by Carolan Ivey
She turned away, but he dropped his uniform and swung her around. Her legs betrayed her and she stumbled into him. “You won’t survive the ride. And even if you do, Harris won’t let you survive the night, after he’s done with me.” He touched her head bump, then her injured shoulder.
“I’m responsible for a lot of things, Miss Taylor. But I won’t be responsible for your death.”
“Then I absolve you of all responsibility for me,” she said, exasperated. “I’m coming of my own free will.”
“You aren’t making sense!”
“Neither are you! Without me, you’re throwing away your chance!” She bent, grabbed his uniform and shoved it at him again. “It’s chilly out there. Put this on. That’s an order, Sergeant.”
He favored her with a ferocious frown.
“I don’t know whether to kiss you or salute you,” he muttered, jerking on his coat.
She was quite certain this was not a normal morning-after routine. She thrust out her chin and scowled back, sliding her arms into Troy’s uniform coat.
“A simple ‘Yes, ma’am’ will suff‑”
Her vision went dangerously grey, then she found herself flat on her back on the floor, trying to remember how to breathe.
Then the room tilted and she felt enveloped in heat. A gentle, healing heat, emanating from Jared’s body as he supported her in his embrace. She sagged against him and drank it in.
“What happened?” He whispered, his hands trembling as he turned her face toward his. She struggled to focus on his eyes.
Several indrawn breaths later, she managed to speak. “Nothing a CAT scan couldn’t diagnose.” She managed a weak grin. She felt the dizzying sensation as he picked her up, and she found herself sitting on the kitchen counter next to the sink. Water ran, and a cool wet towel bathed her face, her hands, her arms where Jared pushed up the sleeves of her shirt.
Angry that her body betrayed her at this critical moment, she forcibly cleared the spots before her eyes. With an effort, she regained some control over her heaving chest and focused on Jared’s face, pale and grim as he bent his head over her hands.
“I did this to you,” he said, his voice low and anguished. “I made love to you, selfishly, thinking only of satisfying my need to touch you, and I drained whatever strength you had left…”
Taylor stared at him blankly. “Your need? Only yours? Jared…”
“No arguments this time, Miss Taylor.” He eyes, icy with decision, bored into hers. “You are staying here.”
She took three deep breaths and rallied. “I’m…”
“You. Will. Die. If. You. Don’t.” Each word cracked like the sharp report of a gun.
“I told you, Stephen won’t—”
“Damn it, woman! Harris will kill you as surely as he is going to kill me.”
She felt even more blood drain from her face. “I can’t let him kill you.”
He went still, studying her with mingled compassion and regret. “I’d rather he not kill me either.”
He picked up her weaker hand and kissed its palm. “A very wise man recently told me I was a fool for hanging onto my lust for revenge this long. He told me I should have let go of my hatred, forgiven Harris, and let it go. But I didn’t. Your help has gotten me this far in one piece, Miss Taylor, but from here on out this situation is serious. Deadly serious. Here is where you bow out. Here is where I have to figure out how to end this on my own without any more loss of life. Too many people have been hurt because I couldn’t let go of my desire to hurt one man. It has not been worth it.”
She pounded once on his chest. “That’s wonderful that you’ve come to this realization,” she bit out. “So why didn’t you just stop this before it got out of hand?” Before you stole my heart?
Jared’s expression went bleak. “God help me, I don’t know how to stop it. It’s like a river that runs downhill until it comes to its natural end. I could have left, but without me to focus on, God only knows what havoc Harris would have caused.”
The rumble, flash and whining siren of a huge fire truck passed right down their street. The horses neighed and kicked nervously at the wooden supports of the house, rattling the walls and windows. Taylor flinched, then flung her arms around Jared’s shoulders.
“You’re not leaving without me.” She shut her eyes tight as she felt his arms go around her, molding her close to his body, and her legs parted naturally to draw him closer. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll make it.” Even as she said those determined words, her limbs shook rebelliously. Angrily she clenched her jaw and willed her muscles to stop trembling, demanded that her strength be returned to her.
