by Lori Austin
“Someone from the war.” She shoved her hands inside. Her indrawn breath made memory flicker again. An operating room, another bucket, the same pained hiss.
“Alcohol,” Ethan said.
“That’s right,” she agreed. It wasn’t, but he couldn’t think why.
Annabeth lifted her chin in the other man’s direction. “You’ll need to wash yours, as well.”
“In alcohol?” He stared at his hands, which no doubt had several raw patches from his horse’s reins, if not cuts from Lord knew what. Most folks’ did. “I don’t think I will.”
“Then get out.” Annabeth doused a clean cloth and lifted it toward Ethan’s face. “Nothing touches him that hasn’t been in that solution.”
Ethan yelped when the cloth met his head. “Mac soith,” he snapped, and jerked away.
“Why is he suddenly speaking Irish?” the lawman asked.
“I have no idea.”
She pushed the bucket in the man’s direction. He sighed and shoved his hands in. His mouth tightened, but he didn’t curse or hiss. “Why alcohol?”
Annabeth submerged a length of sparkling thread, along with a needle. “During the war, Ethan used alcohol to clean everything that touched his patients. More of his lived than anyone else’s.”
“Lister,” Ethan said. “Scotland.”
Annabeth’s eyes grew concerned again; the lawman appeared only more confused. “I could swear he’s talkin’ Irish.”
Annabeth stuck the needle into Ethan’s head.
Ethan talked a lot of Irish after that. Luckily, no one could understand it but him.
CHAPTER 14
The gash required five stitches. It was a glancing slice. The bullet had embedded itself in the far wall of the room and not Ethan’s head.
As Annabeth drew his flesh closed with silver suture wire, she recalled his telling her how he missed it, using the same accent he was cursing in now.
I’ve not seen such luxuries since just after Manassas.
How she’d loved that accent. It had given her shivers in the night. Until she’d heard him speaking without it.
Had that been the beginning of the end for them? Or had it been only the beginning? Even after she’d learned the truth, she’d loved him. She should have known that a love born of lies could only end badly.
“Done.” Annabeth cut the wire with scissors that had been dunked in the bucket. She lifted her gaze to the marshal’s. “You can go.”
Eversleigh smiled. He still had all his teeth, which made him appear younger than she’d first thought—maybe forty, instead of fifty. The gray hair and deep lines on his face aged him, but the war had aged them all.
“I don’t think I will,” he repeated. “There’s still the little matter of the bullet that nearly went into his brain.”
Annabeth’s mind shied away from the thought of how close Ethan had come to death. Although maybe, like Mikey, he wouldn’t have died but merely been changed. Right now, she wasn’t so certain he hadn’t been. The Irish accent was making her nervous.
“It didn’t.” She couldn’t help herself; she brushed her fingers through Ethan’s hair. They came away speckled with blood.
“And why was that?”
Annabeth rinsed her hands in the bucket, soaked another cloth, and wiped Ethan’s face. Every now and then, his eyes opened, fixed on hers as if to ascertain she was still there, then closed again.
“I pushed him out of the way.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t want him dead.”
The marshal cast her an exasperated glance. “I meant, how did you know a shot was coming?”
“The sun flashed off the barrel.”
“Where?” he asked.
“Past the last building on the right at the edge of town.” Seeing the marshal get to his feet, she added, “Don’t bother.”
The man’s gaze turned suspicious. Certainly her assertion that she’d been a spy during the war might account for her knowing a few things about sneaky behavior, but how did she explain knowing the flash of sun had been off a rifle barrel and not someone’s spectacles?
She couldn’t. Or maybe she just wouldn’t.
“You’re not the law here,” she said. “This isn’t your concern.”
“As there is no law here”—he frowned at Ethan, and she could almost hear him wonder if that was a problem Ethan had caused—“it’s become my concern.”
“Don’t you have somewhere else to be?”
Now he frowned at her. “I’d think you’d want to know who took a shot at your husband.”
