by Lori Austin
“Beth?” he asked. He still wasn’t sure she was real. Lately, he wasn’t sure a lot of things were real.
Her eyes narrowed. “What is wrong with you?”
For an instant, he panicked, wondering how many empty bottles lay around him. But he was more adept than that. He always disposed of the empties as soon as they became that way. One never knew when a patient might happen in. It wouldn’t do for the doctor to be found unconscious amid the evidence.
He didn’t care for how she towered over him, so he got to his feet; he managed not to sway. He desperately wanted to scratch the itch that never seemed to go away. But he’d had plenty of practice pretending. He was probably better at it now than he’d been before.
He didn’t tower over her, never had, which was one of the things he’d loved about her. She could almost look him in the eye. Back when she’d still been able to look at him.
As if to illustrate his thought, she glanced at the ceiling. There wasn’t much either of them could stomach the sight of in this room.
“What’s wrong with me?” he repeated, and her gaze lowered, fixing resolutely on his throat, not his face. “Why on earth would there be anything wrong?” He waited a beat, then murmured, “Darlin’,” in the brogue she’d once adored.
She stiffened, and her gaze flicked up, then back down. “Don’t call me that.”
“No?” He walked toward her, slow, like a cat through the tall grass. And like that cat, he quivered in anticipation. “What name are ye usin’ these days? I’ll bet me da’s last gold eagle it isn’t Walsh.”
She winced, and he had his answer. Why it hurt so much, he couldn’t say.
“You know my name,” she said.
“Beth.”
“No.” She lifted her chin. “Annabeth.”
How could he forget? His shortening of her name had been one of the mistakes that had given him away. He should have lengthened it, drawing her name out, making it last, putting all that he’d felt back then into the words. Annabeth Louise. Miss Annabeth. Annabeth Louise Phelan. Miss Phelan. Annabeth Lou.
“And so on,” he murmured. She cast him another quick, worried glance. “Did you come to make yourself a widow?”
She blinked. “What?”
He flicked a finger at the gun. He’d never seen her with one in her hand, although the way she held it, he could tell she knew how to use it. Was that something she’d learned since leaving him? Or something she’d known all along? There were so many things about her he hadn’t known.
She frowned as if she weren’t quite sure how the weapon had gotten into her hand, then shoved it into the holster that rode low on her hips. “You think I’d hurt you?”
“Honey,” he murmured, and even in the silver-tinged darkness, he saw her shudder—with disgust or desire, he didn’t know, didn’t care. “Just seeing you makes me hurt so deep, I want to die.”
She released an impatient huff. “I didn’t come here to listen to your blarney. I had my fill of that—” She paused, and Ethan heard her thoughts as clearly as if she’d said them aloud. I had my fill of you. “Long before I left.”
Suddenly Ethan was so tired and sad, he wanted to sink back onto the floor and find another blue bottle. But first he had to get rid of her.
“You don’t have to listen to me. You don’t have to look at me or live with me.”
Or touch me, or kiss me, or love me. He tightened his mouth lest those words slip out. He might be pathetic, but he didn’t want to be that pathetic.
“You left,” he said, “and I moved on.” He stared her up and down. “Apparently, you did, as well.” Though to what, where, when, why . . . ? He pushed aside those thoughts. They’d haunted him enough. “I never heard from you. Not a word to let me know if you were alive or dead.”
After a year—or had it been two?—with no whisper of his wife, Ethan couldn’t bear to sit in this house one more instant—listening, waiting, hoping, hating. So he’d left.
He’d heard about a physician in Glasgow who’d employed techniques to keep putrefaction at bay with carbolic acid instead of alcohol. Ethan had spent six months studying with Dr. Lister. He could have remained, but he’d started to wonder: Had she come back? Was she waiting in Freedom? Would she leave again if he stayed away too long?
He’d returned to a house full of dust. No letters. No wires. No wife.
