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For the next few days Della awoke at dawn, dressed, then wandered the streets of St. Louis. Sometimes she actually noticed the houses or shops she passed, but mostly she traveled in the past, thinking about everything, from the day she had arrived in Atlanta as a young girl up to the evening that she’d slept with the Yankee who killed her husband.

At midmorning of her fourth day alone, she returned to the small winter brown park and sat on the bench she had begun to think of as her own. It was time to consider finances and make decisions.

Food and additional days at the hotel were nibbling away her money. Like it or not, she would have to telegraph her banker in Two Creeks.

She had decided to finish the journey to Atlanta. She was almost there, and she hadn’t changed her mind about wanting to fill an empty heart with the sight of her daughter.

Feeling overwhelmed by everything she had to do— wire her bank for money, get checked out of the hotel and get to the train station, buy her tickets—Della closed her eyes and rubbed her glove against her cheek. After a moment she felt the bench give slightly as someone sat beside her, then she inhaled the strong, rich aroma of coffee.

She slid a look toward the man seated beside her. “You!” Instantly her shoulders stiffened and her spine went rigid. “How did you find me?” That was a stupid question, and she knew it the minute the words fell out of her mouth.

Cameron set one of the coffee cups on the bench between them and kept the other. “Please, Della. Give me a minute and just listen.”

Chapter 18

“I won’t apologize for killing Clarence Ward.” Not once had Cameron’s rehearsed speech begun with words guaranteed to offend and make the situation worse. Damn it anyway.

“I want to throw this coffee in your face,” she said, speaking between clenched teeth. “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t.”

“It was a war. If I hadn’t killed Clarence, Clarence would have killed me. Only one soldier was going to walk out of those trees.” He glanced at the steam hovering above the coffee and watched her reach for the cup. “I don’t mind dying, but I’m not going to make it easy.

The man who puts me down has to be faster, better, and luckier than I am. That wasn’t Clarence, not that day in the woods.”

“This is pointless.” She touched the cup but didn’t lift it. “I’m cold. I’m going back to the hotel.”

“I’ve done three things in my life that I regret. I bought a commission and went to war. I waited ten years before I gave you what was rightfully yours. And I deceived you and took advantage, knowing you’d despise me after you learned the whole truth.”

“Despise is too mild. You should have told me the truth immediately! Maybe nothing would have changed, or maybe everything would have changed and we wouldn’t be sitting here now. But I should have been told who you were and offered a choice about whether I wanted to spend time with you given the circumstances.” Her eyes burned and a nerve twitched in her cheek. But she stayed on the bench instead of rising.

“I can’t change what I did, but maybe I can help you have a better life than you’ve had.”

“It’s terrible that it was you who killed Clarence.”

“If it hadn’t been me, it would have been some other Yankee soldier.”

“But what’s worse is that you took me to bed without telling me it was you who killed him.”

“You’re right,” he said after a minute, staring straight ahead.

Della clenched her fists in her lap. “What makes this so unforgivable is the deceit. You came into my home and sat at my table. You let me believe that you were my husband’s friend! What makes my stomach churn is that I was falling in love with you! I gave myself to the man who put a bullet into my husband’s heart!”

He’d been imagining this confrontation for ten years. Her words and her expression shouldn’t have sliced him into pieces. “I want to see this journey through to its end.”

“I don’t give a damn what you want.”

“I think you want it, too, Della. You want to see Claire and talk to her and find out if the two of you can have a future together. I know.” He raised his hand. “You say you only want to see her, and maybe that’s where it ends. But seeing her might be the beginning of something good for you both.”

She stared at him as if he were something loathsome. “What are you proposing? That we continue the journey as if nothing happened? As if nothing has changed?”

“I said I’d take you to your daughter and that’s what I mean to do. You don’t have to sit beside me on the train, don’t have to take your meals in my company. We’ll continue on whatever terms you want.”

She was silent long enough that his coffee started to ice over before she spoke again.

“It’s you who sends the money every month, isn’t it?” When he didn’t answer, she sighed. “I thought so. Tell me something, Cameron.”

It was Cameron again. The night she came to him, she had called him James. No one called him James.

“I’m curious. Does sending the money and taking me to Claire, do these things balance the scales in your mind? Once this journey ends, will you put the war away and let it go?”

“I killed a hundred men who had wives and parents and children and lives waiting for them,” he said flatly. “If I knew the names of those people, I’d do something to try to make it right. I don’t know what, but I’d try. But I only know the name and circumstances of one Confederate soldier.”

“So you’ll go on, hunting and killing outlaws whose names and circumstances you do know.” She met his eyes. “Helping me won’t alter one minute of what you remember or what you feel or what you think you owe.”

“Do you want me to say that you’re right? What the hell else can I do?”

“You said that the last man you killed put a face on the enemy, do you remember telling me that?”

Of course he did.

She stood up from the bench and looked down at him. “Now I have a face for the enemy, too.”

“There’s one more thing,” he said, standing and moving close enough to inhale the scent of her, “then we won’t talk about this again.”

She stepped back, her gaze fixed.

“I didn’t use you to scratch a momentary itch. I believe you know that or you wouldn’t have come to me. I spent ten years looking at your photograph almost every day, Della. Sometimes it feels as if I’ve loved you all of my life.” She sucked in a breath and her face went white. “That doesn’t excuse letting you come into my bed. I should have stopped you and I should have told you the whole truth right then. No, that’s wrong. I should have told you the truth the evening I rode down your driveway.”

“You took advantage,” she whispered. The accusation in her eyes was like a knife in his gut.

