by Lori Austin
“He still doesn’t trust me.”
“You know how to fix that.”
Annabeth sighed. “Yeah.”
“That isn’t a problem, is it?” Annabeth didn’t answer. “Considering where I found you tonight, I can’t see how it would be.”
“He’s my husband, Moze.”
“You haven’t been his wife in five years. Why now?”
Five years?
Images tumbled through Ethan’s mind. Annabeth crying. Blood on her hands. On his. A baby’s squalls beneath the sun. Another too still beneath the moon.
“You left him, Annabeth. You never gave any hint you planned to return.”
“I didn’t.”
“Then why did I find you in his bed?”
The silence that followed the question was so complete, and Ethan was listening so hard for his wife’s response that he started when the latch clicked. He hadn’t heard the door close. He didn’t hear anything but crickets until Annabeth said, “You can come out now.”
The past and the present snapped together with a louder click than the latch had made. Ethan stepped into the exam room. Annabeth stood alone, staring at her bare toes.
“You’re still a spy,” he said.
Her head came up, her eyes wide. “You remember?” Ethan nodded, and she cast a frown at the door and then back at him. “Just now?”
“I’ve been having flashes since . . .” He swallowed; his mouth was so damn dry. His gaze went to the cabinet, and he had to use all of his will not to open it.
“Since the Tarkenton baby,” she finished. “I could tell something wasn’t right.”
“Isn’t it right that I remember? It’s 1870. Our child is dead. I killed him and you left me.”
“Killed him,” she echoed, her voice faint. “Oh, Ethan, is that what you thought?”
“It’s the truth.”
“You didn’t kill our son. He just . . .” She swallowed, too.
“I was angry. I put my hands on you. I wanted to do more.” He felt again the fury that had come over him when he’d discovered everything was a lie.
“I don’t blame you,” she said.
“You don’t have to.”
“That whole day, I didn’t feel well. I had cramps.” She rubbed at her stomach, then shifted her back.
A memory of her doing the same on that long ago and horrible night teased at the back of his mind.
“Blood spots, too.”
His fingers tightened. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You were gone, and then . . .” She sighed. “So was he.”
Silence settled over them like the night. “I still shouldn’t have . . .” His voice trailed off.
“We both shouldn’t.”
“Why did you leave?”
She rubbed at her forehead as if her head ached as much as his did. “There were too many lies, Ethan. How were we ever going to get past them?”
“You got past them well enough an hour ago,” he muttered.
“An hour ago, you didn’t recall them.” She dropped her hand and shot him a glare. “Or at least I thought you didn’t.”
“You did.”
Her lips tightened; her fingers curled into fists. “What do you want me to say?”
“The truth, if you’re capable of it.”
“I needed you.”
He wasn’t sure what he’d expected, but not that.
“Just because I remembered everything that happened to us doesn’t mean I allowed myself to think about it. Today, at the Tarkentons’, I saw you with that baby, and all I could do was—” Her voice broke.
“Me too,” he murmured.
She stiffened. “You touched me even though you remembered?”
“Not everything. Not then.”
“When?”
He had a flash of his mouth on her belly, the ripples beneath the flesh that had brought about another memory, and he’d touched and pressed and poked in the guise of . . . what?
Love? Perhaps. But what he’d discovered while kissing his wife’s stomach was that there was nothing within but her. The same thing he’d discovered earlier.
With Cora.
Which was something he wasn’t going to share with Annabeth. Not until he talked to Cora Lewis. Perhaps the woman truly thought she was expecting. As her physician and her lover, he owed her the courtesy of speaking with her about it first.
“I heard you down here,” he murmured. “With him. Just like the last time.” Then she’d called the man “Moze,” but beyond that, Ethan knew nothing more. “Who is he? You never said.”
“You never asked.”
They both went silent as they remembered why that was. Blood and tears, anger, fury, accusations.
And that too-still body.
“Who is he?” Ethan repeated.
“Moses Farquhar.”
“Never heard of him. And why is that?”
“He’s the one who asked me to spy at Chimborazo.”
“How did he know you and that you’d be any good at espionage?”
Her lips curved. “We were raised together after his mother died. He was Luke’s best friend.”
Ethan didn’t like that smile. He thought Moze might have been her best friend, too. Or perhaps even more.
“Why didn’t he do his own dirty work?”
“They needed ears at Chimborazo, and Moze is little more than worthless around blood. Besides, I was already there.”
Ethan frowned. “Why were you there?”
“I had nowhere else to go. My parents were dead, as were all of my brothers but one. I’d nursed my mother and father along with several neighbors. I was good at it.”
“Who suggested Chimborazo?”
“Moze. But he wanted me safe, not alone at the farm.”
“He wanted you there. He planned to recruit you from the beginning.” She didn’t appear convinced, but she didn’t argue. “It was a dangerous game he asked you to play.” No matter when he’d decided to ask her to play it. “I understand why you agreed to help him at Chimborazo, but why did you agree to help him again?”
She let out a short, sharp laugh. “What was I supposed to do? Sell myself in the streets?”
“You’re a nurse and a good one.”
