“Collect yourself,” Emmeline said firmly. “You must find Ezra and ask him to spread the word around town that there isn’t going to be a wedding today.”
“This is quite scandalous,” Izannah commented, rising from the pool of organza like Venus coming out of the sea. “Can you imagine what people will say?”
“Only too well,” Emmeline muttered, swishing forward into the parlor with a grandeur that was wholly feigned. The situation might have been worse, she thought, rather frantically, as she waited for Neal and Gil to enter the inner sanctum, then calmly closed the sliding doors. It hardly bore considering, what would have happened if Gil had arrived even a day later. “Sit down, gentlemen,” she said.
That room, in the heart of the house, was Emmeline’s domain, and she usually felt strong there, and very much in charge of things. It would be within those walls, she decided, that she would hear Gil’s mysterious tale.
Neither man honored her request to take a chair, as it turned out. Neal took up a post at the window, and Gil stood beside the cold fireplace, one hand resting on the ornately carved mantelpiece.
Emmeline began to feel dizzy again—it was so completely unlike her—and put one hand to her throat. Her pulse raced beneath her fingertips.
“Neal,” she began, and because the name came out sounding like the squeak of a rusted hinge, she had to pause and clear her throat. “Mr. Montgomery,” she said. “I do apologize for the shock and inconvenience this development has undoubtedly caused you.” She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror over the fireplace, being very careful to avoid meeting Gil’s gaze, and saw that her dark red hair was tumbling messily from its pins. “You may be sure that I will offer you a full explanation, once I have received one myself.” She cleared her throat again. “If you would be so kind as to leave Mr. Hartwell and me alone to talk—”
Neal turned from the window and crossed the room with startling speed to stand before Emmeline, glowering down into her face. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Gil was watchful and his arms were folded. Although he seemed poised to spring, his body was still.
“Leave you alone?” Neal demanded, a slow flush climbing his neck to pulse in his aristocratic face. “With this . . . this drifter? Emmeline, must I remind you of the scandalous fashion in which he abandoned you?”
Emmeline’s throat constricted for a moment, aching, and she subdued a fresh flood of tears by sheer effort of will. In Plentiful, folks had raised personal censure to the level of an art form.
“No, Neal,” she said softly. “No one needs to remind me of that. Every pitying look I received, every whisper of gossip, has been pressed into my heart like flowers between the pages of a remembrance book. But Gil Hartwell was—is—my husband, and I will hear him out, for my own sake, if not for his.”
Neal brought his emotions under control with visible effort, cast one killing glance at Gil, and laid his hands gently on Emmeline’s shoulders. “If you need me . . .”
Emmeline swallowed hard. “I’ll send for you,” she promised.
He studied her face for a long moment, then released his hold and strode to the doors of the parlor. He lingered briefly, without speaking or turning around, before going out.
Emmeline turned slowly to her husband, who still stood next to the fireplace. He was examining a small likeness of Izannah, housed in an oval frame, a thoughtful expression on his face, and she realized that he had focused on the tintype in an effort to afford Emmeline a modicum of privacy. She could not bring herself to thank him.
“You didn’t answer my question,” he said, setting the frame back in its place on the mantel. “The one I asked earlier, in the garden.”
Emmeline’s skirts made a swishing sound as she turned away from him and with one hand gripped the back of the leather chair her grandfather had always favored. “You wanted to know if I love Neal Montgomery,” she recalled.
“Yes.”
She bit her lip, feeling Gil’s gaze on her nape like a caress, then made herself face him. “I haven’t the faintest idea,” she said, in a rush of soft, defiant words. “I was bitterly lonely after you went away, and Mr. Montgomery is a fine-looking and genial man.”
“With money.”
Emmeline’s right hand tensed; for the first time since she’d known him, she wanted to slap Gil Hartwell—slap him so hard that he’d reel from the blow. “The judge left this house to Izannah and me in his will,” she said reasonably. “We had planned to turn it into a hotel, or take in boarders.”
Gil raised one dark eyebrow. “But you were saved from that fate by a proposal from Mr. Montgomery,” he speculated.
“It wasn’t like that,” Emmeline said. Her chin was trembling, and she hoped Gil couldn’t see. “You know better than that. I wouldn’t have married
you
if I’d wanted money, now would I?”
