Willow: A Novel (No Series) Read online

  Dear Reader:

  Willow is a novel from early in my career, and it was originally shorter than many of my other historical romances. Now, I’m delighted to be able to share this brand-new edition with you. I’ve taken the opportunity to expand Willow to include the subplots, love scenes, and deeper characterization that are possible with a longer book. I hope you enjoy reading this retelling as much as I have enjoyed visiting these characters and this story once again.

  In 1883, the railroad had only recently come to Montana Territory, and outlaws still lurked in the hills. Willow Gallagher, who spent her early childhood in an outlaw camp until her father finally found her, is torn by divided loyalties. Newly married to handsome railroad baron Gideon Marshall, she finds fiery passion in Gideon’s embrace, until she discovers he is on a mission . . . a mission to capture Willow’s outlaw brother, Steven. Now Willow must choose—betray her brother, or risk the love she has found with Gideon, the love she has dreamed of all her life, to save Steven. It is a choice that could break her heart. . . .

  May you be blessed,

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  © SIGRID ESTRADA

  Linda Lael Miller is the New York Times bestselling author of more than eighty novels, including her bestsellers of romantic suspense, Don’t Look Now, Never Look Back, and One Last Look. Ms. Miller resides in Spokane, Washington. Visit her website at www.lindalaelmiller.com.

  Be sure to catch these other compelling historical romances set in the American West from the pen of

  Linda Lael Miller

  CAROLINE AND THE RAIDER

  EMMA AND THE OUTLAW

  FLETCHER’S WOMAN

  HIGH COUNTRY BRIDE

  LILY AND THE MAJOR

  MEMORY’S EMBRACE

  ONE WISH

  SECONDHAND BRIDE

  SHOTGUN BRIDE

  YANKEE WIFE

  Available from Pocket Books

  LINDA LAEL MILLER

  touches your heart forever!

  “Linda Lael Miller is one of the finest American writers in the genre. She beautifully crafts stories that bring small-town America to life and peoples them with characters you really care about.”

  —Romantic Times on High Country Bride

  “A winding, winsome romance full of likable, if occasionally pigheaded, characters.”

  —Publishers Weekly on High Country Bride

  “Linda Lael Miller’s believable characters and their struggles speak to our hearts, while her strong stories engage our minds.”

  —Romantic Times on Courting Susannah

  “An entertaining story.”

  —Booklist on The Last Chance Café

  “A compelling picture of nineteenth-century ranch life populated with flawed but genuinely likable characters. Prose as bright as moonlight on the prairie keeps the pages turning.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Secondhand Bride

  “Magical. Ms. Miller touches our hearts again in a very special way.”

  —Old Book Barn Gazette on The Vow

  “Heartwarming Americana romance with the spark of sensuality Linda Lael Miller is famous for.”

  —Romantic Times on Springwater Christmas

  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

  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

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either 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 © 1984, 2010 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 Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  This Pocket Star Books paperback edition October 2010

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  Designed by Jill Putorti

  Cover illustration by Aleta Rafton

  ISBN 978-1-4165-9855-8

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4767-1044-0 (ebook)

  For Steve and Debbie Korrell,

  my longtime friends,

  with much love and gratitude

  Contents

  Prologue

  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

  Prologue

  Montana Territory

  Spring, 1865

  The other men wore masks, but Devlin Gallagher’s face was bare to the chilly midnight wind. His insides churned, and bile stung the back of his throat. Though he had no love for the condemned, Gallagher dreaded what they were about to do to Jay Forbes. Gallagher was, after all, an officer of the court, duly licensed to practice law, and he’d sworn an oath to uphold justice, not make a travesty of it. And for all that, here he was, riding with an unlikely band of vigilantes, fixing to hang a man, and not in broad daylight, either, but secretly, in the dark of night.

  Forbes stood
quietly in the bed of an old wagon, his murdering hands tied behind his back, his ice-blue gaze fixed on Devlin and glittering with fear, but there was mockery in those eyes, too. When the posse had finally run him to ground, only a few hours before, after he’d robbed a freight wagon and killed the driver, Forbes had laughed, a crazy, cackling sound that sent shivers down Devlin’s spine.

  “You’re doin’ this ’cause I took away your woman, Gallagher—’cause it was me she wanted ’stead of you.”