“Once I do, I’ll just have to find them and kill them.” And right now she didn’t have the time.
Eversleigh’s scowl deepened. “You hadn’t ought to say a thing like that in front of a lawman, even if you don’t mean it.”
She had meant it, but she did see his point.
“Could you help me get him into the bedroom?” she asked.
The marshal stared at her for several seconds, then touched Ethan’s shoulder. “Doc?” Ethan opened one eye. “Can you get up on your own?”
“Some days, aye. Other days, nay.”
He was still using the damn brogue.
“What about today?” the marshal asked.
Ethan lifted his arms, then his head, then his shoulders until he was sitting. He tried to stand and nearly fell. Eversleigh and Annabeth caught him by the elbows and hauled him upright.
“I’d say that was both an aye and a nay, wouldn’t ye, darlin’?”
Annabeth ground her teeth at the endearment and towed him toward the door. Moments later, they lowered him onto the bed. Annabeth tugged on his boots to get them off.
“You have no idea why anyone would want your husband dead?” the marshal asked.
“No,” she said. “Ethan heals people.”
“We’ve had this conversation before.” Eversleigh’s gaze went to the empty window in Ethan’s room. “Or close enough.”
“Your point?” Annabeth stumbled when one of the boots popped off.
“He was a spy. I’m sure someone wants him dead.”
He was right. There were probably quite a few someones. But why now? After all these years?
“Then again . . . you were a spy, too.” Slowly Annabeth nodded. “You sure they were shooting at him?”
“No one ever knew about me.” Annabeth dropped the first boot to the floor and yanked on the second. “Except Ethan.” And Moze. But he didn’t count.
She’d didn’t think Fedya had ever learned the truth, but with him, one never could tell. However, if the Union’s best sniper had been shooting at her, Annabeth would be dead. Besides, if Fedya had wanted her that way, all he would have had to do was kill her in Ellsworth where he’d found her. Instead, he had sent her here.
“You plan to stick with that story?” the marshal asked.
Annabeth cleared her throat. “I have no idea what you mean.”
Eversleigh snorted and left.
The morning faded to afternoon, and Annabeth sat at Ethan’s side. He shifted, moaned. She touched his face. No fever. Not yet.
“You’re all right,” she said.
“Hurts,” he murmured.
She lifted his head and pressed the rim of the medicine bottle to his lips. “Drink,” she urged, and he did.
“The bairn,” Ethan muttered. “Poor little lad.”
Annabeth swallowed. She hadn’t thought of the baby in a very long time.
Liar!
Ethan’s voice. Always was.
He slurred a few more indistinguishable words, then slept.
Not long after, she heard footsteps on the stairs. Sadie Cantrell appeared in the doorway. “How is he?”
“I . . .” Annabeth paused, realizing she had no idea how he was. She hoped when Ethan awoke, he would remember everything, including that his blasted Irish accent was fake. Every time he used it, Annabeth wanted to both kiss and kill him. He thought she was a liar? Who’d lied first?
> “Glass houses,” she murmured, and Sadie tilted her head, birdlike.
“You okay, missus? I can sit with him so’s you can rest.”
“No.” She had to be at his side when he opened his eyes. Would he remember her? His medical training? The past? The war? This town? Its people?
His mistress?
“Where is everyone?” Annabeth asked. The only person who’d barged in after the gunshot was the marshal. Considering there’d been a gunshot, she had expected half the town to come by.
“The marshal asked Jeb and some of the others to stand outside and make sure no one disturbs ye.” She rolled her good eye. “Especially that ninny Cora.”
“She was here?”
“Whining. Begging.” Sadie crossed her arms over her chest. “I sent her packin’.”
Annabeth hesitated. What if Ethan wanted to see the woman? Did Annabeth have a right to keep her out?
Sadie patted her hand. “His wife belongs at his side.”
Annabeth hadn’t been at his side for a long, long time.
Sadie saw more with one eye than most saw with two. “Yer here now. That’s what counts.”
“Is it?” Annabeth murmured.
