded, stiffening like a wall in front of Emma.

  The fancy woman reached out to touch Emma’s snowdampened hair. “Mighty pretty little thing.”

  Molly was still bristling. “She looks fit to work.”

  The train whistle shrilled again, and the sound went through Emma like a bayonet. Her small shoulders stooped slightly, and once more she glanced back at the window. Lily was there, pale face pressed to the sooty glass, searching the crowd of farmers and returning travelers for Emma.

  “You must have used up that poor little Alice you got last time,” Miss Reese remarked, opening her fine handbag. Molly Carver said nothing to that, but Emma noticed that her hands clenched into fists at her sides. “Don’t take her home, Molly,” Chloe went on presently. “You know what Benjamin will do to her.”<
br />
  Emma felt a shiver creep up her spine and then down again. For some reason, she thought of Mama’s soldier, and how he’d always wanted to hold her on his lap when there was no one else around. She bit down on her lower lip, sensing that something important was happening between these two strangers, one so very different from the other.

  Emma’s eyes widened when she saw Miss Reese’s gloved hand produce a sizable bill from the gold-tasseled handbag. “Here, Molly. You take this, and you tell your man there weren’t any good orphans to be had this time.”

  Molly’s brown hand trembled as she reached for the bribe. “You gonna make her into a whore?”

  Emma’s breath caught. She’d heard men call her mother by that word, though they’d all seemed to like pretty Kathleen well enough. She knew the word meant something bad.

  Chloe Reese’s emerald green eyes moved over Emma in a gentle assessment, and humor curved her painted lips. “I think not,” she said quietly. “Truth is, I’ve always wanted a little girl of my very own.”

  Molly’s cracked shoes made a crunching sound in the snow as she walked away without looking back, taking Chloe’s money with her.

  “Come along, now,” Chloe said in a kindly voice. “We’ll get you some food and something decent to wear. You must be a real looker when that hair of yours is brushed.”

  Behind them the train was grinding into motion.

  Emma turned, her heart in her throat and her vision blurred, to wave at her sister. Lily, having found her at last, waved back.

  “Was that your friend?” Chloe asked as she led Emma away to a fine buggy waiting on the other side of the tiny depot.

  Emma couldn’t speak, she was so overcome by the magnitude of her loss. First Caroline, and now Lily. And already Lily probably needed to go—she had a dreadful way of alway having to use the pot when it was most inconvenient for everyone—and those terrible boys at the back of the car would tease her.

  “There, now,” Chloe said, her clothes and skin giving off a pleasant, flowery scent on that snowy December day. “You’ll have other friends, once we get settled out in Whitneyville. That’s in Idaho, honey.”

  Emma sat, shivering and confused, in the buggy seat beside her benefactress, praying that someone, somewhere, would look after Lily. She was so little, and she’d never been alone before.

  “Don’t say much, do you?” Chloe smacked the horse with the reins and it leaped forward through the snow, bells jingling on its brown leather harness.

  Emma thought with bleak irony of all the times Mama had slapped her across the mouth for talking too much. “No, ma’am,” she said, her voice small and raw from tears shed and unshed, “Gramma used to say I could make a scarecrow get restless.”

  Chloe laughed at that, and the sound was a bit too hearty to be ladylike. But then, Emma had already guessed that Chloe wasn’t exactly a lady. “So you had a grandma, did you? How did you end up on an orphan train, if you have folks?”

  The question stung her, made her stiffen her back and run her coat sleeve across her eyes and nose in an effort to regain her dignity. “Gramma died last winter. Then Mama took up with a soldier, and he didn’t want us. He said she had to put us on the orphan train, so she did.”

  The pity in Chloe’s eyes was carefully veiled, and Emma liked her for that. “Us? How many of you were there?”

  “Three,” Emma answered in utter despondency. “Caroline got adopted yesterday, in Lincoln. Lily’s still on the train.”

  “Is she older than you, this Lily?”

  Emma shook her head. “Lily’s only six, and I’m seven.” Fidgeting, she found the paper the woman at the orphanage in Chicago had pinned to her coat. It had a thirty-two written on it in firm, neat numerals. She tore it off and threw it, crumpled, into the muddy snow alongside the road.

  “Dear Lord,” Chloe muttered, and it seemed she was speaking more to herself than Emma. “What kind of people send babies west, all on their own, to be fair game to men like Benjamin Carver?”

  Since she knew no answer was expected—indeed, she didn’t have one—Emma said nothing at all. Besides, she could hear the train rattling off into the distance, and she felt like screaming again.

  The store fronts of the bustling prairie town stood on either side of the single, muddy road that led through Beaver Crossing. Emma looked at the gowns and hats in the dressmaker’s window, seeing through them to a very little girl, with fair hair and wide, haunted eyes, all alone on a train headed west.

  “She’ll be all right,” Chloe said, holding the reins in one hand so she could pat Emma on the shoulder with the other. “The good Lord, He looks after the young ones. Didn’t He watch over you by having me be at the station to see one of my girls off when you came in?”

  Emma could foow neither Chloe’s logic nor the Lord’s, but she looked at her with wary interest. “You have other girls besides me?”

