by Lori Austin
“No one knew.” Ethan considered her patchy scalp. Or at least he’d thought no one knew.
She turned, and her skirt tightened across her middle, revealing the slight rounding of her stomach beneath her dress.
“Beth,” he whispered, and she lifted her gaze, smiling at the wonder in his.
“I’m with child.”
Dizziness washed over him. He put out a hand, and she took it, hers tightening. What if the war had gone on? What if he’d died in prison? What if she’d died out here?
“I’m sorry,” he said, and she yanked her hand away. He stumbled forward, trying to get it back.
“I’m not,” she snapped. “This baby is the only good thing that’s happened to me since—” Her voice broke.
“Since?”
“Since Fort Sumter.”
He went silent. He remembered a lot of good things—the first day they’d met, the first time they’d kissed, the scent of her hair, the drift of her breath, the feel of her skin in the dark, the people they’d saved, the life they’d had—certainly it hadn’t been easy, but it had been theirs.
“Why didn’t you come to Castle Thunder and tell me?”
“It’s a prison, Ethan. They weren’t going to let me in.”
“Why did they let you out?”
“They never had any proof I wasn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time.” She covered her mouth, coughed. Was she ill? He wanted to put his hand to her forehead, but she held herself just out of reach. “Whitlock’s was overcrowded, so they released me. I was afraid if I came back, if I insisted on seeing you . . .” Her voice drifted off.
“They might not let you out again.” He nodded. “I understand.”
“Where’s Mikey?” she asked. “Is he—”
“He’s alive, but . . .” Quickly, he told her everything.
“He thinks his name is Mikhail and that Fedya is his brother,” she repeated. “So he probably went and found Fedya after he escaped.”
“Alexi,” Ethan muttered.
She spread her hands. “Does it matter?”
“Honestly, Beth, I have no idea anymore.” He ran his hand through his hair; he wanted to tear it out. “I need to find him, make sure that he’s safe.”
“If he’s with Fedya—” Their eyes met. “If he’s with Alexi, I’m sure he’s fine.”
“But I have to know; I have to see.”
Silence fell like a stone between them. He had come to tell her how he felt, and now that he was here, he couldn’t say a single one of the things he’d meant to.
“We’re getting married,” he blurted instead.
She folded her arms. “I don’t recall saying yes.”
He dropped to one knee. “Annabeth Phelan, will you marry me?” He pulled his mother’s ring from his pocket.
Her eyes widened, then filled. “You—you—”
“Is that a yes?”
“You had that all along. . . . You were going to ask me even before . . .” She touched their child once more.
“You stood at my side, though I betrayed the cause you believed in. You gave yourself to me, your enemy.”
“Ethan,” she began, and choked.
“I lied. About everything. Who I was, what I believed, hell, how I spoke—and you forgave me. If I hadn’t already loved you, I would have loved you for that alone. I’ll always love you, Annabeth. Always.”
She blinked, and tears flew off her eyelashes, rained onto his cheeks. “I . . . ” She looked away, frowned, seemed to struggle with something; then her shoulders drooped. “I love you, too.”
“Is that a yes?”
She met his gaze, smiling through her tears. “That’s a yes.”
CHAPTER 9
Ethan contacted the Intelligence Service and discovered that Fedya had been sent to instruct soldiers at Camp Astor, New York.
“You’ll get there and back more quickly if you’re alone,” Annabeth said.
“I don’t want to leave you, but—”
She watched everything that he thought, that he felt, flicker across his face. He was torn between wanting her at his side and agreeing that it would be easier if she wasn’t. How had this man ever been a spy?
“Traveling isn’t good for the baby,” he murmured. “And you’re going to be traveling enough just to reach Freedom.”
Along with the information about Fedya, Ethan had received an offer to become the doctor in Freedom, Kansas. It would be a new start for them both.
Annabeth covered her stomach with one hand. For them all.
“Just go,” she urged, so he did.
Two weeks later, he returned. One look into his eyes and she knew the visit had not gone well.
“What happened?”
“My brother tried to break my neck.”
“Mikey wouldn’t do that.”
“Mikey wouldn’t. Mikhail, on the other hand . . .” He shrugged. “To be fair, he thought I was hurting his brother.”
“Why would he think that?”
Ethan glanced away. “I was.”
“Oh, Ethan.”
“I couldn’t help it. Fedya’s so damn smug. He made a comment—half of it was in Russian—and I . . .” He spread his fingers. “I put these around his throat. Making him stop talking felt so damn good.”
Annabeth sighed. “Now what?”
“Now we go West.” He smiled with his mouth but not his eyes. “Together.”
They boarded the train in Virginia, got off in Kansas City, then walked to the nearest church. One glimpse of Annabeth’s just-beginning-to-round stomach and the priest waived the banns.
Annabeth agonized all the way to Freedom. Should she tell Ethan the truth, or shouldn’t she? It didn’t seem fair or right that she knew all his secrets yet he knew none of hers. Then again, hers had led first to he and Mikey being imprisoned, then to his brother being shot in the head.