“Unfortunately, without a nice, bloody war, there isn’t a lot of work for nurses.”
“Instead you’re spying for . . .” He paused as another part of that long-ago overheard conversation resurfaced. “Pinkerton.”
“Yes.”
“Farquhar came here tonight to get you to return to . . .” Ethan paused. “What?”
“Have you ever heard of the Morant Gang?” Ethan shook his head. “They started robbing banks and trains and stages back when everyone else was occupied killing one another out East. They ride in fast, take what they want, shoot any resistance, and disappear.”
“Disappear? In Kansas?”
“The leader, Lassiter Morant, has a hideout no one’s been able to find. Several Pinkerton detectives have tried to become part of the gang. The next time we saw them, they were dead.”
“So Moze sent you.” Annabeth shrugged. “It’s dangerous.”
“No more so than anything else I’ve done in the last five years.”
“What else have you done?”
Her gaze met his. “You don’t want to know.”
She was probably right, and since he didn’t relish her asking what he’d been doing—his gaze flicked to the cabinet, then away—he moved on. “Have you ridden and robbed along with them?”
“I wouldn’t have lasted very long if I hadn’t.”
“There’s a federal marshal in town.” His gaze touched on her bright red hair. “Why hasn’t he recognized you?”
“Moze has made sure that every wanted poster of me looks like someone else, if he didn’t get any mention of me omitted altogether.”
“Sooner or later, Lassiter’s going to get suspicious about all your good luck,” he said.
“Le
t’s hope it’s later,” Annabeth muttered. “I need him to trust me.”
“He doesn’t?”
“You don’t,” she muttered.
“If you’re supposed to be riding with this gang, then why are you here?”
She was silent so long, Ethan thought she might not answer. Then she blurted, “Fedya found me.”
“How?” She didn’t answer; they both knew how. “Why?”
“He said you were in trouble, that you might die.”
Damn Fedya. He’d always seen too much.
“So you thought you’d ride in under cover of darkness and make everything all right?”
“If you’d tell me what’s wrong, maybe I could.”
“Fedya was mistaken,” Ethan said stiffly, blinking as his eyelid fluttered. “There’s nothing wrong.”
“Yet I wasn’t in town a day before someone took a shot at you.”
“As no one ever took a shot at me until you returned, I’m starting to think, more and more, the shot was meant for you.”
Her lips tightened. “I have to get back.”
“Back?” he echoed before he could stop himself.
She threw up her hands. “What did you think I’d do, Ethan? Stay?”
He’d thought that what they’d just shared had meant something. But why should now be any different from then?
CHAPTER 20
Ethan didn’t answer, then again, what would he say that hadn’t been said before? Annabeth should never have come anywhere near him. She should never have hinted that she still cared.
She never should have done a lot of things, including sleep with him. Both now and back then.
“Did you ever find your brother?” he asked.
“Not yet.”
“You’re still looking?”
“I won’t stop.”
“I’m sorry.”
Ethan stood in the shadows. The moon had shifted, and she could no longer see his face. “Wasn’t your fault.”
“I seem to remember you saying that it was.”
“I said a lot of things.” So had he.
“He was missing,” Ethan continued. “You never heard anything else?”
She’d heard plenty; she just hadn’t wanted to share it with him.
“Didn’t you ever wonder why Fedya was kept alive and not executed?”
Understanding dawned. “You exchanged Fedya for your brother.” He blew an impatient burst of air through his nose. “All this time, I believed Fedya shot Mikey on purpose and you knew he hadn’t?”
“I told you he hadn’t, but you wouldn’t believe me. Think, Ethan. Why would anyone want to hurt Mikey? What would Fedya’s shooting him gain?”
“We’ll never know because Mikey isn’t Mikey anymore.”
She wasn’t going to have that argument again. “With a prize like Fedya, I could have ransomed Jefferson Davis. The Union was happy to turn over my brother.”
“Then where is he?”
Annabeth had spent a good portion of the past five years trying to find out.
“Have you heard of Galvanized Yankees?” she asked.
“Confederates who changed sides.” From his tone, Annabeth understood Ethan’s low opinion of the prac- tice.
“Most were prisoners, like you, in terrible places with too many others, starving, sick, dying. When given a chance to get out, they took it. Wouldn’t you?”
“I refused,” he said quietly.
“You what?”
“I was offered the chance to leave Castle Thunder, to pledge allegiance to the Confederacy and become a field surgeon. I said no.”
“Why?” What difference did it make if he operated on Rebels or Yankees as long as he was saving someone? He’d said as much to her a half dozen times before.
“You saw how bad it was in Castle Thunder. How could I leave people to suffer and die if I could help? I couldn’t leave Mikey either; I couldn’t leave—” He broke off, swallowed, looked away.
Had he been going to say he couldn’t leave her? Most likely. At that time, he’d still believed she was who she said she was—a Southern farm girl who’d volunteered her nursing skills for the good of the cause.
“If Fedya was exchanged for your brother, why are you still searching for him?”
“Fedya was taken to an agreed-upon location and exchanged for a man said to be Luke Phelan. It wasn’t until they brought him to me that I was able to tell them he wasn’t Luke at all.”