“Yes’m. Without ye . . .” She shook her head. “He was pitiful.”
“Not too pitiful for Cora Lewis.”
“He’s a doctor; she’s a widow. Everyone thought he was a widower. Including him.” Sadie’s eyebrows lifted; she waited for Annabeth to elaborate. When Annabeth didn’t, the old woman shrugged. “Now yer back; she’ll have t’ move on.”
Cora wasn’t going to move on with Ethan’s child inside of her. Ethan wouldn’t let her.
Tears threatened. Annabeth had never been so happy as when she’d had a life growing within. She’d never been so miserable once it had stopped. She’d never felt so loved as she had when Ethan had claimed her—claimed them—as his. And she’d never felt so alone as when he’d denied her.
She would be the one moving on, not Cora. But Sadie didn’t know that, and Annabeth wasn’t going to tell her.
“Why’d someone shoot atcha?”
That was the question. Had the shot been meant for Ethan or for Annabeth? Because of the past? Or the present?
“No idea,” Annabeth answered, and coughed.
“Strange how the windows of this place are suddenly gettin’ broke so violentlike.”
Annabeth didn’t think it was strange at all. Around her, things got broken “violentlike” a lot.
When she’d left Freedom, she’d gone to Moze and accepted his offer of a job with Pinkerton. At the least it gave her the means and the opportunity to search for her brother.
She hadn’t had any more luck at the task than Moze had.
Over time, she’d become one of the agency’s most daring operatives. She went places no woman would go; she did things no lady would contemplate. At first because she hadn’t cared if she lived or died. But as time went on, and she’d seen the good that had come from her actions, she’d been seduced by the promise of justice. When she captured or killed someone who deserved it, the world—which had been all wrong—became just a little more right.
Her latest assignment, join the Lassiter Gang and discover the whereabouts of Wonderland so Moze could arrest every last one of them, had been more difficult than usual due to Lass’s paranoia, but she would manage.
Annabeth was a spy—plain and simple—and she was damn good at it because she did whatever she had to do to get the job done.
For the past five years, the job was all that she’d had.
• • •
By the time Sadie returned with venison stew, night had fallen and Annabeth had changed out of her bloody clothes. She’d washed and treated the tiny cuts on her face and hands while Ethan murmured Gaelic and nonsense.
Annabeth thanked the woman and set the plate aside. “I’ll eat when he does.”
“Now.” The woman forked up a mouthful and held it to Annabeth’s lips. “It’ll do him no good if ye faint like that other fool.”
Annabeth’s mouth curved, and Sadie shoved the stew inside. Her stomach snarled for more. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten, but it hadn’t been in Freedom. Which meant it had been more than a day. She was lucky she hadn’t fainted like that “other fool.”
If she had any mortification left, Annabeth might have been embarrassed at how quickly she finished the meal.
“I set the pot in the kitchen.” Sadie took Annabeth’s empty plate. “For when the doc wakes up.”
Annabeth ignored the persistent whisper of “ifffff.” He would wake up. She would not let him escape that easily.
“The marshal has a watch posted,” Sadie continued.
“Seems to have made himself right at home.”
“Ye don’t like him?”
“I don’t know him.” Annabeth frowned as a thought slid through her mind. “He could be anyone.”
Sadie laughed. “Why would he come to town and pretend to be a marshal?”
“Why would anyone pretend to be anything?” Annabeth murmured. She could think of so many reasons.
As soon as Sadie left, Annabeth retrieved her pistol from the spare room where she’d dropped it and placed the weapon on the nightstand. She remained at Ethan’s side for hours, leaving only once for more cool water. Her concern for him made it impossible for her to sleep, and that was all right. Certainly there was a guard downstairs, but no one would protect him the way she would.
In the depths of the night, Ethan groaned, reaching for his head. Annabeth grabbed his hand before he could touch the stitches. “That’ll hurt more than leaving it alone.”
He stilled. “Beth?”
Joy shot through her. He knew who she was. The accent had fled. He was fine.
