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  “What’s it like to fly, Cody?”

  “When you’re flying you’re fully alive. When you’re in the air, every minute seems like an hour. You’ll never forget any of it.”

  He turned her slowly in his arms. “I will always remember every moment, just like now.” He kissed her forehead lightly. “You are so beautiful.” Brushing her lips with his own, he whispered, “I don’t think I’ve ever been so attracted to a woman. When I turned and saw you in the crowd it was as though lightning had struck only a few feet from me.”

  Cody lowered his lips to hers, and Katherine gave no resistance. His lips were gentle at first, then grew more demanding. Running her fingers into his sandy hair, she touched his windblown curls—the same curls that had touched the clouds….

  Praise for Jodi Thomas’s previous novels:

  PRAIRIE SONG

  “A THOROUGHLY ENTERTAINING ROMANCE.”

  —Gothic Journal

  THE TENDER TEXAN

  Winner of the Romance Writers of America

  Best Historical Series Romance in 1991 Award

  “EXCELLENT!…HAVE THE TISSUES READY;

  THIS TENDER LOVE STORY…WILL

  TUG AT YOUR HEART. MEMORABLE READING.”

  —Rendezvous

  Diamond Books by Jodi Thomas

  THE TENDER TEXAN

  PRAIRIE SONG

  CHERISH THE DREAM

  CHERISH

  THE DREAM

  JODI THOMAS

  This book is a Diamond original edition,

  and has never been previously published.

  CHERISH THE DREAM

  A Diamond Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Diamond edition / April 1993

  all rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1993 by Jodi Koumalats.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part,

  by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

  For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  200 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-65824-6

  Diamond Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  200 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016.

  The name “DIAMOND” and its logo are trademarks belonging to Charter Communications, Inc.

  I dedicate this book to one of the true heroes in my life, my brother,

  Philip Clifton Price,

  and to the best cheerleader in the world,

  my sister-in-law,

  Victoria Price

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Prologue

  1900

  “I CAN’T CUT myself!” eight-year-old Sarah Anderson whispered, trying not to sound like a baby.

  “You have to or it won’t work,” Katherine McMiller insisted, pulling the stolen knife from her smock pocket.

  Sarah lifted her tiny hand up to her friend. “You do it for me, Kat.”

  Raising her head above the hay fortress they were hiding in, Katherine agreed. “All right, Sarah, but we have to hurry. The wagon will be coming back from town any minute.” She gripped the old pocket knife in her fist and ran the blade over Sarah’s open palm.

  Sarah blinked hard but didn’t pull away or cry out as a line of crimson followed the blade across her flesh. She stared at her chubby hand as if it were someone else’s. Her nails were dirty and ragged, as were those of most of the children at the farm. Calluses lined her palms like war ribbons as evidence of her hard labor. Slowly her blood dripped between her fingers and onto the barn floor.

  Katherine opened her own hand and ran the knife across her palm. Watching, Sarah felt Katherine’s pain as deeply as she felt her own. The two girls tenderly pressed their bleeding hands together. Katherine pulled a tattered blue ribbon from Sarah’s ebony hair and bound their wrists together. “Now,” she whispered, “we’re blood sisters, just as the Indians were blood brothers.”

  “Forever and ever. No matter what.” Sarah nodded.

  “Forever and ever. No matter what,” Katherine echoed.

  That night the girls lay on their cots in a cold windowless room that was little more than a closet. After forcing themselves not to cry while being whipped by Mrs. McFail, the farm manager, they now let their tears flow in the darkness. The iodine had stung their hands even worse than the knife. The cuts would heal and the welts from the belt would fade, but both girls knew nothing would ever break the bond they had forged.

  “Sarah,” Katherine whispered between sobs, “you should have told her I did it; then she would have only whipped me.”

  “I couldn’t; we’re blood sisters, remember?”

  Katherine tried to answer, but the fear that always overtook her at night choked her words before they could leave her throat. She could face anything in daylight, but not in the darkness.

  “Sarah, hold my hand?” Katherine’s brave young voice shook slightly.

  “Sure,” Sarah answered, stretching her bandaged hand across the open space to Katherine. “When we’re grown, we’ll live in a house somewhere nice and we’ll leave the lamp burning all night long. Your room will have windows from floor to ceiling, and if the night’s too cloudy for stars, I’ll put Chinese lanterns up in the trees so you can always see out no matter how dark it gets.”

  Katherine drifted off to sleep as Sarah spoke in her gentle voice of years to come. Neither one of them had any family, but they had each other.

  We’re really sisters now, Sarah thought. She smiled as she covered Katherine’s hand with her blanket. Katherine was the only person on this earth who cared about her, and Sarah knew that one was a long way from none.

  One

  1910

  KATHERINE PULLED SARAH up the grassy hill just outside Dayton, Ohio. The late autumn wind whipped at Katherine’s long navy skirt and pulled strands of her red hair away from her white cap. “Come on, Sarah, or we’ll miss seeing the flight.”