The specks of light dancing behind her closed eyelids abruptly changed color, in concert with the change in his hold on her. His hands slid up her back, molded themselves to the back of her head, and gently used her closely cropped hair to tilt it back. A rainbow of colors showered and swirled when his mouth closed over hers. His lips moved quickly, asking, taking, tongue plunging when she instantly responded.
He stiffened and moved his mouth aside, trailing it down the side of her face and neck.
“Even now,” he rasped, “I can’t stop touching you.”
“Don’t stop,” she whispered, her voice lost in wailing sirens.
“The fire… Harris… We have to…”
“Yes,” she groaned, unsure if she agreed with him or responded to the involuntary thrust of his hips between her legs. Fire raced through her body and settled heavily in the pit of her belly. She gave a long, shallow gasp as he grasped her hips and pulled her hard against him, held her tight for an endless moment, then set her away, leaving her dizzy once more.
“You’ll make it, Miss Taylor. You’ll make it because you are staying right here until your cousin or uncle or whatever branch of your family tree comes to get you.”
Something within her broke as he spoke the words. Something whispered to her that he was right, that the past year of grieving for Troy, the last few days of physical exhaustion and bodily injury, had brought her to the end of her formidable endurance. She would be no help to him when Jared confronted Harris; she might even be a hindrance. Even if she managed to stay on the horse for the hard, thirty-mile ride down to Hatteras, she would have no strength left to help him or even to defend herself.
The missing half of her soul stood before her. She had shared one night with him, but now she had to let him go. Yet her eyes stayed dry. No sobs boiled from the stark stillness of her heart. Her thought processes sharpened to crystal clarity.
She would indeed let Jared go alone. One of her family on Roanoke Island was bound to have heard about the incident at Nags Head by now, and one of them would eventually show up here looking for her.
And when they did, she’d have wheels.
“All right,” she said quietly.
Clearly expecting more of a fight, he backed up a step, read what she hoped was acceptance in her eyes, and nodded.
“Now,” she said with a calm that surprised even herself. “I can’t help you face Harris. But you said there was something else you needed of me?”
He watched her closely for a long moment, then finally nodded, helped her down off the counter and led her to the kitchen table. He carefully averted his face, but she felt his tightly reined distress in the way he slipped his fingers between hers and held on. He let go only to retrieve the papers from the table and lay them carefully on her upturned palms. She examined the letter she’d found in his uniform, then to the other paper, which she remembered as the birth record he’d shown her on the first night they’d met. The same one he’d used to convince her of his identity.
She murmured in surprise when he turned it over and pointed to the handwriting.
“Find out what this means,” he said in a voice as quiet as it was anguished.
She sat down hard on the nearest chair, stunned.
“Ethan didn’t die.” The words came unbidden out of her mouth, but she knew without a doubt they
were true. “But where did he go? And why would he write this? The letter says he was the one who captured you, and he witnessed your ordeal. But we both know Ethan couldn’t have been there.”
“I don’t know why. The only explanation is that Ethan tracked this man down and wrote the letter for him, since there was a very good chance the man was illiterate.”
“Then… if Ethan was alive in 1868, why didn’t he just take the coat and go home?”
Jared made an uncharacteristically helpless gesture with his hands. “I don’t have time to find out. You do.”
She looked up at him, her scalp prickling with a new realization—Ethan Beaudry had lived, and he’d spent years running down the men involved in killing his brother. “But how will you know what I’ve found out? How will I…”
Jared leaned over and grasped her good shoulder, searching deep into her eyes.
“The same way you did the first time. Through my uniform coat. Touch it. Find me.”
Tears escaped down her cheeks. He grimaced, pulled down the sleeve of his sweatshirt and wiped at her face.
“I know it’s too much to ask.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I’ll do it. But you know, when you get to, um, where you’re going, you can probably ask him yourself.”