“I had a dream.” His voice shook as he tangled his fingers with hers. She couldn’t see him in the dark, but she knew his touch better than anyone’s on the earth. “There was so much blood.”
“Hush,” she murmured.
“There was a man.”
She made more soothing noises, rubbing her thumb along his. There’d been a lot of men—at the hospital, in the war, in prison, and ever since.
“In our house.”
Her thumb stopped moving, and she glanced over her shoulder at the darkened doorway. Now or then? Real or imagined?
“You and I argued.” His fingers clenched. “The baby.”
Annabeth extricated herself from his grasp; it wasn’t easy. “I need to light the lamp.”
Her hands shook as she struck the match, but she managed to put the flame to the wick, and a golden glow spread over the room, over him.
Pale, sweating, his hands shook as badly as hers. The silver suture wire sparkled between the crusted blood of his wound. He blinked several times; confusion flickered. “What happened?”
Annabeth opened her mouth, shut it. She wasn’t sure if he was asking about the past or the present.
“Why are you wearing my clothes? And your hair . . . it’s long.” Ethan closed his eyes, his black lashes stark against the waxy pallor of his face. “Was it a dream?”
“Yes.” Not a lie. Even if he’d dreamed the truth, he had dreamed it. What he was talking about—the night he’d learned her secret—had happened five years ago.
“The baby’s fine,” he murmured. “You’re fine. We’re fine.”
“What year is it, Ethan?”
He opened his eyes and his smile was woozy; he appeared a little drunk. Her gaze flicked to the laudanum bottle on the nightstand, but she couldn’t remember how full it had been when she’d brought it up.
“Shhh-ummer. Eighteeeeen.” His eyes slid closed. She didn’t think he was going to finish before he fell asleep, but he did. “Shhh-ixty-five.”
• • •
Annabeth spent the rest of the night reading Ethan’s medical books. Many of them dealt with brain injuries. Understandable, considering Mikey.
Sometimes Annabeth thought Mikey
had come out of the war the least scathed of any of them, despite that damn bullet. Because Mikhail Romanov had never been a Union scout; he’d never gone to prison; he’d never been shot.
Annabeth’s gaze touched on the stitches she’d set in Ethan’s flesh. How strange that both he and his brother would have similar injuries, with both similar and dissimilar results. Ethan had lost time, but he hadn’t lost himself. If he had, he wouldn’t know Annabeth.
She wished that shot had hit her and not Ethan. There was quite a bit of the last five years she would like to forget.
The sun had begun to lighten the distant horizon, spreading fingers of red, gold, pink, and orange across the flat Kansas landscape when she shut the text in her lap. Until recently, she’d spent much of her time in Colorado, where anyone or anything could be hiding behind the next mountain or tree. Because of that, she appreciated the ability to see in any direction for miles.
As the shadows waned, Annabeth considered what she had read. It wasn’t much help. The brain was unexplored territory. No one knew how it worked or had any proven idea how to fix what didn’t. In several of the books, she’d found nothing under the heading “brain trauma” beyond a platitude she’d heard a hundred times before.
“Time heals,” she whispered. A greater load of shit had never been shoveled. If she wasn’t adequate proof of that, Mikey certainly was.
“Beth?”
The pain, the wariness that had been born in his eyes the night he’d learned the truth about her and continued to live there after she’d returned, was gone. For Ethan it was 1865, and they’d just been married. The war was over; they’d survived. They were expecting a child. He knew that she loved him. He still loved her. He seemed to have forgotten his earlier questions about her clothes, her hair. He never had asked why her belly was flat.
Annabeth gulped. She had to tell him. “You were hurt, Ethan.”
He smiled the smile she’d fallen in love with back when she thought he was who he said he was—a brilliant young doctor of the Confederacy. That smile had pulled her in. And the truth?
The truth had changed little but his affiliation.
“What happened?” he asked.
“You were shot.”
His smile faded. He lifted his hand before she could stop him and rubbed his fingers along what would probably be a scar. “Who?”