  At age eighteen, Sarah was fully grown, but with her short legs, she could not keep up with Katherine’s long strides. “Go on without me. I’ll see this great flying machine when it lands.”

  “No, we want to see it take off.”

  Sarah mumbled, “We,” under her breath and tried to keep up with her long-legged friend. Everything about Katherine was like the wind of a summer storm. She was tall and willowy with hair that seemed to battle itself in different lights to be first red, then auburn. She could explode with laughter one minute and with anger the next as easily as a breeze whirls into a tornado. She was straightforward, unafraid to take gulps of life, be they swallows of joy or pain. Katherine’s only fear lay hidden in the hours of darkness, but the night seemed far away on this chilly morning. No, Sarah thought, Katherine never backed away from anything, but fought with both fury and warmth for her right to survive.

  “You’re going to love what we see, Sarah. One of the nurs
es told me this is a test site for new Wright Company planes and pilots. She said the machines just lift off the ground and fly through the air like birds. A man sits smack in the middle of each one’s breast, telling it where to go.”

  “Katherine!” Sarah scolded and laughed as her friend acted shocked at having said the word “breast” aloud. Sarah shook her finger as she climbed. “Proper young ladies at the Mamie Willingham School of Nursing don’t use the names of parts of the body lightly.”

  Katherine whirled in front of Sarah, holding her hand to her forehead in a mock faint. “Heaven help me if I ever have to treat a man who’s been injured in what Miss Willingham calls ‘the privates.’ He’ll probably die before I find the wound.”

  Something about being eighteen and a month away from graduating from nursing school made everything seem funny and bright. Sarah knew she worried more than Katherine did about the upcoming year of working at the county mental hospital to pay off their tuition, but then, she worried about everything more than Katherine did.

  They reached the top of the hill just as the roar of an engine filled the crisp air.

  “Look, Sarah, there are the biplanes. Folks say the Wright pilots make fifty dollars a day for flying.”

  Sarah watched as men moved away from a plane that looked like a huge toy kite. The wheels began to roll down the field as another man, looking quite fragile, crouched low inside the plane to face the wind. Two men ran beside each wing, steadying the flimsy boxlike bird. The wheels moved faster and faster over the grassy earth.

  Suddenly the whirling wheels slackened their speed, but the vehicle advanced even faster. The two men on the wings fell away as if running backward. Sarah blinked, trying to make her mind accept what her eyes beheld. In a moment of miracles the craft was airborne. She felt her heart jump. The plane climbed, and her pulse quickened as if a part of her had also risen up over the countryside. She could understand why people paid to see air shows. Every person watching felt like a passenger on the flight, experiencing a tiny fraction of the miracle, a tiny taste of the fear.

  Katherine whispered, afraid her voice would somehow endanger the pilot’s safety. “Isn’t it wonderful? I feel I may explode just watching.”

  The plane took a sudden dip, and both girls caught their breath in terror. It leveled and turned, bumping against a gray bank of clouds, and began its journey back to the field.

  The marvelous man-made bird flew over them while they waved frantically, caught up in the excitement of flight. As the machine descended to the ground, a sudden gust of wind bounced it up, then flung it hard against the earth. Sarah cried out as the pilot rolled out of the flimsy machine. His body seemed to be made of rags as he sprawled on the ground like a doll tossed hastily aside.

  Both girls started down the hill toward the injured man, and the group of men beside the other plane all broke into a run.

  The pilot raised his head, then pulled himself slowly to his feet. He removed his cap and waved toward the others as if to signal that he was fine, then limped toward the plane.

  Sarah pulled Katherine to a stop. “He’s going to be all right, Kat. He’s lucky.”

  “We need to go closer. We’re too far away to tell if he’s broken a leg.”

  Sarah stood her ground. “No, Kat. He’d hardly walk away with a broken leg. Besides, I don’t think two women would be welcome. Nobody’s supposed to know about this place.”

  “You’re right,” Katherine answered as she watched the men reach the plane and begin pushing it back up the meadow.

  Katherine sighed. “I’m going to go flying someday, Sarah. I’ve got to see what it’s like to be that high above the earth.”

  “You can’t be serious. A woman would never get into one of those things!” But Sarah knew her friend too well. Nothing excited Katherine more than a new adventure, even if it held the risk of danger.

  Katherine fell into step with Sarah, but her mind seemed to be somewhere in the future. “I’d do anything to fly, and one of these days I’ll prove it.”

  “The Wright brothers don’t take women in their school,” Sarah reasoned.

  Excitement sparkled in Katherine’s emerald-green eyes. “I don’t care. I’ll find someone to take me flying.”

  “But how? One of those machines must cost more than we could save in a year. You can’t just walk down there and say, ‘Pardon me, Mr. Birdman, I’d like to fly in your plane.”’

  “Maybe not.” Katherine bit her full bottom lip in thought. “But if we went to where the pilots were…and if we met them…”

  “Stop right there, Katherine McMiller. I’m not going with you to any place where men crazy enough to go up in a machine like that might be and that’s final.”

