Wagon Train Sweetheart. Lacy Williams

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СКАЧАТЬ with whom Emma’s natural timidness didn’t manifest itself. Most of the time. Sometimes, she still felt she couldn’t speak up, even to them.

      In the safety of her journal, Emma wished she could find her backbone. Had she gotten in the habit of being so very quiet at her father’s bedside that now no one listened?

      Sometimes she feared her voice would fade away completely. That no one would hear her or see her at all.

      Ben returned and reached out a hand to draw her up from where she knelt next to Mr. Reed. “They’ve agreed to stay the verdict until he recovers. I’ve sent Cavanaugh to bring a stretcher.”

      She stood, her eyes lingering on Nathan, his dark head lolled to the side. “Where will he stay?”

      “With Abby’s family.”

      She opened her mouth to argue, but Miles Cavanaugh and two other men arrived and Ben was distracted with helping roll Mr. Reed onto the canvas draped over two long poles.

      Ben’s fiancée was Abigail Bingham Black. They had been sweethearts years before, until circumstances—and Abby’s mother—had driven them apart. Widowed and back in her parents’ household, Abby had been on the wagon train and she and Ben had reconnected. And fallen in love all over again.

      Mr. Bingham had had trouble driving the oxen and Nathan Reed had arrived in the wagon train as a hired driver. With no wagon of his own, she knew he’d slept in the open air most of the time. But that wasn’t an option now.

      If the disease followed the same course it had with the children, he would be incapacitated with fever and weakness for a day or more. And remembering the glimpse Emma had had of the interior of the Binghams’ wagon revealed the difficulty Ben hadn’t thought of; their wagon had been overstuffed with all the things Abby’s now-deceased mother hadn’t wanted to leave behind.

      She trailed the men carrying the still-unconscious Mr. Reed through the bustling camp. Women doused their cookfires, men harnessed oxen, children ran among the lot, all in anticipation of the call to ride out. They all worked with intent.

      Was it only Emma who felt as lacking in direction as a puff of dandelion blowing in the wind? She needed to find her purpose again. For so long, her purpose had been caring for her father. Praying, hoping, believing that one day he would recover.

      After his death, she’d been lost, drifting. Until she’d found the orphanage in the town nearest to their ranch, a small affair that had been run by one very motivated woman. And Emma had believed she’d found a new purpose.

      Until the day her brother had come into the house, waving Grayson’s letter. Ben and Rachel had been so excited about the trip, about leaving behind the difficult memories. About starting a new life.

      But Emma hadn’t been sure.

      And she’d hesitated too long to mention that she didn’t want to go West. Once plans were made, she hadn’t felt she could broach the subject, not without sounding selfish and petty.

      Her own fault. Now where was she to find a purpose? Was it possible that she could find it with a family of her own?

      Her eldest brother, Grayson, had written of the widowed local sheriff, Tristan McCullough, who had become his close friend in the Oregon Territory. Tristan had three young daughters who needed a mother. Both Grayson and Ben seemed in agreement that the man was a match for Emma.

      She wasn’t entirely convinced that this was her purpose, even if her brothers seemed to be certain. She would wait until she met the man before she decided what to do.

      Unanswered questions swirled in Emma’s head as she trailed the men carting Mr. Reed to their wagon, but the biggest remained: Where would Mr. Reed stay? Obviously, he couldn’t walk to guide the Binghams’ oxen.

      And from what she knew of Abby’s wagon, there wasn’t room for a mouse, much less a man as tall as Mr. Reed.

      Ben had made himself Mr. Reed’s caretaker when he’d stood up for the ill man. Would Ben—and Emma by association—­­be forced to keep Mr. Reed in the Hewitts’ wagon? If he must stay in their wagon, the precious little privacy she fought for on this dusty wilderness trail would be gone.

      When they arrived at the family campsite, Rachel and Abby were there, packing up the breakfast dishes.

      “What happened?” Abby asked, moving toward Ben, almost as if by instinct.

      “We need to clear a space in your family’s wagon,” Ben told his fiancée. “Reed fell sick—measles.”

      “Will there be room…?” Abby’s question trailed off as she moved with the men toward the Binghams’ wagon. Emma remained near the fire with Rachel.

      “Did the committee reach a verdict?”

      Emma shook her head slightly. “He collapsed. Ben demanded they hold the verdict until he is recovered.”

      Rachel watched Emma carefully. “You don’t think he is guilty?”

      Her sister saw too much. They had always been close. But Emma did have one secret—that she hadn’t wanted to come West at all.

      She shrugged, moving to pick up the breakfast skillet to take it to the family wagon. “Even if he is guilty, he deserves to be treated fairly. No man deserves to be left in the wilderness to die.”

      A shiver raced through her, just thinking about it.

      “That’s his punishment? How utterly unfair!” Rachel was a passionate person—and much more outspoken than Emma.

      She went on, spouting her thoughts as if she was defending Mr. Reed in front of the committeemen herself. “I’m just glad Ben was there to stand up for him.”

      Emma was, too. Part of her wished that she had been able to stand up against the injustice. Perhaps that should become her new purpose.

      Finding her voice. Or risk losing it forever.

Chapter Two

      “Your presence here is quite inconvenient.”

      Emma bathed Mr. Reed’s face with a rag dipped in tepid water from the small basin she’d tucked between two crates in the cramped Conestoga wagon. She was down to the dregs of what she’d started with—most of it had splashed onto her as the wagon jostled over the rough terrain.

      She dared speak to him so rudely only because he hadn’t regained consciousness after his collapse early this morning. If he was awake, she never would’ve had the courage.

      And he probably wouldn’t have heard her, anyway.

      His continuous unconscious state worried her. Where her knuckle inadvertently brushed against his cheek, his skin burned her. His fever was high. Dangerously so.

      “Crossing the creek again,” Ben called out from outside the wagon, where he walked beside the oxen.

      Again?

      Emma braced one hand against the sideboard. The wagon lurched and she slid forward, then another СКАЧАТЬ