Silence settled over them. The years apart had made him angry. What had they made her? He had no idea where she’d been, what she’d done, who she was. But why should now be any different from then?
Annabeth walked out. Ethan gaped. He’d wanted her to go; now she had and—
He hurried to the doorway, catching his toe on a loose board and nearly falling on his face. Reaching the hall, he cast his gaze to the stairs, listened for the clatter of steps downward. He heard nothing, saw the same, and suddenly he understood where she’d gone.
Four strides and he reached his room. She’d looped the gun belt over one bedpost, tossed her hat over the other. Her hair—that glorious red hair he used to bury his face in as he buried himself in her—tumbled down her back, brushing the swell of her rear. The trousers left little to the imagination. No wonder she carried a gun. Any man who saw that would want to—
She turned, and he jerked his gaze upward. He meant to meet her indigo eyes, but he got caught on the fine line of her throat revealed by the buttons she’d already released.
“Wh-what are you doing?” He was dry mouthed, not from need for the bottle but need for her, something he’d thought long dead.
“It’s late. I’m tired.”
The thought of her climbing into his bed, laying her head on his pillow, rubbing her scent all over the sheets, made him hard in an instant. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gotten an erection without a whole lot of effort.
Then, suddenly, he did. Because it had been right here. In this room. With her.
Her fingers released another button, revealing the swell of her breasts. She wasn’t wearing a corset. Why would she? How could she beneath a man’s shirt and pants?
He couldn’t pull his gaze away; his mouth became drier and drier as more and more flesh appeared. Her ribs. Her belly. Her navel. He had a sudden recollection of running his tongue along its edge. She’d laughed and tangled her fingers in his hair.
When she dropped the shirt and reached for the waistband of her jeans, Ethan spun, but not before he saw everything he’d once touched and tasted, everything that had once been his.
Her boots thudded to the floor.
“Get out of my bed.”
“It’s my bed, too.”
His shoulders drew in, an involuntary flinch. “Where am I supposed to go?”
Instead of remanding him to hell, her sigh was long and just a bit sad. “You were sleeping on the floor when I got here.”
“I wasn’t asleep.” He’d been passed out, but he wasn’t going to tell her that.
She didn’t comment; he wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. He wanted to look at her, then again, he didn’t. What if she was sitting up in bed, the covers pooled at her waist, her breasts shimmering in the dying light of the moon?
“You’ll leave in the morning?” He’d meant the words to be an order, but they came out a question instead. Soft, just above a whisper, more a plea than a command. If she stayed, she’d discover every secret, as she had before, and this time those secrets would ruin him.
He risked a glance. She was asleep, cheek on his pillow, the sheets at her waist as he’d imagined, her breasts bared to the night and to him.
And just as he’d feared, he wanted her as much now as he had the first time he’d touched her.
• • •
For an instant after Annabeth awoke she thought everything that had happened in the past five years had been a dream. She’d never left Freedom. She hadn’t done things that would make Ethan hate her. Then she remembered.
Why she had left. What she had done. Why she was back.
“Hell,” Annabeth muttered.
She rubbed her face against the pillow; the aroma of herbs and strong soap billowed around her. The scent of a healer, she wished it could heal her. She’d never felt safer than when she’d been in Ethan’s arms. Amid the lies, love had been their only truth.
But love couldn’t conquer the grief, the blood, the betrayal, the death. Nothing could.
Annabeth tugged the other pillow over her face. Immediately she sat up, and it tumbled to her lap along with the sheet. She lifted the bolster again, took a tentative sniff. Her gaze narrowed on the open doorway.
She knew a woman when she smelled one.
After climbing out of bed, she crossed to the armoire and then stood in front of the large wooden structure for several seconds before yanking open the door on the right. Ethan’s shirts hung side by side with his trousers. She pulled on the left. All she found were more of the same.
Annabeth rubbed her roiling belly. She hadn’t discovered another woman’s clothes, but she hadn’t discovered her own either. What had he done with them?
