“I thought I would give them some privacy,” Steven said.
“All winter?”
“The first storm, anyway.”
His eyes met hers, and for a brief moment—the briefest, because she wanted it to last—she saw him. The warmth and the humor he so rarely showed. Time just stopped, the wind, the birds, her heart.
“You’re lovely when you smile,” he told her. “You should not hide it.”
There was nothing she could say—there wasn’t a thought in her head. She could only stand there and shake. And…want.
Her first kiss had not inspired a drop of the desire this man's smile did. His attention and gaze upon her face made her hot and breathless.
That the doctor could not make her feel at all like this, for all his charm and good looks, made her fear that this...feeling was tied only to Steven. Only he could make her ache like this.
And there was no chance that she inspired the same in him.
Aunt Julia had died a spinster, and Mama always said she'd pined away for a man who didn't love her back.
Perhaps it is a family trait, she thought with a giddy and sad heart. Like an overbite or big ears.
Steven reached past her, leaning closer to her than he’d been since he lay unconscious and gut shot at her feet. Her eyelids nearly fluttered shut so she could savor his smell. The heated pine, the sweat and spice of him.
“Mrs. Denoe.” A man stumbled up behind them and would have collided with her if Steven, quick as a blink, hadn’t moved his solid body between her and the man.
“Careful, soldier,” Steven said. His low voice a masculine warning.
“Mrs. Denoe.” It was Sam Garrity, peering up and over Steven’s much taller shoulder, but Steven put his hand up, keeping the man away.
“Sam,” she said, not used to seeing him clean and conscious. His face was worse in the daylight, purple and blue around his eye and nose.
“You know him?” Steven asked, looking back at her.
“I do,” she said, but didn’t elaborate. Steven was not pleased with the level of work she did with Dr. Madison. “Did Dr. Madison wake you up?”
“No, I woke up on my own.” He was shielding his eyes from the sunlight with his good hand. “Got shut of there before he could come around with a bill.” He laughed, but then he must have realized that the money he owed Madison he also owed to her.
“I'll pay,” he stammered. “I swear—”
“It's all right, Sam. You feeling all right?” Annie asked. Steven stepped sideways, still between them but no longer quite such a barrier.
“I’ve felt better,” Sam said with lurching, pained smile. “I, ah… wanted to thank you, Mrs. Denoe.”
Sam was so young. Still a boy, really. If the war hadn’t happened, he’d still be in school.
“How are your stitches?” she asked, and he lifted his hand. The gauze was already dirty and there was blood seeping through it.
“I told you to keep that clean,” she scolded, acutely aware of Steven watching her. “How'd you get that dirty so fast?”
“It ain't dirty.” He glanced down at the bandage. “It’s real clean.”
She sighed. They had a difference of opinion on what “clean” meant.
“Please, Sam,” she said. “Be careful with it, or you could reopen the wound.”
“I will. I’ll be real careful. Thank you, again. You… you always take good care of me. You're... you're the nicest person around here. And I just want to thank you.” There was something in the tone of his voice that caught her in the throat. What she provided for him could hardly be considered care, but it was all the kindness he had in the world.
“You're welcome,” she said. “Though you could thank me by keeping that bandage clean.”
Sam smiled and shuffled off, his threadbare coat catching a breeze and flaring out behind him.
“You all right?” Steven asked, and Anne jerked away, her weight tilting backward. She tried to catch herself with her bad foot, which was sure to make her fall on her face, but Steven caught her. His hands at her elbows, pulling her back into balance, onto her center.
Steven.
But as soon as she was sturdy on her feet, he let go of her so fast it was as if he hadn’t touched her at all. But her body knew. Her body burned, there at her elbows where his hand had been.
Her body would not forget.
“Thank you,” she breathed, unable to look at him in fear that he would see it all in her face, everything she felt. Every secret dream she’d had about him and tried to ignore or hide away. “I’m fine. Let’s go in.” He opened the door to the hotel and she swept past him, making sure no part of her touched any part of him.
Yes.
Dr. Madison was right. Steven would get a very different answer.
Chapter 3
Steven watched her walk past him, her small shoulders, her stiff back. So straight. That was Annie…. Anne. She preferred to be called Anne now. Annie was a little girl’s name. She’d left the name behind when she left his clearing.
She was not a little girl. Anne was an arrow. He shook out his hands, as if to rid himself of the sensation of having touched her. Of having been touched. His arm still ached like he’d stuck the whole thing in icy spring runoff.
As Anne walked, the silly cherries on her bonnet bobbed, a strange bit of frivolity that only highlighted the lurch of her gait. He wished he could take her arm the whole time they walked—it would help. But he had no chivalry left, and he felt no pity for her, and hated the idea that she would think he did.
So he was paralyzed into not touching her. And that was easier.
It was easier to live as if he were half dead.
“Are you coming?” Anne asked, looking over her shoulder at him. The cherries, the glasses, the brown curls behind her ears. If she weren’t made of steel, if she hadn’t saved his life and probably dozens of others, if he didn’t know better, he might think she was silly. A bit of forgettable fluff.
Thank God, he knew better.