He smiled, then crossed the room to stand before her. “I’m sorry, Emmeline,” he said. “I have no right to question any decision you might have made during these past seven years.”
Tacitly, they agreed to sit down, and took seats on the horsehair settee facing the fireplace. Gil brushed the back of Emmeline’s hand with his fingertips, and then enclosed it in a tentative grasp.
A silence settled between them, and they simply sat together for a little while. Emmeline spent those moments trying to moderate her heartbeat and her breathing, and to get used to the fact that the man she’d long believed to be dead was very much alive.
Finally, Gil thrust one hand through his unruly hair—in a gesture so dearly familiar that Emmeline felt a tug in her soul at the sight of it—and began to talk. To his credit, he met her gaze and did not look away.
“I guess you didn’t get any of my letters,” he said.
Emmeline bristled. For the first year after Gil’s disappearance, hoping for word from her missing husband, she’d met every stagecoach and waited in the general store while old Mr. Dillard sorted through the mail. “I told you,” she said stiffly, “I thought you were dead.”
Gil sighed heavily. “Yes,” he said, and sighed again. “Well, there were times when I wished I was, but it isn’t my intention to burden you with my personal trials and tribulations.” He raised her hand, seemingly unaware of the motion, and brushed his lips lightly across her knuckles. “I went to San Francisco to meet with a banker about a loan to buy more cattle, just like you and I agreed,” he began. “Everything went well, and I was ready to catch a stagecoach back here, but the
next one wasn’t leaving for two days, so I decided to explore the city a little. I met up with some friends and told them all about you, and the ranch, and the steers we were about to add to the herd. We went to a saloon, the night before I was going to leave, for a farewell drink.”
Emmeline straightened her shoulders and lifted her chin slightly, but offered no comment. Gil had been a reasonably temperate man during their marriage, but he had taken a drink now and again, and she had no call to think he was putting a varnish on the truth. Yet.
Gil sat back on the settee, still holding Emmeline’s hand, but instead of looking into her eyes, like before, he stared off into the middle distance, as though watching a scene unfold in the ether. “I’ve wished I’d stayed in my room a thousand times since then,” he continued presently, his voice low and rough as gravel. “But there’s no sense in wanting to change the past, of course. I’d bought a brooch that day, to bring home to you, and my spirits were so high I just had to celebrate. I recall that I threw back a couple of shots of whiskey and watched the dancing girls for a while.” He paused again, and lowered his head. A tremor went through him, barely perceptible, and then he faced Emmeline again. “My friends wanted to stay, so I left the saloon by myself and started back to the rooming house, by way of an alley. The last thing I recall is something striking the base of my skull. When I woke up, I was in the hold of a ship out in the harbor.”
Emmeline’s mouth fell open. Gil’s story seemed a bit overdramatic, and she wasn’t at all sure she believed it. “You were shanghaied?” she breathed. She’d thought of a thousand and one yarns he might tell just since he’d appeared in the side garden like some latter-day Lazarus, but this particular scenario hadn’t occurred to her.
Gil used his free hand to rub the back of his neck, as though
some shadow of pain still lingered in the bones and muscles there, and sighed again. “I spent the next six and a half years hauling lines and raising and lowering sails. Every time we made port, I tried to escape, but I never even got to the end of the wharf before I was caught and brought back.”
“But finally, somehow, you got away,” Emmeline whispered, marveling. She was caught up in the story, whether it was true or not.
Gil nodded, but there was no triumph in his face, only a grim, haunted expression. “We were at anchor in Sydney Harbor one quiet night, scheduled to set sail with the morning tide. The water was smooth as glass, and so clear that the moonlight reached right to the bottom.”
“What happened?” Emmeline dared to inquire, barely breathing by that point.
For a moment, she thought he would fling her hand away and bolt from the room, there was such tension in him, coiled tight and ready to spring. But then Gil relaxed—by conscious choice, she could tell—and even managed a faltering smile.
“Perhaps one day I’ll tell you the details, my love. For the moment, it’s enough I was lucky, and got safely to shore.”
Emmeline’s stout heart was fluttering again, and the images were vivid in her mind. If Gil was lying, she said to herself, he’d missed his calling, choosing to scratch out a living on a small ranch; he could have made a fortune writing dime novels. “My word,” she remarked, too shaken, for the moment, to say more.