Her saddlebags, which she’d left with her horse, sat just inside the door. Uncertain what, exactly, their presence meant beyond the ability to don slightly fresher clothes, Annabeth removed her dress, a shift, some drawers from the bag. She’d tossed her corset long ago, hadn’t missed it even once.
She used the water in the pitcher and the soap next to it to wash as best she could before dressing. After a quick glance into the spare room—no Ethan, not a sign of her things—she trotted downstairs.
He stood in the exam room, using a pestle to savagely mash whatever lay at the bottom of a mortar.
“I think it’s dead.”
He started, nearly dropping the bowl, then tossed a scowl over his shoulder.
“What did you do with my clothes?” she asked.
He went back to mutilating whatever he had in the bowl—something that smelled both red and spicy. “Burned them.”
The front door opened and a man came in. The sun was at his back, and she couldn’t see his face. Had Lass sent someone after her already?
Then he stepped out of the light, removing his sweat-stained Stetson. His hair was gray, his eyes were blue, his hands large, scarred, and capable. The guns at his hips were the same. “Mrs. Walsh?”
She opened her mouth; nothing came out. Legally, that name was hers, but she hadn’t used it in . . . forever.
“Can I help you?”
Annabeth shivered as Ethan’s breath stirred her hair; at the same time, his heat warmed her from shoulders to shins.
“Dr. Walsh?” Ethan must have nodded, because the man extended his hand. “I’m Ren Eversleigh, U.S. Marshal.”
Ethan stiffened, or maybe Annabeth did. The lawman didn’t seem to notice. He shook Ethan’s hand; Annabeth moved closer to the door.
“I have some questions about the sheriff. I’m told he fell from the upstairs window.”
Only someone who knew Ethan as well as Annabeth did, who had thought about every minute they’d spent together over the hundreds of nights since she’d left him, would have seen the slight flutter of the muscle beneath his right eye and known what it meant.
Ethan Walsh was getting ready to lie.
“He did,” Ethan agreed.
Annabeth coughed. Ethan kept his gaze on the marshal, but his hands clenched.
“How?” the lawman asked.
“I wasn’t here.”
“Hmm,” Annabeth murmured. No twitch there.
Ethan cast her a glare that very clearly said he wished she would go away—preferably the same way the sheriff had—before returning his attention to the lawman. “Since when do federal marshals investigate the accidental deaths of small-town sheriffs?”
“When they aren’t accidental?” Annabeth asked. It appeared fairly obvious to her. It also made her wonder if the sheriff’s death was in some way related to the danger to Ethan.
Ethan put his hands behind his back, no doubt to keep himself from throttling her. She shouldn’t bait him, but she found that sometimes—like when he lied—she just couldn’t help herself.
“Why would you say that, Mrs. Walsh?” The marshal tilted his head. “You are Mrs. Walsh?”
“I . . .” Her eyes met Ethan’s, and her desire to bait him faded. “Am.”
His lips thinned. His shoulders hunched. Pretty soon his fingernails were going to puncture his palms.
“You believe the sheriff’s death wasn’t accidental?” Eversleigh continued.
She tugged her gaze from Ethan’s. It wasn’t easy. “I have no idea if it was or it wasn’t. I was . . . away.”
“Was anyone here when he died?” the man snapped.
Ethan rubbed beneath his eye. “No.”
“How well did you know the sheriff, Dr. Walsh?”
“Well enough to say hello.”
“Yet he fell to his death from your bedroom window?”
Ethan dropped his hand. “What are you trying to say?”
“Apparently something you don’t like.”
“I can’t decide if you’re accusing me of killing him or fucking him.”
Annabeth choked. The marshal cast her a quick glance, then went back to his interrogation. “Is either one the truth?”
“No.”
Ethan refused to look away, as did Eversleigh. Annabeth feared they might bump chests and growl. “My husband saves lives, Marshal; he doesn’t take them.”
Ethan frowned, obviously wondering why she was defending him. She kind of wondered that herself.