He nodded and gave her a wry smile. “That’s assuming we end up in the same place.” Before she could protest, he took her face in his hands, his eyes darkening to nearly black.
“In any case, I’ll find Troy for you. I’ll bring him with me when you contact me, if I have to bring him kicking and screaming.” Anger burned in the blue depths of his eyes.
“What do you mean by that?” He knew something and wasn’t telling her. She was certain of it. But he only shook his head.
“Let’s just say that I’m sure Troy would not have wanted you to go to these lengths to deal with your grief.”
Her throat constricted, and she could only manage an unintelligible squeak in reply.
He nodded again, to himself this time, took her hands and closed her palms together over the precious papers she held. Then he stood, his hands fisted at his sides.
“I’ll saddle the horse.”
She rose to her feet, her heart broken and numb.
“You’ll need the knapsack, and food.” Her eyes fell on Troy’s pipe, still resting on the kitchen table. Impulsively she caught Jared’s hand as he turned away.
“And this,” she said. She picked up the pipe, pressed her talisman into his open palm, and closed his fingers over it.
Minutes later, lips throbbing from his parting kiss, Taylor leaned heavily on the deck railing and listened to the thud of the grey gelding’s hoof beats fade into the pre-dawn gloom. A half-mile to the south, Bodie Island Lighthouse stood bathed in fire department floodlights, its lamp extinguished and the fire at its base subdued.
Horse and rider appeared in dim silhouette as they topped the dune line. Jared reined in the grey, and Taylor saw the outline of his head turn in her direction.
I love you.
Her throat closed and tears blurred her vision, unsure if the words had come from her spirit, or his. It didn’t matter. They were true.
The wind carried a faint shout to her ears and she fiercely blinked her eyes clear. Jared wheeled the horse in the direction of the sound.
Her hand went to her throat. Harris! He had seen Jared, exposed on top of the dune. Jared dug his heels into the grey’s sides before she could even think about shouting a warning, useless as it would be against the wind.
A flick of the horse’s high-flung tail, and Jared Beaudry was gone.
*
Lane Brannon nearly wept in relief when she wheeled her large Suburban into the driveway, and the headlights fell on the bright, white-and-black spotted rump of Taylor’s Appaloosa mare.
She rubbed her stinging eyes. She’d been driving for almost 24 straight hours, haunting every hospital and clinic within a hundred miles, refusing to leave each one until she had looked into the face of every wounded re-enactor she could find. Frantically dialing Taylor’s cell phone, hoping her cousin would pick up.
She had left her Uncle Hugh and her close friend Vince in charge of her camera equipment on Roanoke Island, promising to call as soon as she found out anything. Vince had not been at all happy to be left behind, not at all satisfied with her hurried and sketchy explanations. She smiled faintly at the memory of his scowl in her rearview mirror.
Turning up nothing at the hospitals and only a few frightened and confused re-enactors at the local police stations, Lane had taken to the road, sometimes driving on the beach, searching for Taylor Brannon and Stephen Powell. Everything from here to the Virginia state line was closed, blockaded and locked up tight, and Lane had just squeaked by getting across to Kitty Hawk before the state police had closed the causeway down. She had been stopped more than once and warned to get herself to safer ground, that some “crazy” re-enactors were reported roaming around, armed and dangerous.
She had ignored the warnings and kept driving.
Then she had remembered her invitation to Taylor to spend a few days at the beach house she’d rented. Heart in her mouth, she had gunned her truck’s huge engine and prayed. And now it looked like her prayers had been answered.
She jumped out of the truck and sidled past the nervous mare.
“Whoa, baby,” she said soothingly. “Shove over, big girl. Where’s your mama, huh? Where’s Taylor and Stephen?”
She paused to refill the horse’s water bucket, then pounded up the outside stairs, found the door unlocked, and burst through, flipping on the light as she went.