  Chloe smiled as she brought the buggy to a stop in front of a large building. Emma couldn’t read the big gilded sign over the door, but she was a city girl, and she guessed accurately that the place was a hotel. “Yes, I have other girls. But they’re not daughters. You’re going to be my own child from now on.” She paused to laugh disbelievingly. “Lord have mercy, I don’t even know your name.”

  “It’s Emma,” the girl said politely. “Emma Chalmers.”

  Chloe put out a strong gloved hand. “Good to meet you, Emma Chalmers. My name’s Chloe Reese, if you didn’t catch it before.” She wound the reins expertly around the rig’s brake lever and, gathering her skirts and cloak in one hand, climbed down to stand on the frozen, rutted ground. “Come along now, Emma. You’re a thin little thing. It’s time you had a good meal.”

  Emma’s throat closed, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to eat for thinking of Lily, who’d probably get a withered, spotty apple and some cold tea to last her the whole day. “I-I’m not very hungry,” she answered, getting down from the buggy to the wooden sidewalk.

  Her rescuer touched Emma’s wind-stung cheek gently. “You mean to find your sisters someday, don’t you?”

  Emma nodded. “Oh, yes, ma’am. I promised Caroline I’d remember everything important—”

  “Well,” Chloe broke in amiably, “you’ll need to keep your strength up for that, won’t you?”

  After swallowing hard and giving the matter several moments of deep and sober thought, Emma nodded. Starving herself wouldn’t keep Lily from being hungry. “Yes, ma’am,” she said.

  Chloe led her inside the hotel, and they were soon seated at a wooden table with a cloth as white as new snow spread over it. Pulling off her gloves and laying them aside, Chloe smiled at her charge. “Well, now, tell me what you like to do.”

  Delicious smells were coming from the kitchen, and a woman approached, with a pad and pencil in her hand. Suddenly, Emma knew she was ravenous.

  “I like to eat,” she said eagerly.

  Chloe laughed again. “And what else? Do you draw pictures? Ride horses?”

  Emma shook her head. “I don’t know how to do much of anything, except sweep and sing and look after Lily so she doesn’t get lost.”

  Sadness moved in Chloe’s pretty face, but she was distracted, talking to the woman with the pad and pencil. She asked for two chicken dinners, coffee for herself, and a big glass of milk for Emma.

  When the food came, however, Emma could only look at it for a long time, thinking how Lily’s brown eyes would have gone wide at the sight of such a feast. She and Caroline would have grabbed for a drumstick.

  Emma’s hand trembled slightly as she took up her fork. She didn’t miss her mother, or the soldier, cted,hat in the name of heaven was she going to do without her sisters?

  Whitneyville, Idaho Territory

  April 15, 1878

  The keening whine of the train whistle deepened Emma Chalmers’ despair at the ending of Anna Karenina, and she sniffled as she slammed the book closed. She then hastily dried her eyes with a wadded handkerchief trimmed in
blue tatting and smoothed the skirts of her prim brown sateen dress.

  Grabbing up a new supply of posters she’d just had printed over at the newspaper office, Emma dashed for the door. The Whitneyville Lending Library was empty, and she didn’t bother to lock up, since no one she knew would have stooped so low as to steal a book, and she’d collected only two cents in fines.

  She saw a slim figure reflected back to her as she passed the spotless windows of the general store. Emma quickened her steps, as it had been her experience that some of the conductors and stagecoach drivers would evade her if given the opportunity.

  As she passed the Yellow Belly Saloon, with its peeling paint and sagging porch, the smells of whiskey and sawdust and beer and sweat came out to wrap themselves around her like an insidious vine. Emma broke into a ladylike sprint, clutching her posters to her shapely bosom with one hand and keeping her skirts out of the dirt and tobacco juice on the sidewalk with the other. Her bright hair, pulled into a single thick plait, swung as she ran.

  The railroad yard was crowded with arriving and departing passengers. Most were human, but there were some pigs and horses and an occasional crate of squawking chickens.

  Emma picked her way through the throng as daintily as she could, and with a practiced eye sought out the conductor. A well-fed man with a ruddy complexion and thick white hair, he was half-hidden behind a shipment of canned meats bound for the general store.

  After clearing her throat, a sound barely discernible in the din, Emma approached. “Good afternoon, Mr. Lathrop,” she said politely.

  “Miss Emma,” Mr. Lathrop answered with a nod of his bushy head. His blue eyes revealed both kindness and apprehension. “I’m afraid there’s no news today. It just seems like nobody in this whole part of the country knows anything about your sisters.”

  Even though she’d expected this answer—after all, she’d gotten virtually the same one every week for nearly thirteen years—Emma was stricken, for a moment, with the purest of sorrow. “If—if you would just pass these bills out, as you go along—”

  Mr. Lathrop accepted the stack of crisply printed placards and held one up, with great ceremony, for his pensive perusal. It read:

  REWARD! $500 CASH!

  For any information leading

  to the location of MISS CAROLINE CHALMERS,

  dark of hair and eyes, or

  MISS LILY CHALMERS, fair, and having brown eyes.