Out of Her League

by Lori Handeland

  “All right,” he agreed. “Who am I to turn down anything?”

  Not the man she knew and—

  Cat brought up short. Not the man she knew and what?

  Well, not the man she knew.

  Alexi turned his cards face up. Cat kept her face blank as she placed hers face down.

  “You win.”

  AN OUTLAW IN WONDERLAND

  Lori Austin

  “Beth?” Ethan stepped into the room. Hands open to show he held nothing in them, he stared at her as if she was a wild thing. “What are you doing?”

  “What you should have done.” She tightened her grip. “Long ago.”

  “Honey,” he began. “Shut. Up.” Annabeth swung the axe. The crib shattered into several large chunks.

  She continued to hack away at it until the thing lay in several dozen small ones. When she finished, she tossed the blade in the center and peered out the window. She needed to leave—this room, this house, this town, this life—but right now it was all she could do to stay on her feet.

  “Why did you keep it?” she whispered. “I … ” he began, then sighed. “I don’t know.” On the street below, a few people still paused and pointed, but most of Freedom had gone about their business. No doubt the doctor and his no-longer-dead wife would be a topic of conversation on street corners for weeks to come, but folks had work to do and only so much time to do it in.

  Annabeth’s gaze went to Lewis’s Sewing and Sundry. The sun glanced off the windows bright enough to blind. Ethan came up beside her. He didn’t speak; she had told him to shut up. Annabeth still couldn’t look at him.

  “Why?” he murmured. She wasn’t sure which why he meant. Why was she here? Why had she left? Why had she lied, spied? Why had they even tried?

  Or maybe just why had she used his axe on their dead child’s crib? At least for that question she had an answer.

  “You might have put Cora Lewis in our bed,” she said, “but you aren’t putting her child in the one you made for ours.”

  “I wouldn’t,” he began.

  She had no idea anymore what he would or wouldn’t do, but she knew one thing for certain. “Now you can’t.”

  They continued to peer outside. Did Ethan see the streets, the buildings, the people? Or had his vision blurred with memories too?

  Standing in this room all those years ago, the town below them dustier and smaller, but back then wasn’t everything? Laughing together, her belly round and taut. When he’d laid his palm against it everything in the world had seemed so right. How could it have gone so quickly, and so totally, wrong?

  Lies.

  His. Hers. She still wasn’t sure where one began and the other ended. She probably never would be.

  A flash of light near the edge of town drew her attention. She’d seen sparkles like it before.

  Annabeth shoved Ethan aside as the window shattered all over them. They bounced off the wall, landing on the floor in a heap of limbs and glass and crib chunks as the echo of a gunshot rang in her ears.

  Ignoring the spike of glass and wood against her knees and palms, the tiny cuts across her face and throat, Annabeth crawled to the door where she’d dropped her possessions. She slid her Colt from the holster, muttering a few curses that she’d left the rifle in her saddle’s scabbard. A pistol was going to be of no use unless whoever was shooting at them decided to approach the house. And if they were going to do that, they would have done it in the first place rather than snipe at them from afar.

  Annabeth thought about what she’d seen in that instant before she’d pushed Ethan out of the way. A glint of sun off metal at the edge of Freedom, where few people roamed, in a place where whoever wanted them dead could slip back into town during the commotion, or jump on a horse and disappear during the same. Although, around here, there wasn’t much cover.

  She doubted the culprit was still out there. Nevertheless, she peeked over the edge of a window that now matched the empty one in Ethan’s room— very quick, just in case—but no more shots were fired.

  A cloud of dust had marred the horizon. A horse and rider? Or just dust? She couldn’t tell.

  “I think they’re gone, but … ” She paused. The words stay away from the window—one never knew just how gone “gone” was—remained unspoken.

  Ethan didn’t move, didn’t speak. She considered he might be frightened, but as he’d once spent time as a field surgeon in the middle of a war shots had come closer to him than this.

  “Ethan?” She sat on her heels and glanced over her shoulder.

  She’d been wrong. No shot had ever come closer than this.