Ethan’s continued anger at Fedya frightened her. He’d come to the conclusion, with a little help from the guards at Castle Thunder, that Fedya had been released as a reward for shooting Mikey. Fedya had not disabused him of the notion when they’d met in New York. Not that Ethan had given him the chance. Although even if the sniper had, she doubted Ethan would have believed him.
“What possible reason could anyone have for hurting your brother?” she asked.
“Not hurt. Kill. Mikey is dead. Fedya killed him. There is no more Michael Walsh.”
“Ethan, you know that’s not true.”
“It is. You haven’t looked into his eyes and seen a stranger staring back.”
She had nothing to say to that, so she kept silent. She understood his anger was born of guilt. He hadn’t protected Mikey, and now the little brother he had known was gone.
“Leave it alone, Beth.” He took her hand, smiled that smile she loved, with both his eyes and his lips at last. “We’ll leave the past in the East. We’ll start new in the West. We’ll be free of all the pain.”
And because she wanted that, too, Annabeth decided to keep her secrets to herself.
Considering that Kansas was about as Yankee as could be, Annabeth worried that her accent might label her an outsider and that she would never be accepted in their new hometown.
However, the folks of Freedom wanted to leave the past in the past nearly as much as she did. They welcomed her as their doctor’s wife. Certainly, there were those whose lips curled when she spoke, who whispered behind their hands when she came into the one mercantile in town, but as time passed, any lingering animosities faded.
It didn’t hurt that she possessed nursing skills. From the day they arrived, she and Ethan worked side by side to heal their new neighbors. They were given a place of their own, a two-story structure in the center of town. The ground floor consisted of a waiting area, an examining room, and a kitchen. The second floor held two rooms—one for them and one for the child that grew steadily beneath her heart.
They bought furnishings, but Ethan insisted on making the crib himself.
Sometimes she just stood in the doorway and watched him work. He would turn; he would smile. “You’re so beautiful,” he would murmur, though she knew she was anything but. The future was so bright, it blinded her.
Some nights Ethan would awaken shouting his brother’s name. She held him and comforted him as she had in prison. Annabeth had nightmares, too, but she awoke with clenched teeth, as if, even in sleep, her mind and her body knew she had to swallow every secret she could not share.
But each morning she woke to another day as Ethan’s wife. Each night she lay at his side and touched him as she’d always dreamed of, taking all the time she wanted.
Because she believed they had all the time in the world.
• • •
After riding to a neighboring farm to treat a nasty broken leg, Ethan returned to Freedom, stabled his horse, and hurried through the just-fallen night toward home. As he stepped inside, voices murmured in the next room.
“He doesn’t know?” A stranger. A man.
“No.” Annabeth, sounding tired, defeated, a little scared.
Ethan’s fighting instincts, which he’d thought had gone into hibernation after Appomattox, awoke. He drew his gun.
“Have you found Luke?”
“Not yet.”
Annabeth let out a long, discouraged breath. “What do you want, Moze?”
“If it weren’t for you, we never would have caught that sniper.”
Ethan’s neck tingled. He began to get a very bad feeling.
“You saved a lot of lives, Annie Beth Lou.”
Somehow, Ethan didn’t think this Moze was referring to her nursing skills. He held his breath and clung to the shadows.
“Get to the point,” Annabeth ordered. “Then get out.”
“I work for Pinkerton.”
“The enemy?”
Ethan winced. If Alan Pinkerton, once the head of the Union Secret Service, was the enemy . . . then what did that make him?
“He’s not the enemy anymore, Annabeth. Besides . . . aren’t you married to one?”
One? Ethan wondered. One what?
“Just say your piece.”
“When I told Mr. Pinkerton all you’d done, he sent me to hire you.”
“I’m otherwise engaged.” The words were cool and dry.
“You didn’t have to sleep with the guy.”
Ethan was heartily sick of this conversation. Or perhaps he was just heartily sick. Was everything he’d believed about her, about them, a lie?
“I suppose a spy of his caliber wasn’t going to tell you anything worthwhile just because you asked,” the man muttered.
“If asking was the way you got your information, I’m surprised you’re still breathing.”
Moze chuckled. “Feeding him the news about the false meeting between Lee and Davis was best done in bed.” He cleared his throat and murmured, “After. A man will believe anything then.”
Ethan frowned. She hadn’t told him about the meeting; he’d discovered it written on a scrap of paper stuffed into a patient’s boot.
She was good.
His nausea was replaced by anger. Because of her, his brother was dead. Because of her, both Ethan, one of the Union’s top spies, and Fedya, one of the Union’s most gifted snipers, had spent months in Castle Thunder Prison. Because of her, he was married to the enemy.
But then so was she.
“You could have gotten in touch with me,” Moze said. “If I’d known you were in trouble, I’d have . . .” His voice drifted off.
“I’m not in trouble,” she said softly. “Or at least I wasn’t until you showed up.”
“Do you ever plan on telling him?”
“I don’t think I’ll have to.”
The rustle of clothing followed the soft scuff of a boot. “If you need me, you know where I am.”
“I do.”
Ethan recalled her saying those words to him not so long ago. Words that had bound him to her and her to him forever. He’d been so happy.
