you go on and write her, then, if you feel so strongly about it. Go on, John. Be my guest. Write the lady back.”
He did. Then, although he’d meant to leave when that first year was up, John Bandera hung around waiting for a reply.
When it came—addressed to Price—he wrote her back.
And waited again. And again.
Six years later, long after his drunken partner had pulled up stakes and disappeared, John Bandera was still there, still writing letters signed “Price,” still loving the lady so like a gardenia.
Chapter One
Mississippi, 1872
“Emily Russell, you are not leaving. I forbid it. Now, you put that suitcase down. Do you hear me? Put it down.”
“I do hear you, Dodie. You’re screeching like an owl, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if everybody in Russell County hears you.”
“You wouldn’t be doing this if your brother were here. After all Elliot’s done for you, too. How can you be such an ungrateful wretch?”
Emily shoved past her wailing sister-in-law, charged through the front door, and dropped her final piece of luggage on the verandah.
“There.” She shaded her eyes against the bright morning sun, searching past the long sweep of driveway toward the street beyond. “Now, where in blazes is Haley Gates? He promised me he’d be here by ten o’clock.”
“If I know Haley Gates,” Dodie muttered, “he’s probably facedown in the hay in somebody’s barn.” Then she reached for the leather handle of a carpetbag. “I’m taking this back inside.”
Emily jerked the bag away. “You’ll do no such thing. I’m going, Dodie. And that’s that.”
“To Texas!” The young woman threw up her hands. “Texas! Where you’ll be set upon by wild Indians. Maybe even scalped. Lord knows any savage would love to whack off those blond curls of yours.”
“I’ll be sure and keep my bonnet tied tight, then.” Emily peered down the street in the opposite direction. “I’ll scalp that Haley if he’s not here in two more minutes.”
Dodie sighed mightily, then sank into a high-backed wicker chair. “Elliot’s going to be beside himself when he gets back from New Orleans to find you’ve taken off like some thief in the night. You know that, don’t you? He’ll be furious. He feels so responsible for you.”
“It’s ten o’clock in the morning, Dodie, and I’m not a thief. I’m not a prisoner, either. At least not anymore.”
“A prisoner! What a spiteful thing to say, Emily, when all we’ve done is look out for your best interests since Mother and Father Russell passed away. Why, I’m sure those two must be fairly twirling in their graves right now, seeing what their foolish, dreamy daughter is up to.”
Emily almost laughed at that image of her prim and proper parents. But Dodie was probably right. If they knew what she was doing, her parents would most definitely spin in their shady little graves. As for being dreamy…Well, Dodie was probably right about that, too. But Emily wasn’t foolish. Not now, at least.
Dodie sighed again, louder and longer. “Oh, how I wish that nice Mr. Gibbons hadn’t gotten the croup and died. He was going to propose marriage, Emily. After all those years of being so shy and tongue-tied whenever he was around you, I simply know he’d worked up the courage to pop the question. I could see it in his eyes.”
“Perhaps,” Emily said. And she would have married Alvin Gibbons, too, she thought. She would have had to marry him, and then they would have lived unhappily ever after. Only now her longtime, flesh-and-blood suitor was dead and Emily was on her way to Texas to find a man she didn’t know in the flesh, but in letters. All those lovely letters.
“I’d like to scalp that no-good Price McDaniel for luring you away like this,” Dodie moaned.
“He didn’t lure me.” Emily almost laughed at her sister-in-law’s melodramatic despair. If anybody deserved to be melodramatic and despairing right now, it was Emily herself. “Price doesn’t even know I’m coming.”
“Well, that’s just fine and dandy. You’re traveling five thousand miles to see a man—a traitor, by the way—who may or may not even be there when you arrive.”
“It’s not five thousand miles. And Price is not a traitor. He did what he had to do, Dodie, to get out of that horrible Yankee prison camp. You know that.”
“He should have come home.”
Emily gave an indignant snort. “To what sort of welcome?”
They had had this argument before, a hundred times perhaps during Emily’s six-year correspondence with the self-exiled Price McDaniel. But what her sister-in-law failed to recognize was that, during those six years, Emily had fallen in love with the man. She hadn’t told a soul, though.
Well, that wasn’t quite true. She had confessed her love to Price in a ten-page, heartfelt letter she had written on New Year’s Eve, then sealed and mailed with such high hopes on the first day of 1872.
If you think me bold and brazen, dearest Price, then I am guilty as charged. Your Emmy loves you and would even be so bold as to propose a life together in the flesh rather just on paper. Send for me, Price. Oh, my dearest. Marry me.
His response had arrived, like clockwork, as all his previous letters had, and she had opened it with a brimming heart and trembling hands only to read his bitterly fond and conclusive farewell.
Someday I hope you can forgive me for misleading you. Dearest Emmy, I will not write again.
That evening she had wept on Alvin Gibbons’s shoulder, and he—suddenly not so shy—had consoled her gently, if not a bit too thoroughly, just two weeks before he sickened and died.
“For God’s sake,” Dodie exclaimed now. “You barely knew Price when he was here and you haven’t heard a word from him in months. How do you know he’s still in Texas? How do you know he’s still alive? Or that he even wants to see you?”
“I know,” Emily lied, when what she knew was only that she had to leave. Today. Now. It wouldn’t be long before everyone in Russell County knew that she—poor Emily, the dreamy spinster, the maiden lady whose shy suitor had passed away three months ago—was going to have a child.
Haley Gates had a tendency to spit when he talked, in part from his habit of dipping snuff and in part from the absence of front teeth, so while Emily sat beside him on the wagon seat, she was glad he kept his face forward and his eyes on the backsides of his mules. She was glad, too, that he had lapsed into silence after an hour-long discourse on who was up to what in Russell County. The man took extraordinary pleasure in pawing through almost everybody’s dirty laundry. Almost everybody. Her own secret, she supposed, was still safe.
But if he said one more time just how brave she was for going out West alone, Emily couldn’t decide whether she was going to hit him or to ask him to turn the wagon around and take her home. She didn’t feel brave. She felt sick and scared to death.
Even