  Katherine linked her arm in Sarah’s. “You could wear your mist-blue dress. I just know you’d dance ever so grandly in those new suede shoes.” Katherine lifted her cotton apron as though it were fine silk and twirled around. “I’m sure I can talk Miss Willingham into giving us Saturday night off if we promise to work Sunday night instead. One of the other girls said a lot of the birdmen go to O’Grady’s on Saturday nights.”

  “No, Kat! I’m not going. That place is only one step above a saloon. Some of the girls may go there, but not me.”

  “But who’ll keep me out of trouble if I go alone?”

  “You’d go alone?”

  “If I have to.”

  Sarah sighed, trying to decide whether to give in now or later. She knew if Kat had her mind set on going, nothing would change it. Sarah also knew she would never let her go alone. The night they’d run away from the children’s farm together flashed through Sarah’s mind. Katherine was the one who’d been brave enough to plan the escape, but it was Sarah who’d dreamed of going to the Mamie Willingham School of Nursing and saved enough money to get them there. No matter how hard things got, they always had each other. “You’re right. I’ll wear my blue dress.” Sarah tried to sound excited. “But I’m having nothing to do with any man who has a death wish so huge he must try flying. I want to heal people, not watch them splatter themselves over a field when that funny machine decides not to stay in the air.”

  Katherine hugged her friend wildly and laughed. “We’ll have fun, Sarah, just wait and see.”

  Sarah wasn’t worried about having fun. She’d watched Katherine do some pretty wild things over the years and had always gone along for the ride. But this time Sarah’s sensible mind feared the ride might just get one of them killed.

  Two

  KATHERINE PUSHED A rebellious strand of hair back into her cap and straightened her apron as she walked toward Miss Willingham’s office. It would never do to be caught shabbily dressed by the hawk-eyed dean.

  The office door was open, and Katherine approached with determination and entered. Immediately the room sent a chill over her, even though a stove clanked feverishly in one corner. The stately dean of the nursing school looked like an aging queen behind the massive desk. Her blouse was as starched and crisp as her manner; and though most nurses now wore the more fashionable soft collars on their uniforms, Miss Willingham’s collar remained high, with thin ribs of boning to ensure stiffness.

  As Katherine neared, the elderly woman looked up and smiled a tight-lipped greeting that altered her face for only an instant.

  “Come in, Katherine.”

  “I need to talk with you, ma’am. If you have the time?”

  The woman nodded. “I was just stopping for a cup of tea. Won’t you join me?”

  Katherine moved to the seating area by the windows and waited for Miss Willingham. One thing she had always admired about the dean was her sense of equality. No student was too lowly to join her for tea, as long as her hands were clean. And no man was so high she wouldn’t correct him if he stepped out of line. This one trait endeared the older nurse to doctors and grounds workers alike.

  Miss Willingham seated herself and began to pour. Her porcelain was fine Scottish china, and her tea silver was worn thin from
polishing. “I remember the day you and Sarah came to my office pleading to attend this school. The two of you had not a dollar between you and couldn’t have been more than twelve years old. Runaways, but from the looks of you, the life you left couldn’t have been easy.”

  “We’ll never forget how kind you were to take us in and let us work for our keep until we could go to nursing school.”

  “Kindness was not the reason, my dear,” Miss Willingham replied as she handed Katherine a cup of tea. “It is my duty to ease the pain of others, just as it will be yours in the future. Now, child, what brings you to my office?”

  “Two questions,” Katherine said, noticing that Miss Willingham raised an eyebrow in interest. Nothing made the dean happier than to be asked advice. “First, may Sarah and I work Sunday night instead of Saturday so we can put up the Thanksgiving decorations while all is quiet?” Katherine knew better than to ask for a Saturday off to go to a place like O’Grady’s.

  “Certainly.” Miss Willingham sipped her tea. “Now, what else?”

  “Well…” Katherine hesitated. “Because I have no mother to go to, I feel I must turn to the only wise woman I know.”

  Miss Willingham wasn’t easily taken in by flattery. “Go on, child.”

  “Would you please tell me what to do to discourage…men?” Katherine had it all figured out. Whatever the old spinster told her, she’d do the opposite. For if nothing else Miss Willingham was an expert at discouraging men. She was reported to have been a beauty in her youth and with her father’s fortune must have had many a caller. But Mamie Willingham had remained unmarried and used her wealth to establish the nursing school as well as the Willingham Clinic and Hospital.

  “Well, well, what a question!” Miss Willingham pressed her lips so tightly together they disappeared. Her gray eyes stared out the window as if she could see the past just beyond the pane. Her silence lasted so long Katherine decided she wasn’t going to answer.

  When Miss Willingham turned back, a coldness iced her eyes, a frost of scarred-over pain long ago buried. “I’ll tell you the truth, dear. Men are respectful for the most part, but when they’re young and hot-blooded, watch your step. They want only one thing, and they’ll promise you anything to get it.”