Taylor, her face flushed and puffy, cradling an obviously injured arm, struggled to rise from the couch. The first thing Lane noticed was the light in her cousin’s eyes. A light of bright determination and tenacious will. Their depths glowed with a spark of spirit Lane hadn’t seen since Troy’s death. Her jaw was squared with it as she lurched to her feet and held out her good arm.
“Oh, thank God!” cried Lane as she took a shortcut over the coffee table with her long legs and embraced her cousin. “I heard what happened up at Nag’s Head, and I was afraid…”
“I’m all right, I’m all right,” Taylor choked over and over, holding Lane tight and rocking back and forth. Finally Taylor pulled back.
“Was anyone killed?”
Lane didn’t like the panicked, edgy look on Taylor’s face, and spoke gently. “No, no one was killed, but there were some close calls. A couple of the Union boys are still in intensive care.”
Taylor sagged and closed her eyes. “Thank God.”
“Where in the hell is your cell phone?” Now that she knew her cousin was safe, Lane let loose a little of the frustration that had been building over the past 24 hours.
Taylor shrugged. “Back in my truck, I guess. I don’t remember. I think it died. Have you talked to my Mom?”
“Only every 15 minutes for the last two days. How could this happen? They say some of the guys in the unit went crazy and fired real ammo. And some of them are still on the loose. Everything from here to the Virginia state line is closed down, and the cops are everywhere, but so far no one’s been able to find them.” Lane halted and looked around, suddenly alarmed.
“Where’s Stephen? He wasn’t…”
“No, Stephen’s alive. At least he’s—” Abruptly Taylor grabbed Lane’s hand and dragged her toward the front door. “Look, can we talk about this on the way?”
“On the way where? Now? In the dark?” asked Lane in amazement as she was unceremoniously towed across the room. She dug in her heels. “The only place you’re going is the hospital, Taylor Brannon! You look like you could use a doctor.”
Taylor whirled so suddenly that Lane almost collided with her.
“You have to drive me to Cape Hatteras. Tonight.” Before Lane could ask what on earth she was talking about, Taylor dropped Lane’s hand and changed direction, disappeared into the kitchen and reappeared a moment la
ter with Troy’s musket and a box of shells. Lane swallowed when she saw the red mark on the box. Live rounds.
Lane raised both hands in surrender, realizing she was being summarily hijacked. Taylor draped Troy’s uniform jacket over one of Lane’s hands as she charged out the door.
“I promise I’ll sleep in the car on the way down.” Taylor paused at the top of the stairs and waited, rubbing her eyes and shaking her head as if to clear it, while Lane shut the door and locked it. “After we get there,” Taylor continued, “I should have a few hours to rest until Jared and Harris reach the lighthouse.”
“Who are they?” Lane caught Taylor’s arm, frowning as she eased her unsteady cousin down the steps, wondering if her equilibrium wasn’t all that was unbalanced. Something had gotten hold of Taylor, and wouldn’t be denied until it was satisfied. That much Lane sensed.
Lane made Taylor lie down in the back seat, and carefully covered her cousin with a sleeping bag. Before she would consent to start the engine, Lane used her former EMT training to check the wound under Taylor’s bandage, and to examine the bump and laceration on the side of her head. The wounds were clean and scabbed over, but Taylor clearly danced on the ragged edge of complete physical breakdown. Her flushed skin pointed toward fever and possible infection, her slightly unequal pupils indicated concussion.
“I’ll live,” rasped Taylor as she again turned aside Lane’s suggestion to head for a hospital instead of the end of the continent. Taylor’s hand snaked out from under the sleeping bag and caught Lane’s arm in a surprisingly strong grip. “Trust me on this. Get me down to Hatteras. At least two men’s lives depend on it. And Lane…”
Again struck by the sparks in Taylor’s eyes, Lane had the distinct impression that the fires of hell were nipping at Taylor’s heels.
“What?”
“When we get to Hatteras, I want you to drop me off, turn this truck around and drive away. Don’t look back, Lane. Do you hear me? Don’t look back.”
