Memory's Embrace Read online

  Writing as LAEL ST.JAMES New York Times bestselling author LINDA LAEL MILLER captures hearts in the enchanting sequel to My Lady Beloved …Look for MY LADY WAYWARD

  Coming soon from Pocket Books

  And don’t miss Linda Lael Miller’s acclaimed romances

  COURTING SUSANNAH

  ONE WISH

  TWO BROTHERS:THE LAWMAN& THE GUNSLlNGER

  THE VOW

  MY OUTLAW

  Be sure to read her marvelous series

  THE WOMEN OF PRIMROSE CREEK RIDGET CHRISTY SKYE MEGAN

  … and the newest novel in her beloved, bestselling Springwater series SPRINGWATER WEDDING

  All available from Pocket Books

  “Do You Really Practice Free Love, Tess?” Keith Asked.

  Tess met his gaze. “Yes,” she said stubbornly.

  “I think you’re lying.”

  Her lower lip trembled almost imperceptibly.

  He strode over to her and unpinned her hair, so that it fell about her shoulders in shimmering waves and curls, catching the early morning sunlight, smelling of fresh air and woodsmoke and castile soap.

  It seemed natural to kiss her, and he did, cautiously at first and then with a hunger that was so intense that it could not be denied.

  The onslaught of emotion washing over Tess in the wake of the kiss was devastating, buckling her knees.

  “Good Lord,” she breathed.

  “My sentiments exactly,” he replied.

  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

  For orders other than by individual consumers, Pocket Books grants a discount on the purchase of 10 or more copies of single titles for special markets or premium use. For further details, please write to the Vice President of Special Markets, Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, 9th Floor, New York, NY 10020-1586.

  For information on how individual consumers can place orders, please write to Mail Order Department, Simon & Schuster, Inc., 100 Front Street, Riverside, NJ 08075.

  Linda Lael Miller

  MEMORY’S EMBRACE

  POCKET BOOKS

  New York London Toronto Sydney Singapore

  The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed.” Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this “stripped book.”

  This book is a work of historical fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents relating to nonhistorical figures are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance of such nonhistorical incidents, places or figures 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 © 1986 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: 0-671-73769-4

  eISBN: 978-1-439-10736-2

  ISBN-13: 978-0-671-73769-6

  First Tapestry Books printing January 1986

  First Pocket Books printing May 1990

  10 9 8

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

  Cover art by Mitzura Salgian

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  For Pamela Anne Lael I love you, little sister.

  Chapter One

  April 5, 1890

  Simpkinsville, Oregon

  A DENTED ENAMEL DISHPAN SOARED, SPINNING LIKE A discus, high into the slate gray sky. Curious, Tess Bishop wheeled her disabled bicycle to the edge of the road, laid it carefully on its side, and, holding her box camera under one arm, made her way through the brush and into the clearing beyond.

  A peddler—the gilt-painted legend on the side of his grim black wagon indicated that his name was Joel Shiloh—dodged the falling dishpan and flung a coffeepot heavenward in almost the same motion.

  “Come down here and fight!” he bellowed, as grounds and coffee splattered upon his disreputable shirt and vest. He was a tall man, probably in his early thirties, and, as Tess watched in amazement, he shook one sun-browned fist at the sky and shouted again. “Come on, damn it! Fight!”

  Tess lifted questioning hazel eyes, and saw nothing but clouds. Threatening clouds. Who was this man talking to, anyway? God?

  The peddler placed his hands on his hips and tilted his head back so far that Tess thought his dirty bowler hat would surely fall off into the grass. “Well?!” he yelled, resting one booted foot on the stones surrounding his campfire. “What are you waiting for?!”

  Tess was just about to scramble back to the road, and her bicycle, when the man suddenly roared an exclamation of mingled pain and rage and dashed, hopping awkwardly as he went, toward the stream that edged the clearing.

  “Don’t—” she began, in warning, lifting her free hand as though she might stop him in time.

  But, of course, she couldn’t, for she was too far away. The peddler plunged into the stream at exactly the place Tess had feared he would and disappeared to the brim of his bowler hat.

  Tess carefully set down her camera in the grass and then, gripping her calico skirts to keep from stumbling, raced across the verdant clearing, with its sprinkling of wild violets, to the stream bank.

  The peddler came up sputtering before Tess could reach him, and, glaring up at the sky, his hat floating beside him, his hair plastered to his face in dripping tendrils, he roared, “That was a dirty, underhanded trick!”

  Tess, who had forgotten her first impression of this man, that he was either drunk or insane, stopped just short of the stream and stared at him. “Who on earth are you talking to?” she demanded.

  Joel Shiloh looked at her in exasperation, but if he felt any chagrin at behaving in such a maniacal fashion, he didn’t show it. He snatched his hat before it could swirl away on the current, tossed it into the windblown grass, and struggled out of the water to stand, gasping, on the bank.

