Wagon Train Sweetheart

Both Nathan and Clara went still.

James Stillwell joined their circle, nodding to Rachel and Bingham, who had roused at his loud greeting. Mr. Stillwell’s glittering gaze swept over Nathan, Emma and Clara and held for a moment too long. Clara panted softly in Emma’s ear, while Nathan stood stiff, shoulders rigid.

Was Nathan right? Did Stillwell have a grudge against him in particular? She’d intended to argue on Stillwell’s behalf until she’d remembered when he’d slapped Nathan across the face when Nathan had collapsed. It had seemed unkind to her.

“You got a minute, Ben?” Stillwell asked, finally turning away from where the three of them stood. “There’s a problem…”

Ben stood, leaving Abby to her father’s care.

“I suppose its time to clean up, anyway,” Rachel said, the words more a complaint than an acknowledgment as she stood.

Emma was afraid Nathan would disappear into the darkness. She knew his cough lingered and didn’t want him sleeping out in the cool night air, not yet.

“I’ll bring you something of Ben’s in the morning,” Emma told Clara quickly, then moved to intercept Nathan.

As Emma turned away, Clara was left in the glow of the firelight, and her coat flapped open on one side, revealing the girth of her stomach. She quickly strode away into the darkness, but as Emma took a step toward Nathan, his pensive gaze remained on the spot where the other woman had disappeared.

Surely he couldn’t have seen through Clara’s disguise in that one moment, could he? Nathan was intelligent and watchful. She could well imagine that he might notice Clara’s condition when the Morrisons and Emma’s own family hadn’t.

“Are you ready to retire?” Emma asked, her words tumbling one over another in her haste to distract his attention from thoughts of Clara. “You’ll bed down in the wagon again.”

He didn’t grumble, as Ben might’ve, but accepted her demand without argument. Which perhaps told her more about his condition than he would ever say aloud.

Sleep was a long time coming after she had joined Rachel and Ben in the family tent near the wagon. That moment in the shadowed darkness repeated in her mind.

Had Nathan seen through Clara’s disguise?

* * *

Nathan startled awake to an unfamiliar sound, his breathing harsh in the early-morning stillness.

What was it?

His chest burned, and the fiery poker stabbing him with each inhale brought him to full awareness. He was in the Hewitts’ wagon, its white canvas cover gray above him in the darkness. A corner of a crate poked into his lower back. Smells of coffee and flour roused him. His illness lingered; he could feel it in the heaviness in his limbs, the fire in his chest.

It was light enough he could see his breath puff out above him in a white cloud. Cold in the not-quite-dawn, he was grateful to be tucked in warm with the quilted blanket Emma had forced on him last night.

Emma.

The sound came again, and he sat up, careful not to rustle the blanket too much and scare off whoever was outside the wagon.

It sounded like bells tinkling, or a long-forgotten hymn he’d heard sung from inside a church when he’d been a very young boy, hiding outside the structure on a bright Sunday morning.

It sounded like joy.

Someone was humming.

The back flap had been closed for the night, and he hooked one finger around the quarter-size opening and tugged, ever so slightly. The canvas gave, the opening widened. Not all the way. Just enough for him to see Emma’s profile in the predawn light.

Her head was bent toward the ground, her golden hair spilling down over her shoulders, down her back.

He swallowed. Hard.

She ran a brush through her silky locks, still humming a tune he could almost recognize, unaware that he watched her.

Against the darker silhouettes of scrub brush and prairie in the distance, she was so beautiful that it made him ache from the inside out. Her features, her form…her heart.

Anybody could see it. Why else would she have offered someone like him—an outcast—kindness, as she had done? Why would she have befriended Clarence—whom Nathan had some suspicions about—if not for her kind heart? Why help all the overburdened young mothers with sick children?

Why tell him he could be forgiven?

He’d never met anyone like her. Or rather…women like her stayed far, far away from the likes of him.

She made him remember things, want things that he hadn’t thought about in years. Watching her with her brother and sister, the easy camaraderie they shared, how well they knew each other, and loved each other…

He missed Beth with the same intensity as when she’d just passed.

He should make some kind of noise. Let Emma know he was awake.

Who was he kidding? He should get down out of the wagon and walk away, never look back.

But something held him immobile as he watched her separate the waterfall of her hair into three parts and slowly tuck the parts into a long plait.

With the fall of her hair out of his way, his sharp tracker’s eyes picked up the straight line of her jaw, the slope of her cheek and little upturn at the end of her nose. Her eyes were downcast, the curl of her dark lashes shadowing her cheek, hiding the clear blue depths.

Depths that didn’t throw accusation or revulsion or derision when she looked at him. Only a gentle friendship that he didn’t know what to do with.

He wasn’t the man she thought he was. Yesterday, he’d overheard her defend him to her brother, but what she thought about him wasn’t true. He had plenty of dark things in his past. Things he wasn’t proud of.

Things that Beth would be ashamed to know he’d done.

A sudden fit of coughing took him and he ducked away from the canvas, deeper into the wagon.

He heard movement from outside the wagon, the rustling of clothes. Probably Emma’s dress.

He went hot. Would she figure out he’d been watching her?

He couldn’t stop coughing, even when it felt as if an entire lung lodged in his throat. Then Emma was there, undoing the canvas cover from the outside and thrusting a dipper of cool water into his hand.

He took a breath and a sip. The icy water soothed his throat enough that he stopped coughing, at least for the moment.

The concern on her expression made the poker of fire in his chest burn hotter. The sky behind her turned blue and it made her eyes—and whatever was in their depths—shine brighter.

“Woke up to ice on the water bucket this morning,” was all she said. Then, “Are you still fevering? Your cheeks are flushed…”

She stepped up onto a crate on the ground at the foot of the wagon bed and reached up to touch his forehead with the back of her wrist.