He nodded and fell in step behind her.
The Inter-Ocean hotel was four opulent floors with a kitchen, owned by Barney Ford, an escaped slave from Chicago who’d come West by way of Nicaragua. Anne and Steven walked through the lobby, with its curved desk and the black walnut key rack everyone made a fuss over. The hotel was being hailed as the grandest accommodations west of St. Louis, and Steven had to agree.
The Inter-Ocean Cafe was excellent, too. The cook—a former nun—made Irish soda bread twice a day and served it with sweet butter, and Steven tried to get a hold of it right out of the oven. So hot it burned his fingers.
One of the small things that reminded him that he was still half alive.
Anne picked a table, and he did a quick double-step to take her coat and pull out her chair. He hung their things on the hooks on the wall behind them.
Gladys came by with coffee, and they both ordered the flapjacks and bacon. Then, with the business all gone, it was silent between them.
“Who was that man? Outside?” he asked. The smell of alcohol had rolled off the man in putrid waves.
“Sam. Sam Garrity.”
“And the bandage?”
“He came in last night. He’d been stabbed through the hand and knocked unconscious. I stitched him up.”
“You? Where was the good doctor?”
His Anne was a terrible liar. She blushed and stammered and fiddled with things—this time it was her napkin. She watched her own fingers pinch the scrap of cloth into a limp fan.
“Busy with another patient.”
He blew out a long breath of displeasure, which brought her eyes up. He saw the sudden spark of anger in their brown depths, but she quickly shuttered it.
“I have a loan payment for you," she said, changing the subject. Which, he supposed, was for the best. They only argued about the doctor. And he didn’t want to argue with Anne today. Willingly he put aside his opinions. He knew he didn’t have the right to feel so p
rotective about Anne—he wasn’t kin, wasn’t her husband.
But she’d saved his life.
And didn’t that bind him to her like nothing else he’d ever experienced. More even than to his brother, so different after the war.
Anne was his friend. His best friend.
And he had the suspicion he was the same for her, and neither one of them really knew what to do with that. He’d never been friends with a woman before.
“There’s no rush,” he said, regarding the repayment of the loan. He would have waved her off, but she’d been adamant about repaying the money he’d given her to buy the house. And he admired that.
“I rented out the back room to a woman with a small baby. Her husband is a miner.”
He nodded, listening to her voice. Letting its rasp and its Georgia softness curl around him.
“I don’t think the doctor is too pleased,” she continued.
“He's not the only doctor in town, Anne.”
He’d written her a letter of introduction to Dr. Whitmore, and instead, within weeks of being in Denver, she had rented part of her house to the handsome unmarried Dr. Madison.
With the addiction he couldn't quite hide. Anne never said as much, and Steven didn't ask, because the boundaries of this relationship with Anne were fuzzy and strange. And testing them made his heart beat out of his chest. A feeling that was far from comfortable.
Steven wasn't totally versed in the signs of opium addiction, but you didn't spend time in Denver without picking up a few things, and he knew something wasn't right with that man.
“You could stay at the house,” Anne said, “while you’re in town.”
Steven shook his head. “The hotel suits me fine.”
“You could have privacy.”
“Privacy is the problem,” he said quickly. He felt her interest, her concern, and he took a sip of coffee. For eight months in Andersonville, he’d longed for wide-open spaces. Sky and green grass and the absence of people. Quiet. But to his dismay, he had solitude in spades up at the cabin and he could not abide the loneliness. The emptiness around him made the emptiness inside him so much worse. Conversely, he could not stand to be in crowds, the accidental touches, the heat and noise of humanity.
So he was caught.
And when she looked at him with those serious eyes, sunlight glinting off the thin edge of her glasses, maybe she knew. Maybe she saw all the places that Andersonville had bent and broken inside of him.
He cleared his throat and shifted against the hard chair, making it rock on its uneven legs against the floor. Uncomfortable because he could feel that boundary between them, the edges of it—clinging and soft.
“Tell me about the railroads?” she asked. She lifted her own coffee cup, and her eyes met his over the rim. “That was quite a day in May,” she said, referring to the ground-breaking ceremony. Thousands of people had shown up, and he’d taken her with him. He’d bought her a flag to wave and he’d thought, seeing her flushed cheeks, her bright smile, that if he were normal, in any way whole, he would kiss her. Right there in front of the Colorado territorial governor.
“Steven?”
“I don’t know much,” he said, pulled from his memory. “I’m only an investor. They are making their way to Cheyenne to tie in with the Transcontinental, but there have been some problems with Indians. And with the workers. But we’re told all is going apace. We got that outfit coming out of Golden licked.”
“And so what business will you be conducting while you’re here, if all is apace?”
“The new station.”
“At Wazee and Wynkoop? It’s all anyone is talking about.”
“The plans are impressive,” he said.
“You are fairly impressive yourself,” she said, and then blushed, glancing away. The silence that spun out between them was soft. There was a real peace to being with Annie.
“Were you always this way?” she asked, tilting her head.
“I don’t think my parents would have called me impressive,” he replied with a smile.
“What would they have called you?”