  After a few moments, he sat down in the grass with a disgusted grunt and began tugging and wrenching at one sodden boot. Having no luck, he looked up at Tess, azure eyes flashing in a beard-stubbled and yet strangely aristocratic face, and said, “Help me, will you?”

  Tess was never able to say why she didn’t turn and flee, as any s
ensible young woman would have done—after all, the man was clearly mad and it was about to rain and she was still nearly five miles from home. Aunt Derora was going to skin her for sure.

  “What?” she asked, befuddled.

  “Pull my boot off!” he snapped back, impatiently, and cast another scathing look at the dark, rainburdened sky.

  “You could say please,” Tess pointed out reasonably.

  “Please, then!” he shouted.

  “You have a truly nasty temper, Mr. Shiloh,” she remarked, but she did grasp his muddy boot—there were holes in the sole—when he extended his foot. Pulling required such effort that she grew red with the strain, and a mischievous light danced in the peddler’s eyes as he looked up at her.

  “I do, don’t I?” he agreed companionably.

  Tess tugged with all her might, and when the boot came off, at last, she went tumbling backward into the grass. She got up quickly, disgruntled and stunned, certain that the peddler would laugh at her.

  Instead, his attention was absorbed in peeling off a stocking as wet and shabby as his boot had been; Tess might not have been there at all for all the notice he paid her.

  There was an angry burn on the bottom of his foot, which accounted for his strange hopping and the imprudent leap into the creek, and he frowned at the injury and then frowned at the sky. “Thank you very much,” he said to the grumbling clouds. “Thank you very, very much!”

  At that precise moment the rain began, in a fierce torrent, drenching Tess’s hair, which fell free to her waist, and causing her dress to cling.

  But dresses were the last thing on Tess Bishop’s mind. “My camera!” she shrieked, bounding to her feet and racing across the clearing to snatch up the treasured black box, clutch it to her breast, and cast wildly about for a place of shelter.

  She tried to reach the latch on the rear door of Mr. Shiloh’s wagon, but it was too high. Muttering, Tess began to leap for the thing, falling short each time.

  Mr. Shiloh, oddly calm and resolute now, materialized at her side, deftly worked the catch, and opened the creaky door. Tess thrust her camera inside and then sighed with relief, caring nothing for the fact that she herself was soaked to the skin. She had saved for a long, long time to buy that camera.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Instead of answering, Joel Shiloh boldly grasped her waist in his hands and lifted her, so that she sat on the floor of the wagon, her feet dangling from the door. Rain thundered on the curved, sturdy roof and further soaked the peddler, who stood for a moment, seemingly oblivious to the downpour, watching Tess with a sort of wonder, as though he had seen her before and thought he should recognize her.

  “Come out of the rain,” she said practically.

  A wry grin twisted the peddler’s mouth, and he turned and vaulted up to sit beside her in the doorway of the wagon. “What’s your name?” he asked, watching her.

  Tess gaped at him, let her eyes slide down his long, muscular legs to his feet. He was wearing one boot, but his injured foot was still bare. “Tess Bishop,” she said, after some time. “How is your foot?”

  He laughed and ran one hand down his face as if to brush away the rain. The gesture didn’t do much good, of course, for his hair was sodden. “Fine, Tess Bishop. My foot is just fine.”

  “I tried to warn you, you know.”

  “About what? Burning my foot?”

  Tess shook her head and droplets of rain water flew. “About jumping into the stream. It looks shallow there, because the water is so clear, but it’s actually over seven feet deep.”

  Another wry smile. “So I discovered. Does your family know that you’re out wandering around in the countryside, Miss Bishop? In the middle of a rainstorm, yet?”

  Tess sat up a little straighter. She didn’t have a family, really—just Derora, her aunt. And while she was certain to catch the devil, if not pneumonia, she couldn’t see where it was any of this man’s business. “Does yours?” she countered.

  The peddler grinned. “Actually, my family doesn’t have any idea where I am.”

  Tess was intrigued. It was odd, she thought, the way the rain shut out the rest of the world, made it seem as though only she and Mr. Shiloh existed, “But you do have a family?”

  His blue eyes were distant, and, even though he wasn’t looking directly at Tess, she could see a shadow of pain flicker in their depths. “Yes. I have a family,” he said, after a very long and introspective silence.

  “You’re estranged from them,” guessed Tess, shivering.

  Powerful, rain-sodden shoulders moved in a shrug. “You could say that.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  He looked at her now, keenly, almost suspiciously. “You’re probably freezing to death. Let me get you a blanket.” With that, he turned and scrambled into the dark depths of the wagon, returning in a few moments with a heavy woolen wrap, which he draped around both of them.

  Again, Tess experienced that sensation of sweet isolation; they were creatures of the mist, she imagined, living in a special universe hidden away behind a thundering waterfall. “Thank you,” she said, snuggling into the warmth of the blanket. But, suddenly, a giggle erupted from deep within her.

