Texas Homecoming Read Online Free Page A

would actually help her.
    “I don’t imagine it’s been easy working for my grandfather,” Cade said.
    He couldn’t know what she and her grandmother had endured.
    “What made you do it? I’d have thought you’d go to Mexico.”
    Necessity made her do it, but she had stopped being angry at Fate long ago. Even though the war was over and men were coming back to Texas, everything had changed. She had changed, but Cade had changed, too. She sensed he was as different from his grandfather as she was from her grandmother. Neither of them had time for the hatred and pride of the past. He might really want to know why he’d found her in the last place he would expect her to be.
    She didn’t like working for the Wheelers, but she hadlearned to take care of herself, learned from experience that loss of pride wouldn’t kill her. She had grown stronger, had learned that no one had the power to destroy her belief in herself.
    “Two women traveling alone would have been set upon by every bandit between here and Mexico City,” she said.
    “Why didn’t you go to San Antonio?”
    “It’s been taken over by Anglos who want nothing to do with anyone who sided with Mexico.” She didn’t say that her grandmother’s pride wouldn’t allow her to live in San Antonio when her only means of support was a granddaughter who worked in a shop or the home of some rich Anglo.
    “They couldn’t be worse than my grandfather.”
    “What do you want me to cook for supper? I wasn’t prepared for four extra people.” She wanted to get away from his smile. It had grown warmer until she almost felt he was pleased to see her. Yet she didn’t trust him. He knew something about Laveau he wasn’t willing to tell her.
    “We’ll eat anything you fix,” he said with a broad smile. “We’ve been cooking for ourselves for too long. I won’t tell you some of the things we’ve been forced to eat.”
    She hadn’t thought of that, but she should have guessed. Other men who’d come back had nothing but their rifles and the clothes on their backs. At least Cade and his friends had managed to keep their horses.
    “There’s some pork, but not enough to last long. We can eat the chickens, but I’d rather keep them for eggs. I’m sure you remember there are turkeys in the pecan trees along the creek. There’re wild pigs, too. We couldn’t feed them, so we turned them loose to forage for themselves.”
    “We can kill a beef now and again,” Cade said, “but I’drather keep them for market. What will you do about your place?”
    “Laveau will drive the squatters off when he gets back. He said the Union Army will take over Texas. He says they’ll give us our land back.
All of it
.”
    His expression turned angry again. No, that wasn’t exactly right. It wasn’t hatred either, but the emotion she felt emanating from him was as strong as hatred.
    “Do you still write Laveau?”
    “He moves too often.”
    “Then you don’t know when he’ll get home?”
    “He said he’d come home when the Union Army got here.”
    “They’re here already.”
    “I know. General Gordon Granger landed in Galveston on the nineteenth of June. He proclaimed Texas restored to the Union, the slaves free, and all acts of the Confederacy null and void. Your grandpa told me fifty thousand more troops landed in July. When Laveau didn’t come back with them, I thought he might be with you.”
    Strong emotion remained in his gaze. Only now it seemed to have an element of sadness, even pain. The Cade Wheeler who rode off to defeat the Union single-handedly had been too cocky for ordinary human emotions to affect him. But that wasn’t true any longer. She longed to ask what had happened.
    “Laveau wouldn’t be with us after changing sides. He’d have been in danger of his life.”
    Shock turned her stiff. “You would kill him?” She had never been allowed to forget the enmity between their two families, but it had never gone as far as killing. Her