Seduced by Molly O'Keefe Page B

been when she walked out here. Truly he appeared sorry.
    Sorry would not return her life to her. Her mother and father and fiancée. All her uselessness and frivolity. But all of that seemed very far away now. That girl she’d been, that life. It was a dream. She had no more hate and anger to heap upon this man. Perhaps killing Jimmy had lanced that wound; she didn’t know and didn’t have the energy to care.
    “I joined the war believing in something,” Cole said. “But, at this moment, I could not tell you what it was.”
    “You won,” she said.
    “My father died at Bull Run, my brother and I enlisted with the Union, my younger brother went to the Rebels, and I have heard no word from him since the morning he left. My mother and sister, when the fighting grew too close, went south to Charleston to stay with her people there. I never saw them again. My family’s home was burned down, the fields are burial grounds. If that is winning, I can’t imagine what losing feels like.”
    She touched his hand, just above the thumb where there was a dip, a small pocket of skin that was warm and damp, and then she pulled her hand away. Cold comfort perhaps, but all she had.
    “Remarkably,” she said, “it feels the same.”
     
    DAYS PASSED WITH a strange harmony. The kind he'd never thought to experience again. Cole built the smokehouse and in the dawn hours he hunted and fished to fill it so they would have food over the winter. Melody made the most of what he brought back to the cabin, surprising all of them with what she could do with the wild plants she and Annie found while foraging in the woods.
    Steven got stronger, though Annie still clucked over him. Yesterday morning he'd snapped at her to stop touching him. That he needed no more fussing and he could dress his own wounds. Annie had stiffened, her hands pulled away as if she'd accidentally stuck them in a fire. She quit the cabin, mumbling something about finding Melody.
    “You could have done that better,” Cole said into the silence.
    "She touches me too much."
    "She's only checking your wounds," Cole said.
    Steven didn't answer.
    "Are you accusing her of touching you for some other reason?" Cole asked, attempting to tease, but Steven's eyes flared and Cole didn't know what his brother was thinking.
    "Whatever her reasons, it's too much," Steven said and rolled over, leaving Cole to wonder how his brother could be right there and at the same time, so distant.
    The quiet industry of the four of them working together in that clearing, it reminded him of the very best days with his family. And those memories pressed against his skin, his head, making him ache. Every night, he found himself on his feet after supper, leaving the cabin at twilight as if it were an enemy to run from.
    He’d marched for four years as a Union soldier and the war had replaced living and vital flesh with a cancer of memory. And then he’d gone west, eating his own heart so what was left of him wouldn’t notice the horrors he was committing in the name of finding his brother.
    The countless dead, laid to rest with his hands.
    There had been the boy soldiers in the war, with their hairless faces and terrified eyes. His first bounty outside of Independence, a stagecoach robber who’d pissed his pants and begged for his life. The two brothers who’d raped and murdered the mayor’s daughter outside of St. Louis. The horse thieves with dead eyes and bad aim. That red braid in the dust.
    He’d thought when he found Steven, when he put his guns away, he would find some peace. But apparently, that was not to be.
    And Melody. He'd thought, so foolishly that first night with Jimmy and all of her forced and merry conversation, that he'd been charmed by her, by the ray of sunshine her laughter forced into his world. But the sight of Melody lying in those flowers, staring up at the sky as if she'd seen the face of God, that rolled the rock away from his cave and now there was too much light to