  “What is it?” asked Joel Shiloh, arching one butternut eyebrow.

  “My aunt would kill me,” she confessed, “if she knew I was sitting here in a wagon, wrapped in a blanket—”

  “With a man,” finished Mr. Shiloh, grinning again.

  “Tell me about your family,” Tess insisted, blushing a little.

  “I have two older brothers, a younger sister, and a mother. My father died several years ago, in an accident.”

  He had told her what she wanted to know, and yet he hadn’t told her anything, really. “Why are you estranged from them?”

  The beard-stubbled jawline hardened just a little. “Why are you five miles from town in a rainstorm?” he countered, and his voice was brisk now.

  Tess was injured by his tone, but she squared her shoulders and lifted her chin. “I’m a grown woman,” she pointed out.

  He was smirking at her. Smirking! Tess clasped her hands together in her lap, beneath the folds of the blanket, to keep from slapping him right across the face.

  “Well, I am!” she declared.

  “Sixteen if you’re a day,” he teased.

  “I am eighteen!” defended Tess, furiously.

  The peddler put one hand to his chest and drew in a dramatic breath. “As old as that!”

  Tess had learned to bear many things during her tumultuous life, but mockery was not among them. “I suppose you’re so very old and wise?” she taunted, chin out, color aching in her cheeks.

  He said nothing for a long time; he just sat there, swinging his feet, looking amused. When he did speak, he shocked Tess to the marrow of her bones. “Take your clothes off,” he suggested affably.

  “I beg your pardon?” whispered Tess, every muscle in her body poised to leap from the bed of that wagon and take desperate flight.

  “You shouldn’t be sitting there in that wet dress,” he said rationally. “I’ll get you something else to wear and you can—”

  “I have no intention of disrobing!”

  He bit his lower lip—probably to keep from laughing—and although Tess was annoyed and still ready to run for her life and her virtue, she did not move. Could not move.

  “Do you imagine that I plan to accost you?” Joel Shiloh asked, finally.

  “You could. After all, you’re not sane.”

  He gave a startling shout of laughter and then looked at her with those ice-blue eyes. They seemed to caress her, as well as laugh at her, but there was no threat in them and no vestige of madness. “You are referring to that shouting match I was having with God,” he said.

  “With God?” echoed Tess.

  He nodded and the rain eased at the same moment. “I’m going to build another fire under those trees over there,” he said, with a smile in his voice. “You’ll find dry
clothes in the drawers built in under my bunk. Change into them while I make some coffee.”

  Tess’s face felt like it throbbed with color. “You threw the coffeepot at God, remember?” she reminded him, in acid tones, to hide her alarm and the strange, tingling wonder that came hand in hand with it.

  Joel Shiloh chuckled, unwrapped himself from the blanket, and leaped nimbly to the ground. “Fortunately,” he said, with a sweeping spread of his arms, “he threw it back.”

  Tess couldn’t help smiling, but she made no move to follow his orders and change her clothes. No, she just sat there, watching him through the drizzling rain as he built the promised fire and gathered up the coffeepot and its lid.

  When he finally looked in her direction, there was an expression of good-natured sternness on his face. “Under the bunk!” he shouted.

  Tess stiffened and looked back over one shoulder. “It’s too dark in there—I wouldn’t be able to find anything,” she retorted, in lame tones.

  He was striding, long-legged and effortlessly masculine, toward her. Even wearing just one boot, he managed to look authoritative.

  Tess found herself huddling deep in the blankets, the side of the wagon’s door frame digging into her back. A chill shook her and her teeth began to chatter. “Stay away from me,” she whispered.

  Joel Shiloh laughed and sprang past her into the wagon. “Your virtue is safe with me, Miss Bishop,” he said, rummaging around in the darkness behind her. “I prefer grown women.”

  “Grown—” Tess choked out, in aborted protest. A sulphur match was struck, its scent acrid in the moist air, and then the light of a kerosene lantern flickered, revealing an unmade bunk, stacks of wooden crates, and Tess’s camera.

  “Women,” he finished for her. “You, of course, are only a girl.” He wrenched open one of two drawers beneath the quilt-tangled bunk and plucked out a shirt and a pair of trousers. Trousers! “Now, put these things on or I’ll do it for you.”

  “I am not a girl!” argued Tess, as the garments were literally flung into her lap. Why was it so important to impress him with the fact that she was old enough to support herself, and did; that she was not a child as he obviously thought?

  Glacier-blue eyes swept her; it was as though he could see through the blanket to her small but wellshaped breasts, the slender waist and smoothly rounded hips of which she was circumspectly proud. “I could have sworn you were,” he replied, and then he was gone, leaping out of the wagon, gasping at the insult to his burned foot, and limping back to the struggling fire he had built in the limited shelter of the trees.