  It was true that Devlin had more reason to hate Forbes than the others did, but the once-sharp edge of his fury had been blunted by time; he hadn’t seen Chastity, his former wife, in over three years. Since then he’d divorced her, courted and married Evadne Jessup Marshall, a young widow he’d met in San Francisco, and come back to Virginia City, backbone straight, head high.

  Devlin’s jaw tightened a little; it still gave him a twinge of sorrow to remember Chastity’s betrayal, though he’d given up on her long ago. Not a day went by, though, that he didn’t yearn to set eyes on his son. Steven had been a small boy when he’d seen him last, only four years old. “This has nothing to do with Chastity,” Devlin finally rasped out, “and you damn well know it.”

  One of the other vigilantes climbed up into the wagon bed to stand next to Forbes and fling a rope over a sturdy tree branch, testing it with a hard pull. Forbes’s star-shaped badge flashed in the bright light of the spring moon as he shifted his stance, as if bracing himself against the inevitable.

  The springs of the buckboard creaked under the weight of the two men, and the shadows of leaves danced, silver edged, over both of them.

  “You people is killin’ an officer of the law!” Forbes burst out, finally accepting the gravity of his situation, and his throat worked spasmodically as the noose was slipped around his neck. His long hair was stringy, his lean jaws marred by scars from an early bout with the smallpox.

  Devlin didn’t wonder what Chastity had seen in Forbes, way back when, because he reckoned he knew. Some women favored meanness in a man, figured they deserved such, maybe, and even seemed to find it exciting.

  With a wrench, he brought himself back to the task at hand, grim though it was.

  Right or wrong, he’d be glad when Forbes was dead, because a dead man couldn’t thieve and rape and kill. Forbes had done plenty of all three, though Devlin hadn’t known the true extent of his crimes until recently. He would never have eaten or slept or rested if he’d been privy to the truth.

  He’d tracked Chastity and Forbes to Montana, turned the whole territory upside down, looking for his boy, with no luck at all. The worry chewed at his gut, when he let himself think about all the things that could be happening to Steven.

  As wild as she was, how could Chastity have put her own pleasure before the safety and well-being of her child, and Devlin’s? He’d begged her to leave Steven with him when she went off with her outlaw lover, a man she’d met in a backstreet beer parlor. She’d flaunted her penchant for Forbes, thrown him up to Devlin, almost daring him to turn her out onto the streets, said she’d be going away for good as soon as the arrangements were made. At the time, the heartbreak had been almost more than Devlin could take, and fool that he was, he’d still cherished the hope that Chastity might change her mind, come to her senses, and stay.

  They had a good life, a nice home, a son.

  Chastity had wanted for nothing.

  She’d made up her mind about leaving, though it took some time, but she’d promised, sweetly, tenderly, and tearfully that she’d leave the boy behind with Devlin when she left.

  It would be better for Steven to grow up there, in San Francisco, with his father, she’d said.

  But then one day Forbes had come for her, and Chastity had sneaked out of their fine house, with its beautiful view of the Bay, and they’d taken young Steven with them. According to the note Chastity left for Devlin, Jay Forbes had always wanted a son and she couldn’t deny him anything.

  There had been one insane encounter with Chastity, during the intervening years, but Devlin had never again laid eyes on his boy.

  “Murder!” Forbes ranted on, struggling against his bonds now. “It’s cold-blooded murder, what you’re doin’ here! You’ve gotta let me go.”

  “Don’t you go yammering on to us about murder!” raged Mance Pickering, the editor of Virginia City’s fledgling newspaper. “You’ve shot four men that we know of, and Lord knows how many we don’t. That freight driver you gunned down two days ago was barely twenty years old, you son of a bitch, just married and the wife with a babe on the way!”

  Forbes shook his head quickly, like it was all an unfortunate misunderstanding. He was sweating hard now, and his gaze kept shifting off into the distance, as if he was expecting to be saved. “He drew on me,” he argued, almost whining the words. “It was kill or be killed.”

  “You’re a liar,” Pickering spat out. “Tom wasn’t wearing a sidearm or carrying a rifle, and you probably put that bullet through the poor kid’s heart before he even had a chance to think about going for that old squirrel gun he kept stashed under the wagon seat.”

  Forbes’s voice took on a pleading note, a mite on the shrill side. “You gotta listen to me—this is all a mistake, I’m innocent! Gallagher here, he just wants to see me swing from the end of a rope ’cause his woman’s livin’ with me—his woman and his boy!”

  None of the others so much as glanced in Devlin’s direction, but he could feel their embarrassment, sense their awkward sympathy. All of them knew the story, or some version of it.