Gil reached into the inside pocket of his frayed and musty coat, and when he opened his hand, a small porcelain brooch rested on his calloused palm. “This belongs to you,” he said.
Nearly overcome, Emmeline gnawed at her lower lip and concentrated all her considerable energies on maintaining her composure. Then, with unsteady fingers, utterly unable to resist, she reached out and claimed the trinket. It was not an
expensive piece, just a simple porcelain oval with a sheaf of golden wheat painted on in the most fragile of brushstrokes.
The thought of Gil carrying the small treasure with him, through all sorts of privations and ordeals, touched her heart in a way the prettiest and most poetic words in the language could not have done.
Her eyes were awash with fresh tears when she looked at him, holding the brooch in a tight fist and pressing that fist to her bosom. “So help me, Gil Hartwell, if I ever find out you made that up, that you bought this from some peddler in Missoula or Butte, I’ll never forgive you.”
“I’m telling the truth, Miss Emmeline,” he said. He hesitated, obviously weighing his next words. “You’ve got to get used to the idea of my being back in Plentiful, I know, and that’s sure to take a little time. I’ll stay clear of you if that’s what you want—God knows, there’s plenty to do at the ranch while you’re thinking things through. But when I was working on those ships, darlin’, there was only one thing that kept me going, and that was the belief that I could find my way back to you some fine day.”
A tear spilled down Emmeline’s cheek, and she made no move to wipe it away. She just sat there, listening, waiting, wondering if all the love in the world was enough to mend the damage that had been done by an unkind fate.
“I often imagined kissing you, Emmeline, the way I used to do. That’s all that kept me from throwing myself overboard and breathing water until I went under. And that’s all I’m asking of you now. One kiss.”
Emmeline didn’t speak. She just nodded, and leaned forward slightly, closing her eyes.
He curved a finger under her chin, like in the old days, and tilted her head back. She felt him close to her, and his breath on her mouth set her flesh to tingling, first just on her lips, then all over her body. She let out a soft moan of relief and
regret when he claimed her, tenderly at first, tentatively, and then with a slow-building power, fueled by passion.
Emmeline was lost; Gil’s touch had always affected her that way. She would have given herself to him, right there in the broad light of day, on her grandmother’s horsehair settee, if he’d chosen to take her.
But he didn’t. He drew back, one corner of his mouth kicking up in a semblance of a grin as she opened her eyes, lashes fluttering, to gaze at him in consternation.
“I do apologize, Miss Emmeline,” Gil said, “for any inconvenience or embarrassment I might have caused you by coming back when I did.” He touched her lips, still swollen and sensitive from the most thorough and compelling of kisses, with the tip of an index finger. “Mind, I didn’t say I was sorry for spoiling your wedding.”
Emmeline blinked, still too confused to speak. She loved Gil Hartwell as much as she ever had, but she was going to let him walk away, let him return to his homestead without her, because he was right about one thing: She needed time to ponder, to work out whether she believed him or not.
If Gil was lying to her, she’d know it, somehow, and no amount of love would make her set up housekeeping with a man who had betrayed her. Emmeline was a proud woman, and she’d been taught to put a high value on herself. She could not reconcile her hopes to anything less than complete loyalty.
Gil stood, his hand cupped beneath her chin, and their fingers, interlocked until then, loosened, separated, fell away.
“I love you, Emmeline,” he said. And with that he turned and walked out of the parlor without looking back.
Emmeline sat rigid until she heard the front door close smartly, then covered her face with both hands and let out a wail fit to break a banshee’s heart.
Izannah, who had been hovering outside the parlor for some time, burst into the room and hurried over to sit beside Emmeline and put an arm around her. Mrs. Dunlap, their nearest neighbor, was close on Izannah’s heels, clucking and wringing her hands and muttering “Lord have mercy” over and over again.
“What did that rascal say to you?” Izannah demanded.
Emmeline snuffled inelegantly. “He said he loved me,” she confessed, and promptly began to sob again. Even now, after all the humiliation she’d suffered, all the tears she’d shed and all the prayers she’d prayed, she wanted to chase after Gil Hartwell and ask him to take her home with him.