“The only thing I took from you was a memory. That’s all I wanted.” When she turned away from him, he cleared his throat, then pulled out his pocket watch and consulted the time. “We have three hours before the train leaves. Will you come, or do you want me to send you back to Texas?”

“I’ve already decided what I’ll do.” Her head came up and her eyes flashed. “You owe me this trip, Cameron!”

“That’s how I figure it.”

She moved past him, twitching her skirt aside so the hem didn’t touch his legs, and she refused his arm when he offered.

He watched a freight wagon rumble past the small park’s gate, then smoothed the brim of his hat. “We’ll take your trunk to the station, then we’ll have time for a light supper. We should eat something because the line we’re riding doesn’t have dining cars.”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to sit in a restaurant with you. When we arrived, a man was selling hot potatoes on the platform. If he’s still there, that’s all I want. A potato.”

They didn’t speak again during the walk to her hotel, and he waited in a small, unadorned lobby while she packed.

He’d been watching her for two days, trying to decide when and how best to approach her. From the start he’d known there was nothing he could say to ease her pain or deflect her hatred. His goal had been to persuade her to continue on to Atlanta. Cameron could live with her hatred, that had been inevitable and he’d expected it. But he couldn’t live with her not finding her daughter.

He sat on a horsehair chair with his hat on his knees and remembered the firelight glowing through her nightgown as she stood in the doorway. He remembered the sweetness of her mouth and the damp heat of her skin. No matter what happened in the years to come, he would always have that one perfect hour when she had looked up at him with shining eyes and called him James.

Della’s preference was to ride in a separate car. Her second choice would have been to sit by herself. By now, however, she knew a traveler’s manner of passing time was to speculate about fellow passengers. So she sat in silence beside Cameron, her arms folded across her chest, her head turned to the window. Observers would note silence and rigid postures and would conclude the existence of difficulties, but she and Cameron wouldn’t be as interesting as they would have been if they had chosen separate seating.

“No, thank you,” she said when the conductor came down the aisle passing out box lunches. Inside would be bread, butter, and cheese, two pieces of fried chicken, and cookies or a slab of frosted cake. It didn’t matter if it was morning, noon, or night, the boxed meals were always the same.

Cameron also shook his head, but he did request coffee and assumed that she also wanted a cup. As recently as last week Della would have teased him about never missing an opportunity for coffee. Biting her lips, she turned her face back to the window.

Well-maintained farms appeared with increasing frequency as the train chuffed southeast. Since the train carried freight and mail, it stopped at almost every town, large or small, which explained why the journey to Atlanta would take eight seemingly endless days. They had missed the fast-moving express train.

“You should eat something,” Cameron said. He paid the conductor, then passed her a cup of coffee. After a minute he decided she wasn’t going to comment. “You haven’t said a dozen words in the last three days.”

They rolled past a field enclosing horses and cows, and Della wondered what it would be like to live with an animal the same general size and shape as yourself but whom you couldn’t communicate with because he was a different species.

She slid a glance toward Cameron, then looked out the window again. “I have nothing to say.” Having nothing to say hadn’t stopped her from talking in the past. She waited, but Cameron was tactful enough not to say so.

In fact, there should have been a great deal to discuss and explore. That day sitting on the park bench had produced explosive declarations. Della had confessed to being on the brink of falling in love with him, and Cameron had admitted that he had fallen in love with a photograph he had carried for ten years. In different circumstances, they could have discussed these two wonders for weeks. At least Della could have. Cameron would have nodded and muttered and tugged at his collar, and she would have laughed watching his discomfort.

But Cameron had killed her husband. One act, committed in less than a minute, had put Clarence in the grave and had forever changed her life.

Closing her eyes, she dropped her head and rubbed her forehead. “I know it could have been any Yankee, you’re absolutely right. It just happened to be you,” she whispered. “From your point of view, it could have been any Confederate who appeared that day. It just happened to be Clarence.” Cameron didn’t speak. “For a while I blamed you that Clarence died with ‘I hate you’ in his ears. But that isn’t true. It’s my fault that he died believing I hated him.”

Cameron faced forward and didn’t glance at her, but she saw his hands tighten around his coffee cup.

“I know you were doing your duty as a soldier that day. I know you acted in self-defense. But in here,” she touched her breast above her heart, “I feel betrayed. You killed my husband and you lied to me.”

“I never lied to you.”

“You lied by omission. You let me believe things you knew were untrue.” She shifted on the seat to face his profile. “I believe that you are a man of integrity and honor. But if that’s true, then how could you deceive me like you did?”

Finally he looked at her with tired eyes and an expressionless face. “I knew you would hate me when you learned the truth. And then I’d never get to know you or be with you for a while. I didn’t plan to deceive you, Della. It just happened, and I was glad.”

She blinked and her lips parted. It was that simple. He had deceived her because he’d fallen in love with a girl in a photograph, a girl who had not existed for years.

“Oh, Cameron.” Her voice cracked and dropped to a scarcely audible tone. “Were you disappointed?”

He understood what she asked. “Never. You are everything I hoped you would become and more.”

The back of her throat tightened and her eyes felt hot and scratchy. He wasn’t the type of man to whisper sweet nothings into a woman’s ear. He’d said all he could and probably more than he was comfortable with.

“I wish . . .” But wishes were foolish things, about as useful as a broken clock.

Della turned her head toward the window. She was sitting next to the man who had killed her husband. How was that possible? She had made love to him. Unthinkable, but it had happened. She could never forgive Cameron’s deception or make sense out of being with him.