  “Where is my son?” he asked hoarsely. “Where is Steven?”

  For all his quaking, a smug look crossed Forbes’s face. “You’d like to know that, wouldn’t you, Gallagher? Well, you ain’t gonna hear it from me, not unless you let me go, like you know you ought to do, ’stead of takin’ the law into your own hands this way.”

  Devlin merely stared up at the man. He didn’t say a word.

  “You’ll go to hell for this!” Forbes croaked out.

  “I’ll see you there, if I do,” Devlin told him.

  Forbes began to blink rapidly, and the front of his shirt was soaked, even though it was cold out. “There’s a lot you don’t know,” Forbes went on, almost blathering now. He turned his head, rubbed his beard-stubbled chin awkwardly against one hunched shoulder, as though it itched. “You hear me, Gallagher? There’s a lot you don’t know.”

  “I reckon there is,” Devlin agreed evenly. He couldn’t rightly say he cared overmuch about Chastity’s situation, though he had once—she’d made her bed and she could damn well lie in it—but his fear for Steven was like a spear through his middle. It had been seven years, which meant the boy was eleven years old now.

  “We’ve got two boys of our own, Chastity and me,” Forbes said. “Coy and Reilly. They need me, Gallagher. They need their daddy.”

  For once in his miserable life, Devlin figured, Forbes might be telling the truth. “A boy needs his pa,” he said quietly. “I never got a chance to say good-bye to my son. I guess you and his mama must have told him I wanted no part of his raising.”

  The noose was drawn tight around Forbes’s neck, and Pickering, who had put it in place, climbed into the seat of the wagon itself and took up the reins. “Let’s just get this over with,” he said.

  “Wait a minute!” Forbes begged. “Wait—I got somethin’ more to say!”

  “Ya, and you’d talk all night if you thought it would save your hide,” said Swede, the blacksmith.

  “No,” whined the onetime lawman gone bad, “you gotta listen, I tell you! Gallagher, I know where your boy is, and your little girl, too! Don’t you want me to tell you where Chastity’s got ’em hid?”

  The hanging would have proceeded if Devlin hadn’t held up one hand to delay it. “What little girl?” he demanded in a gruff undertone.

  Forbes laughed like the madman he was. “Your little girl, Gallagher—your baby daughter. Chastity calls her Willow.”
r />   A tremor went through Devlin Gallagher’s sturdy frame. Almost three years before, he’d caught up with Chastity, his runaway wife, at Bannack, where he’d had a mining claim. He’d begged her for news of Steven. Devlin had shared one night with Chastity—she’d cried in his arms and said she’d made a terrible mistake by leaving him, but in the end she’d slipped away, taking a poke of his gold with her while he still slept. Come the rueful morning, he’d known no more about his son’s whereabouts than before.

  “He’s just stalling, Dev,” argued Pickering. “Trying to buy time.”

  “Where are they?” Devlin asked, with a calm that belied the churning emotions inside him. “Where are my children?”

  Forbes shrugged. Even now, when he was about to die, there was something cagey about him. Probably not surprising, Devlin thought.

  “Most of the time, Willow lives with a Mexican woman we know,” the outlaw allowed slowly. “Chastity thinks the baby oughtn’t to grow up in hideouts and on the trail. Maria looks out for her.”

  “Damnation,” the storekeeper broke in. “Devlin, Forbes is lyin’ to you! There probably ain’t no little girl or no Mexican woman, neither.”

  A cloud drifted over the wide moon, and every man there shivered. It was then that they heard the eerie screaming.

  She rode down through the gulch at a breakneck pace, did Chastity, her thick, fair hair trailing out behind her, her slender frame draped in a dark cape. She might have been a ghost or a beautiful demon just escaped from hell. Her disjointed shrieks of outrage and desperation were etched forever into the minds of everyone there to hear them.

  Reaching the scene, Chastity fairly leaped off the back of her lathered black mare, flung one frantic look at Jay Forbes, then stumbled toward Devlin. She wore trousers, like a man, and a ragged white shirt that was open at the throat. “Stop them!” she sobbed, grabbing at him, clutching his lapels. “For God’s sake, Devlin, don’t let them do this!”

  Devlin stared at her, stunned. She was like a specter, a mirage. He couldn’t believe she was real.

  She was fevered, her eyes wide and imploring. “Please!” she cried, in a keening hiss.