How times changed.
The back door opened and closed. Cool blue silence settled over him. A match flared; the lamp came to life, spreading golden flickers across the floor.
“You can come out now,” Annabeth said.
Ethan stepped into the room, gun still drawn. Her gaze went to the weapon. “I wouldn’t blame you.” She flicked her eyes to the windows and then back to his. “But others might.”
“You betrayed me.”
“You betrayed yourself.”
His hand tightened, and he put the pistol back in the holster, for an instant afraid of what he might do. “I think I’d remember that.”
“It was a trap, Ethan.”
“One that you set.”
“I didn’t think you’d jump into it. I was trying to prove you weren’t a traitor.”
“Were you ever going to tell me?”
“No.” He blinked, surprised, and she threw up her hands. “What possible good could it do? You said you wanted to leave the past in the East, start new in the West.”
“Your past seems to have followed us here.”
“I didn’t ask him to.”
“You planned to live a lie forever?”
“It isn’t a lie.”
“It isn’t the truth,” he muttered. “What was?”
She laid a palm on her belly; his gaze lowered, and he swallowed as memories flickered. “You gave me your virginity to gain my trust?”
He didn’t know her anymore. He’d never known her.
“It wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like? Tell me, please, because I don’t understand.”
“We were together that night, in Castle Thunder, after I set the trap.”
“Your point?”
“I didn’t need to gain your trust; I already had it.”
“Then why? What did you think you could possibly learn from me in prison?”
“Nothing!” She swallowed as if her throat were desert dry. “It was a prison, Ethan, and I stayed there for you. Because I loved you. What was between us . . . this . . . ?” She pointed at him, at herself. “Is real.”
He released a short burst of air through his nose.
Her hands clenched. “You think I’d—”
“I don’t know what to think.”
Unless it was that she’d fucked him for the cause, then had become pregnant and had little choice but to marry him. That sounded more truthful than anything she’d told him thus far.
“Maybe you should tell me what happened,” he said. “From the beginning.”
She nodded, rubbing her belly as if it ached. His chest certainly did.
“Someone at Chimborazo was notifying the Yankees of Confederate troop movements, plans, strengths.”
“Me.”
“I didn’t know that. I didn’t believe that.”
“What gave me away?” He’d always wondered.
“Beth,” she murmured, and he frowned. He didn’t like how she kept rubbing her stomach.
“I don’t—”
“Yankees shorten names,” she explained. “Southerners make them longer.”
Something that simple had been his undoing? Ethan almost laughed. “If I’d called you Annie Beth Lou”—he left out like him, but from her wince, she heard it just the same—“instead of Beth . . .”
“You also talk in your sleep,” she muttered. “And you didn’t have an accent.”
“So you set a trap. But I wasn’t the only one who fell in. You killed my brother.”
Her lips tightened. “Only after you killed mine.”
He shook his head, confused. “You said your brothers died at Sharpsburg, Ball’s Bluff, New Bern, and Shiloh.” All of those battles had occurred before Gettysburg. Before Ethan had watched so many die despite everything he did. Before he’d been asked to do more.
“My youngest brother, Luke, went missing at Mount Zion Church.” Ethan couldn’t control a slight twitch at the location. “One of Mosby’s men was sent to
rally the Rangers. They arrived. He didn’t.”
“I don’t—”
“You did,” she insisted. “He either babbled the information while delirious, or you found it in his things.”
In truth, he couldn’t recall. What did it matter?
Ethan had never allowed himself to consider the people his actions affected. He couldn’t and continue to do what he’d promised. He had believed utterly that his efforts at espionage could shorten the war. But to someone whose entire family had died in it, he wasn’t any kind of hero.
“What are we going to do?” he whispered.
“Do?” she repeated as if the word were foreign.
“About this? About us?”
“We’re married, Ethan. For better or worse, as long as we live.”
“It’s a lie.”
“I meant those vows.”
“I took them with a woman I didn’t know.”
“You took them with me.”
“Who are you?”
“Annabeth Phelan Walsh. My entire family is gone. All I have is you and—” She again set a hand over her stomach.
“My brother died because of your lies.” He turned his palms up. “Sometimes I still see his blood.”
She took his hands, squeezed them until he met her gaze. “He isn’t dead, Ethan.”
“He might as well be.”
“I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.” She tried to pull her hands free, but now he wouldn’t let go. He yanked her close; her head snapped forward, narrowly missing his chin, and she stilled. “You’re scaring me.”
The monster inside of him was glad. How many young boys had been frightened, had been bloodied and died because of her?
Because of him.
Guilt blended with the anger, causing his fingers to tighten. “You were everything. The only bright light in so much darkness.” She tore herself away at the same time as he released her. The momentum had her reeling back. She banged into the countertop as he turned away. “I loved you.”
She didn’t answer, didn’t argue, and his chest tightened.
It had all been a lie.
Ethan strode toward the door through which Moze had left. He wasn’t sure where he was going.
Somewhere. Anywhere but here.
“Too soon,” Annabeth gasped. “Help me.”
He spun, and the angry words died on his tongue.
