Megan Chance

A

HEART

DIVIDED

by

Megan Chance

Other Books by Megan Chance

Historical Fiction:

Susannah Morrow

An Inconvenient Wife

The Spiritualist

Prima Donna

City of Ash

Historical Romance:

A Candle in the Dark

After the Frost

The Portrait

Fall from Grace

The Way Home

The Gentleman Caller

A Season in Eden

Original Copyright © 1996 Megan Chance

E-book version Copyright © 2011 Megan Chance

ISBN 13: 9781936632039

ISBN 10: 1936632039

Cover photo courtesy mantonio/www.bigstock.com

To Tonia, for Scott and Veronica and Shane—

From the first to the last, they are always for you.

And after all, what is a lie? Tis but

The truth in masquerade.

—
Don Juan

George Gordon, Lord Byron

July 1877—Chicago

I
t was a dark night. Conor Roarke strode quickly past the shadowed alleys, hearing the soft echo of his own footsteps on the wet cobblestones. It was always dark in this part of town, in the immigrant slums of Chicago, but the rain had made it especially so tonight, just as it had cleansed the air and washed away the scents of smoke and grease and sickness—at least for a little while. The stink would be back with the sun tomorrow, Conor knew, and his heart squeezed a little at the thought.

It was very late, and he was tired. He'd spent the day in Pinkerton's offices, being briefed for his next assignment—an outlaw gang in Kansas this time. It meant leaving again, and it seemed he'd just got back. But there were too few operatives in the Chicago office, and he was the only one available, so he was being sent west for a time, even though he needed—deserved—a rest.

Conor shoved his hands into his pockets and lifted his face to the steady breeze blowing down the narrow alleyways. His house was just ahead, a cramped, two-story brick with crumbling cornices, and at the sight of it he felt a surge of energy. He quickened his step and grabbed onto the rusted metal railing, swinging up the two short steps to the door.

It wasn't much, but it was his. Someplace to come home to, even though he spent far too little time here. He had come to appreciate its shoddy meanness, but never more than in the last two days. He stepped into the small hallway, closed the door behind him, and glanced up the darkened stairs. A light angled across the floorboards, illuminating the shadows. He heard a cough.

With a smile, Conor hurried up the stairs. He passed the small room that served as his office and went straight to the bedroom. The door was cracked open, the light that streamed out was warm and welcoming.

He knocked lightly on the door and pushed it open without waiting for an answer, frowning again immediately when he saw the man in the bed—or, more accurately, the man who was struggling to get out of bed.

"I thought I heard you," the man said, peering toward the doorway. He pushed back the bedcovers. "Good, lad. You can help me up."

Conor sighed and stepped into the room. "You should be asleep," he said.

“I
was
sleeping. But now you're here, and—"

"Get back in bed." Conor went to the bed and pushed his adoptive father gently back against the pillows. "They don't need you at the rectory. I stopped by on my way here. Sister Theresa says you're to rest."

"Nonsense." The older man struggled upright, pushing aside the blankets to reveal the nightshirt tangled around his body. His wiry red hair stood out around his head in a vibrant halo, but his skin was pale, his voice gravelly and thick with congestion. "The good sister doesn't know how to write a sermon, me boy. It's early yet—"

Conor loosened the blanket from his father's hand and smoothed it back over his chest. "It isn't early, Father. It's late. It's nearly eleven o'clock. They'll understand when you aren't there tomorrow." He sighed, admiring Sean Roarke's stubbornness even as it exhausted him. "It won't be the first time the good people of Saint Mary's have had to listen to Father Callahan."

Sean made to get out of bed again. "But—"

"Sit back," Conor commanded. "I'm not letting you up until Dr. Johnson has a look at you. He said at least a week of bed rest."

"A week ..." Sean's body shook as he was seized with a fresh bout of coughing.

Conor was at his side instantly. He wrapped his arm around his father's shoulders. Sean's frail, emaciated body shuddered. The old man's bones rattled beneath his thin skin. "Did Anna keep a poultice on you today?"

"She's a ... she's a bit... scattered, that lassie," Sean said, breathing audibly. "Now, at the rectory-"

"They're all sick there," Conor said impatiently. "That's why you're here, remember? Damn that girl anyway. She needs a good talking to."

Sean waved his hands, shaking his head as he coughed helplessly.

"All right, all right. I won't yell at her," Conor said. "I'm going downstairs. I left that poultice recipe from Sister Mary in the kitchen."

His father's protestations floated in the air as Conor hurried down the dark stairs, not bothering to take a lamp to illuminate the familiar way to the kitchen. The light from a nearby streetlamp gave an eerie yellow-white glow to the room, and Conor spotted the recipe on the table and lifted it to the window, squinting to make out the words. Onions. Lots of onions. He wrinkled his nose at the thought, then heard the echoes of his father's coughing ringing down the narrow hallway.

