Resurrection by Linda Lael Miller

Author:Linda Lael Miller [Miller, Linda Lael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Romance, General, Historical, cookie429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9781476710990
Publisher: Pocket Star
Published: 2012-12-09T22:00:00+00:00

4

GIL STOOD ALONE AT THE FOOT OF HIS OWN GRAVE, PONDERING the many paradoxes of life—and death. It is not given to every man, he thought with grim amusement, to read his name on a marble tombstone.

Heedless of the copious summer rain, as soft and warm as an angel’s tears, Gil noted that Emmeline had elected to bury him in the family plot, facing the judge’s resting place. This touched him deeply, for Emmeline was a woman to whom family was vitally important.

It was the empty space next to his own, though, that tightened his throat and twisted his heart into a painful knot, for she had plainly reserved that spot for herself. Emmeline must have loved him when she’d commissioned that stone, he realized, and with such devotion that she would have gladly lain beside him throughout eternity.

He wondered, with the semblance of a smile rooted in irony rather than humor, exactly where she would have planted Mr. Montgomery—had she married him, of course. She hadn’t, and for that Gil, who had learned to expect little in the way of miracles, was wondrously grateful.

He folded his arms, his new clothes soaked and his hair dripping. His body, still throbbing for want of the satisfactions he had denied it on Miss Emmeline’s screened porch, found some small mercy in the dousing, and was eased.

For a time, Gil considered the world and its ways. Then, as mystified as ever, he squatted to trace the letters of his name, chiseled with Old World precision onto the face of the fine stone. Below was his birth date, followed by that of his supposed death—in a tragic twist, the day he’d been shanghaied. In many ways, he had indeed perished then, so he supposed it was fitting that there should be a grave for his old self. He might have come here to mourn the Gil he had been in the innocent arrogance of his youth, believing himself invincible and feeling so damn certain of everything.

He smiled bitterly at the memory. “Rest in peace,” he said, rising and laying a hand to the smooth, curved top of the headstone. And then he turned and walked through the puddles and the thick, claylike mud to his wagon. The mule stood shivering in the rain, head down.

Gil climbed into the box, pushed the brake lever down with one foot, and took up the reins. The mule, glad to be moving, slogged patiently over the slippery, rutted track, hauling his master home.

• • •

Gil did not come to town on Monday, or at least he didn’t pay Emmeline a call, and she told herself that was for the best. The rain had stopped sometime in the night, but the shrubs and the grass were bejeweled with water droplets, quivering prisms flinging off light. After her ten o’clock piano lesson, Emmeline went out into the garden and carefully took down the Chinese lanterns, now mere globs of brightly colored pulp.

On Tuesday, Reverend Bickham came to call. He was

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