Ashes and Memories Read Online Free PDF Page A

traveling alone with him had been joyless.
    Reece gazed sidelong at her, studying her with a new admiration in his eyes. “That's true, but I do enjoy a challenge. Besides, it's as good a place as any -- any you'll find in this part of the country.”
    His gaze grew reflective as if his mind had carried him somewhere far from this place. Emma’s throat tightened. In the depths of his eyes, she read the signs. He'd been through some kind of hell himself, and the part of him that had been created in that inferno reached out to the dark, empty place inside her. She steeled herself against it, against him.
    He forced a self-conscious smile. “Providence is a growing, thriving town, rugged, barely civilized. It has all the problems of a new frontier town.”
    “Such as?” she asked, glad for something else, anything else, to think about other than the heavy weight of loss in her chest and the all too familiar pain in his eyes.
    “Such as mud, dust, lawlessness, corruption, isolation, lack of culture or society.”
    “Never was much for society,” she said with a deep, steadying breath. “If it's all that bad why do you live here?”
    “Perhaps I like lawlessness, corruption, and isolation,” he said with a smile. “Although I can't say I care much for mud.”
    He was too charming, too smooth and sophisticated, and he had no right to be so diabolically handsome. He disturbed her on so many different levels she could hardly recover from one assault before she was reeling from another.
    “Do people always follow your orders so blindly?” she asked, hoping to keep the conversation on safe ground, if there was any safe ground with Mr. MacBride.
    Reece laughed shortly. “Around here they do.”
    “Even the sheriff?” she asked, regaining her equilibrium. “Where I come from the sheriff is an elected official.”
    “You know, I cannot help thinking how dangerous a newspaper could prove in the hands of an opinionated woman.”
    His sardonic smile warmed her blood and filled her with a giddy light-headedness, which infuriated her more than his patronizing words. She pulled her gaze away before he could capture it again.
    “It just seems a little strange that everyone jumps at your every word,” she said, trying to concentrate on the bustle of activity around her.
    Wagons and men on horseback filled the street, while pedestrians crowded the sidewalks. Reece acknowledged passersby from time to time with a touch of his hat or a brief nod.
    Excitement and optimism coursed through Emma again as it had this morning when she'd walked these streets for the first time. For all its rough appearance, there was a fresh exuberance, a raw audacity about Providence that beckoned to her. It was so different from the wounded South.
    “We had an elected sheriff,” Reece explained. “Unfortunately he was murdered during the execution of his duties a few months ago and it was expedient to promote the deputy.”
    “Murdered.”
    “Lawlessness, Miss Parker,” he said, feigning regret. “I am afraid things are a little different here in the territory than back east. Where exactly are you from, if you don't mind my asking?”
    “Savannah, Tennessee. It's a small town in the western part of the state.”
    “Yes, on the Tennessee River near.... I am familiar with the area." He tensed, his face growing noticeably pale.
    Near Shiloh, she finished silently. Of course he'd heard of that blood bath, but his reaction went deeper than that.
    She started to ask if he'd been there, but her own memories were too painful, the smell of gunpowder and the sound of cannon fire too strong.
    She was only nine at the time, but she remembered as if it were yesterday the fire and the smoke and the blood-soaked bodies of the men who were brought to the makeshift hospital in town. Then and there she'd learned to hate violence and war.
    Emma pushed the memories into the far reaches of her mind, taking a deep breath to clear her senses. “We came west to find