It wasn't getting better. It was getting worse, and for the hundredth time Conor cursed himself for staying away so long. He'd always tried to keep his father from overworking, but for the last two years Conor had been assigned to the Pennsylvania coalfields, and while he'd been toiling to bring the Molly Maguires to justice, the nuns in the rectory had cheerfully given in to Sean's reassurances and let his father work himself into the ground. But things were different now that Conor was home again. This time he would make sure his father had a caretaker before he went off on a new assignment. This time he wouldn't stay away so long. And in the few weeks he had before he left for Kansas, he would be too busy caring for his father to think any more of the

Molly Maguires ... Or of the guilt that still haunted him.

Conor took a deep breath, but almost the same moment that he told himself not to think of her, the vision of her face came into his mind. Dark hair and dark eyes that were always laughing....

She didn't laugh anymore
, he reminded himself. At least not for him.

Conor pushed the vision roughly away. Sari was in the past, and he wanted to leave her there. She had shown where her loyalty lay, and it wasn't with him, and there was no point in thinking about her or the Molly Maguires again. It took too much concentration, when what he should be concentrating on was his father and making sure he lived through this damned illness. Sean Roarke was all Conor had left. All he'd ever had.

Conor unlatched the basement door and went down the rickety steps. Cold dampness seeped over him. Cockroaches scurried over the dirt floor, crunching beneath his boots, but Conor crossed without hesitation to the root bins and dug through the straw until he had a pile of onions. Gathering the sprouting vegetables into his hands, he turned and took his first step up the stairs.

The explosion deafened him. The house rocked, the stairs crumbled beneath his feet. He fell to his knees and something hit him between his shoulder blades—the kitchen collapsing into the basement. Conor rolled to the wall and huddled there, shielding his body against the side of the onion bin while dust and cracking wood flew up around him, and the acrid scent of burning wood and oil singed his nostrils, mixing with flakes of ash.

It was over almost as soon as it began. The sound of the explosion died away, leaving only the noises of collapsing brick and wood, the crackling of fire. Warily Conor lifted his head from his arms and squinted into the smoke and dust fogging the air. Timbers and beams hung crazily—creating eerie shadows in the dust. Dust that filled his nostrils and his lungs. He struggled for breath, for comprehension. Christ, what had happened?

Conor blinked, forcing himself to think. He looked up through the hole in the floor, and suddenly the answer came to him. A bomb, he thought dazedly. It was a bomb.

He stared, confused, at the splintered floor, at the flames licking the timbers. He could see the collapsed timbers of the second story, the falling bricks. Christ, someone had set a bomb in his house. Didn't they know his father was sick in bed? Didn't they know his father—

His father...

Conor froze.

His father was upstairs.

November 1877—Beaver Creek, Colorado

S
arilyn Travers was planting dahlias when she first saw the rider. He was only a silhouette at first, a shadow against the brown and withered plains, but even then there was something about him she recognized, a presence that made her stiffen.

No, it wasn't him. It couldn't be him. Sari gripped the tuber in her hand convulsively; her mouth went dry. She knew that stance—the arrogant confidence of it.

It was Jamie.

No, not Jamie; the newspapers had called him Conor Roarke, she remembered—his real name. Jamie O'Brien had been another fiction, just like everything else about him.

Sari closed her eyes.
Please, let me be wrong
, she prayed silently.
Don't let it be him
. There was no reason for him to come here. He had what he wanted. What more could he take from her?

The rider came closer, closer. He was advancing rapidly. In the rarefied atmosphere of the high altitude, he could be a mile away or only yards—it was so hard to tell. The leather duster flapped against his legs; he sat the horse with broad-shouldered ease. There was no denying it. Conor Roarke. Back from hell, or wherever it was he'd gone.

Hastily she looked around for her uncle, but Charles was in his own small soddy behind the main sodhouse, probably immersed in one of the Grange journals he read by the dozens. She doubted he even heard the approaching horse. Desperately she willed him to feel her discomfort, to come to her. She concentrated so intently, she half expected her uncle to come rushing around the corner. But there was nothing. Nothing but the sound of the wind picking up speed over the plains. Nothing but the steady approach of the rider.

As he came into the yard, Sari lurched to her feet and leaned against the sun-warmed grass bricks of the soddy. She watched as he led the horse to the fence near the well and looped the reins around a post. His face was darkened by the wide-brimmed hat he wore. The shadows from the windmill blades crossed over his body in the fading sunset. Sari barely breathed as he stood there, surveying the house as if he had all the confidence in the world, and all the time.