“How underhanded of them,” Ethan murmured, and startled a burst of laughter from Annabeth.
She’d never been certain if what happened then was the misunderstanding the Yankees said it was or the lie she still believed it to be. Illinois was a long way from Virginia, and there’d been a war going on. Communications went awry all the time.
“Two opposing groups, whose job it was to lie, worked out an exchange and one of them . . .” She spread her hands. “Lied. Shocking.”
“What happened to your brother?”
For a while, she’d believed Luke had died in prison and been buried in an unmarked grave, or worse.
“They said he swore allegiance to the Union before leaving prison and then he came West to fight Indians. But Moze found no record of him at Fort Dodge or Fort Zarah, where most of the Galvanized Yankees landed.” Not that the records kept of rebel prisoners were very accurate.
“Fort Dodge, Kansas?” Ethan asked.
“Is there another one? Why don’t you just ask what you want to ask? Did I marry you to get closer to where I thought my brother had gone?” Ethan didn’t answer, didn’t need to. “I didn’t find out about him being galvanized until recently. But even if I’d known back then, I could have traveled to Kansas on my own if I’d wanted to. I certainly didn’t need you.”
“Thanks,” he murmured, and she felt bad. Would they ever stop hurting each other?
“I loved you, Ethan. That’s why I married you.”
“Not because you were pregnant and alone and scared?”
“Well, that too,” she agreed.
Now he laughed, and Annabeth found herself smiling in return, until he spoke again. “You could have gotten out of Castle Thunder anytime you wanted. Why didn’t you?”
The anger she’d banked suddenly roared to life, and she crossed the few steps that separated them. She had to tilt her head only a bit to glare into his eyes. “I told you once before, Ethan. I stayed there for you.”
Regret flickered in his eyes. For an instant, she thought he might lean close, kiss her brow or maybe her mouth.
Speaking of Castle Thunder brought back memories of their first time. Their coupling had been fast, desperate. They hadn’t known how long they would have before someone—a guard, a prisoner—returned. But there’d been so much pain and so much death. The two of them had wanted nothing more than to find some joy, to reaffirm life.
Moving together, coming apart, their eyes meeting, their bodies straining. The way her breath had caught, not from the pain of her first time, but from the beauty, the utter rightness, the completeness she’d felt only in his arms.
“Ethan,” she murmured, and her breasts bumped his chest.
He hissed as if she had scalded him. Then he stepped back, face averted; he would not look at her as he turned away. She was left alone, fists clenched, anger and agony pulsing so strong, she felt feverish. She had to get out of this room, this house, this town, his life.
Annabeth spun and ran up the stairs.
• • •
Ethan took another bottle from the cabinet—hell, he took two—then he slipped out the back door. By the time the sun lightened the horizon, he’d downed a good portion of the first. His chest still hurt, but it always did when he came here.
Ethan traced the name carved on the tombstone. “Michael,” he whispered. “Michael Walsh.”
Not his brother, but his son.
Annabeth didn’t know about the grave. She’d disappeared before it had been dug.
Everyone dealt with t
ragedy in his or her own way. Ethan lifted the laudanum bottle in a toast to the grave. “Yer mother runs away and spies on people, me darlin’.” He took a sip. “Apparently, it helps.” Or maybe not. Annabeth didn’t seem any more over their tragedy than Ethan was.
His horse, tied to the oak tree that lent shade to the solitary grave, huffed and shuffled. The grave site wasn’t that far from town. Certainly, it was a bit of a walk, but he hadn’t needed to bring the horse. However, Ethan knew from past experience that ascending the hill sober was a damn sight easier than descending it when he wasn’t.
From his vantage point on the small hill—were there large hills anywhere in Kansas?—Ethan watched Cora step onto her porch and shake out a rug. Just the sight of her made Ethan want to—
A growl rumbled in his chest, and his hand tightened around the bottle so hard, he nearly broke it. He loosened his hold, but he couldn’t stop glaring at the woman. She was as much of a liar as his wife.
Ethan lay on the grass and stared at the bright summer sky. Why had he suddenly remembered everything he’d forgotten? It was a mystery. One he’d like to solve. Because if he could remember, then . . .
Couldn’t Mikey?
Hope fluttered—or at least he thought it might be hope. He couldn’t quite recall what hope felt like.
The last thing Ethan remembered clearly was standing in the spare bedroom as his wife took an ax to their child’s crib. He’d been amazed, frightened, a little aroused. Which was pretty much the effect his wife always had on him. She was an amazing, frightening, arousing woman.
From that point on, his thoughts were hazy—dreams and reality blended together, the past and the present jumbled. People would appear familiar, but he couldn’t decipher why. Or they would seem to know him, but he would not remember them at all. His waking hours had taken on a dreamlike quality, while his dreams . . .
His dreams had seemed more like the truth.
Was that why the sound of Moses Farquhar’s voice had caused the wall in his mind to tumble down? He’d dreamed of the first time he’d heard it, then woken and heard it again? Same place, same person, similar words.
“No,” he murmured, and his horse pawed the grass once and then stilled. “I started to remember at the Tarkentons’.”
Because of the baby.