The question jerked some heavy rope inside of his gut. Yanked at the façade he worked so hard to keep up.
I’m not impressive, he wanted to say. I am not anything. Every day I wake up and put together the pieces I can find of myself so I can simply walk out the door.
“Enterprising?” she asked when his silence had gone on too long. “Would they have said that about you?”
“Not at all,” he said to his coffee cup. “My parents would be surprised, as I perfected the role of young man of leisure before the war. I did the least amount of work I could. Found ways to get Cole to do it, or Gavin.”
“I find that hard to believe,” she laughed.
“I was fond of naps and fishing. Of girls.”
The mention of girls, the thought of them, of what his fondness for them and theirs for him had entailed, made his own cheeks heat.
“But now… I find if I’m busy…”
It keeps me sane. He couldn't say that. Keeps me away from whiskey. Helps me sleep. All those things, he couldn't say.
Terrible horrible things that he didn’t understand, or how they got into his head.
Terrible horrible things he couldn't tell her. Other men came home from the war and did not carry these burdens. And he did not suspect that his experience was all that much worse than theirs. War was horror. There was no way to make it through without that horror attaching itself somehow. Like barnacles on the bottom of a boat.
But other men did not seem so…damaged.
What weakness was it in him that gave the ghosts so much control?
She spooned sugar into her coffee, and he almost did the same just to have something to do with his hands. Industry. Constant industry saved him from himself.
She spoke. “Sam, the boy outside—”
“The soldier?”
“Yes. I’m worried about him.”
“Because he has no idea how to keep a bandage clean?”
She rewarded his small joke with a smile and he felt he could breathe again.
“Yes. That and… he seems… haunted by the war.”
He put down his spoon. He felt pinned by her words.
“Like you,” she whispered.
He didn't even bother to deny it. There was no point.
“I worry he will be killed,” she continued, “before anyone can determine how to help him.”
“Perhaps that’s for the best,” he said, still watching her hands. Avoiding her eyes.
“You don’t mean that.”
He didn’t tell her about the nights he woke up sweating and shaking, and would step naked to the door of his cabin, his Remington in hand, and imagine walking into the forest, far enough away that his brother would not find his body.
“Of course not,” he said instead. A lie. And if she knew it was a lie, she wanted to believe it badly enough that she let it pass.
“There was a hospital near our farm,” she said. “Wounded soldiers were sent there by rail, and my father was a doctor.” She licked her lips, telling him all he needed to know about the uncomfortable nature of the memories. “He took me with him. I was a good nurse, he said. Calm. Helpful. And when we left for the day and got in the carriage to come home, he’d ask me what I saw that day. What I learned. What mistakes I made. And he told me his. And I thought… it was his way of teaching me. To be a nurse. A doctor even. And I felt… proud. I felt I was a part of something grand and noble. And I felt special. To my father.”
“I imagine you were. I mean…you are. Special,” he said. Her blush was endearing. And somehow private. The way it curled up from her neck, over the bit of lace at her collar. The way it turned the skin, that small bit of skin over her heartbeat, pink. Her eyes glanced away, uncomfortable with his sentiment, but he caught their glitter. Her pleasure.
Lovely. So lovely.
“And Father and I would get home,” she continued, “and
he’d kiss my mother in the front hall and he’d admire Melody’s needlework. He’d be jovial at dinner. Exactly as he always was. But then my brother died, and Mother got sick and the war went on and on. I stopped going with him. As the war got closer he was gone longer. He’d spend nights at the hospital. He’d be gone two, three days at a time. And he would come home and every time… he seemed smaller. Thinner. He stopped kissing Mother. Stopped joining us for dinner. He’d go into his study and stay there. But at night…” She cleared her throat. “At night he’d come into my room and he’d sit by my bed and he’d tell me—”
“No,” Steven breathed.
“He’d tell me what he saw that day. The mistakes he made. The surgeries and the boys who died.”
“Anne—”
“I think… I think he had to talk. He had to tell me those things so they wouldn’t be in his head anymore.”
“He shouldn’t have done that.”
“He…he knew that. He always apologized.” She turned her head, staring out the window, at the clouds in the bright blue sky. “But I was glad he told me. I was… glad. Mother despaired of me. Said I was unnatural. And if she knew about the way that Father talked to me…” She laughed a little, in her throat. It sounded to Steven like a sob. And that too endeared her to him. “Oh, she would not like it. But those conversations with my father… that never felt unnatural. That always felt good. Right. It always felt like the right thing.”
Gladys came to their table with steaming plates of food. At the sight of it Annie sat back, smiling.
“That looks delicious,” she said. “Doesn’t it?”
Her merry brown eyes met his, and he didn’t understand where she put these things. Where she kept the things she’d seen and the things she’d done as well as all the things her father had handed her to hold.
Because he felt full. Full of ghosts. Full of horrors. He had no room for anyone else’s horror. If his father had crept into his room to tell him about amputations and grapeshot wounds, dysentery and infection, he would explode.
Anne put her napkin in her lap and cut into her flapjacks with joy. With relish. “I’m so hungry,” she said, like she wasn’t holding rot in both hands.
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