“I don’t think you know as much about him as you think you do, ma’am.”
“You’re wrong.”
She knew everything; she only wished that she didn’t.
CHAPTER 12
Your husband was a spy,” Eversleigh said flatly.
“I know,” Annabeth returned. “I’m the spy who caught him.”
Ethan sighed. “Beth.”
He wasn’t sure if the glare she shot his way was because he’d spoken, or because he’d again shortened her name. He couldn’t help himself. To him she was Beth, and she always would be. If she didn’t like it, she could leave.
Ethan scratched his wrist. He really needed them both to leave.
“Is that the South I hear in your voice, Mrs. Walsh?”
“Virginia,” she agreed. “Richmond.”
“As Ethan Walsh is listed as a surgeon at Chimborazo Hospital, I’ll assume that’s where you met.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
Annabeth frowned. “I was a matron.”
“You just said you were a spy.”
“I was both.”
“Like him?”
“Yes,” she said again, then quickly, “No! We weren’t on the same side.”
“You worked against each other, yet you’re married,” the marshal clarified.
Her gaze met Ethan’s; he lifted his brows. Hers crashed down, and she faced the marshal. “That’s in the past—over and done with.” She cleared her throat. “You’ve obviously investigated Ethan. I want to know why.”
Ethan did, too.
“Someone wrote the marshal service in Wichita. Said the sheriff died here ’bout a month or so back under suspicious circumstances.”
“Sheriffs die every day,” Ethan said.
“Not too many fall out of windows.”
“Accidents happen.”
“Whoever sent the letter seemed to think he was pushed.”
“Who sent it?”
“No signature.”
“Obviously the letter writer is the person who tossed the sheriff from the window,” Annabeth said. “Why get the law involved at all unless it’s to turn suspicion away from oneself?”
“According to your husband, no one was here to toss the man. He fell.”
“Someone’s lying,” Annabeth said.
“Always,” the marshal agreed. “But who?”
“I’d tend to believe the fellow stand
ing in front of me as if he has nothing to hide over a person who writes anonymous letters. But I’m funny that way.”
“Somethin’s funny,” Eversleigh muttered, turning to Ethan. “I heard that not long before the ‘accident’ you had visitors.”
“Not visitors. A patient,” Ethan clarified.
“And the giant who joined them?”
Annabeth cast Ethan a glance. She knew exactly who that was.
“I don’t remember any giant.”
“Dark hair. Light eyes. Nasty scar right about here.” Eversleigh pointed to his forehead.
“Ah.” Ethan rubbed his eye. “The brother of my patient’s husband.”
Annabeth shifted her weight to one hip, then fidgeted it back to the other. She wanted to ask questions, discover the truth about his visitors. But she knew that if Ethan was skirting the inquiries, there had to be a reason. He doubted she would care if he were arrested, but she’d make sure Mikey wasn’t.
“Thank you for your interest, Marshal.” Annabeth crossed to the door. “Have a safe trip back to Wichita.”
Eversleigh didn’t move. “Something smells here.”
“That’s the medicines we make in the back room.” Annabeth opened the door.
The man peered at Ethan, then at Annabeth. He knew they were lying, but he wasn’t sure about what.
“If he lied then . . .” the marshal began.
“He did,” Annabeth agreed. “I did. That was what we did.”
“Then why should I believe him now?”
“As I told you before, Ethan isn’t a killer.”
“He’s never killed anyone? Not even during the war? Not before or after?”
Ethan waited for her to deny him, to say that he had killed the most precious thing in their world.
“Never,” she said. She always had been a far better liar than he.
The marshal loosed a short, sharp, annoyed yet defeated sigh, and turned to Ethan. “Where did your visitors go?”
“They told me they were from Texas.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Didn’t say.” Probably because they weren’t actually from Texas.
“You didn’t ask?”
“Didn’t care. I was more concerned with my patient.”
“What was the matter with her?”
