Megan Chance (27 page)

Her smile died. Sari brought the bowl of stew over to him. He grabbed it eagerly, spooning into it with a primitive hunger. She let him eat a few bites before she spoke again.

"You can't stay much longer," she said. "It's only a matter of time before Conor discovers you."

"So let him discover me, then." Michael spoke through a mouthful of stew. "I'd like a chance to even the score with the bastard."

"Didn't you already do that when you killed his father?"

Michael turned to her, his eyes blazing, his spoon poised above the plate. "He caused the death of nineteen men, Sari," he said brutally. "Your friends. My friends. Your husband. Nineteen men. In the Bible it says, 'An eye for an eye.' That's thirty-eight eyes. I've only taken two."

The horror of his statement numbed her. "That's the Old Testament," she said hoarsely. "The New Testament says to turn the other cheek. And they broke the law, Michael. Evan too. You broke the law. If they'd found you, you would be dead."

"So I would. Would you mourn me, Sari? The same way you're mourning your poor dear husband?"

Sari felt herself pale. "That's not fair."

"Isn't it?" Michael asked roughly. "You weren't exactly a faithful wife to him."

"No," she said evenly. "But I didn't betray him either."

"I didn't say you did."

"No, but you thought it. You all thought it. Admit it, Michael. You thought I gave information to Conor. You believed it along with the rest of them."

"What else were we to believe?"

"How about that I didn't know anything? Evan and I didn't have a good marriage—not even a bearable one. He didn't talk to me about the Mollies' plans, and neither did you. How would I have known anything to tell Conor?"

"You knew he was the Pinkerton agent," Michael said stubbornly.

"Not until much later," Sari argued. "Not until I told you. I saved your life by telling you."

"But you didn't tell Evan."

His statement felt like a blow. It was the truth. She couldn't deny it. She hadn't told Evan that she suspected Conor was the traitor. It had been too late by then for Evan to avoid being implicated, but not too late for him to escape.

She had let him go to his death.

She had even wanted it.

Sari looked down at the floor, at the pile of greasy onions, of oily paper, and felt that sadness, that emptiness, well up inside her. She'd had to live with Evan's death every day since she'd stood there in town and watched him march to the gallows, his white shirt gleaming in the sun, the blood-red rose pinned to his chest looking like a wound.

She would never forget that day. She would never forget how he refused to look at her, or how his sister and mother had stoned her with their eyes. The small community had drawn away from her; she felt their collective blame in every sigh and every breath, in every unsaid word. She could not have remained in Tamaqua another day after the hangings. Eventually they would have come to her house in the middle of the night. Eventually she would have had to pay the price for her perceived betrayal. Sleeping with the enemy—how brutal the words sounded, how terrible they were.

"You don't know how it was," she said slowly, quietly. "You don't know."

"Evan never laid a hand on you, Sari," her brother said. "I know that for sure. If he had, I would've killed him."

"Not a hand, no," she said. She raised her eyes to his. "But there are other ways to hurt someone, Michael. It doesn't have to be a blow."

Her brother's face closed, eyes hardened, lips tensed. She wasn't sure whether he was working to control his anger at Evan or at her. His eyes shut briefly and he leaned his head back against the wall.

"Sari," he said. "You used to be such an obedient girl."

"Those days were long ago," she said bitterly.

"Before Da died."

"Yes." That was all that needed to be said. Just that
yes
, and she knew he was thinking back, as she was, to those days before their parents had died, back when they were a family and she and Michael had been close. Before Da died in the mines and Mama had followed him shortly after, dead of a fever that made her delirious and strange. Before Sari had been taken in by Aunt Bernice and
Onkle
Charles, and Michael had chosen a different path altogether.

In his own way he was like Conor, she thought. He'd been ten when their parents had died, and already angry. Their father's death in a mining accident had only exacerbated that anger. Michael had joined one of the boy's gangs in town, and though Bernice and Charles had taken him in as well, Michael rarely slept there, never ate there. He was in trouble almost from the moment their parents had died, raging against fortune, against life, and then, later, against the railroad and the company that ruled the miners' lives. The days when she and Michael had been children who depended on each other were long ago and faraway, vague memories, half-remembered dreams.

She looked at him now and remembered how well he'd been her brother once. How he'd taken care of her in the wake of their parents' neglect, kissing her scraped knees and feeding her bread and cheese when their mother was too busy sneaking shots of whiskey to make dinner.

She thought he'd forgotten those things, had forgotten what they'd been to each other, and so it surprised her when he turned to look at her, and his dark eyes were warm. "I haven't made things easy for you, have I, lass? Not these last years."

"No," she said. "You haven't."

"Do you hate me?"

Sari sighed. "I don't hate you, Michael," she said wearily.

"But you wish I would go away. You said as much once before."

"We don't lead the same lives. We don't care about the same things. I... I don't like your methods. The violence, the ... killing ..." She looked at him frankly. "Yes, I wish you would leave me out of them. I wish you would go away."

"There are no other ways now," he said bitterly, and that light of fanaticism, of hatred, glittered in his eyes. "The company's made sure of that."

She got to her feet. "Michael—"

"All right, all right." He grabbed her hand, forcing her back to her seat. "I'm sorry. Just tell me something, darlin'. Why's Roarke here?"

She jerked her hand from his. "I don't want you to hurt him. Promise me you won't."

"Sari—"

"Promise me."

He sighed heavily. "I won't hurt him—at least not while I'm here," he assured her. His lips broke in a grin, his teeth shone, eerily white, through the darkness of his close-cropped beard. "I promise you. But I don't trust him, and I want to know why he's sniffin' around my sister. Unless it's the same reason he was always sniffin'."

"Michael!"

"Sari, darlin'. Just tell me. I want you to be safe."

She laughed shortly. "That's interesting, given why Conor said he was here."

Michael's brows rose in question.

"He says there's a blackmark against me. That he's here to protect me from assassination."

Her brother sobered. He glanced at the wall, his jaw tightening, and it was those gestures more than anything that told Sari the truth of what Conor had told her.

"There
is
a blackmark," she said quietly.

"You have to understand," Michael said. "They think you gave him information. That you betrayed us."

"And you didn't tell them differently?"

Michael gave her a desperate look. "I couldn't tell them different, Sari. I didn't know." He scowled. "But I did tell them not to touch you. That I wouldn't allow it."

"But they didn't take the blackmark away."

"No, they didn't," Michael agreed.

"So is that why you're here?" she asked, and her heart squeezed with the words. "You were their assassin. Does that mean you've come to kill me? The raid on the soddy ... was that you?"

To his credit he blanched. "I don't know what you're talking about," he said. "There's been no raid."

"But there was," she insisted. "
Onkle
was beaten."

"Not by us," Michael said. "Jesus, Sari. You're my sister. It may not mean much to you, but I do love you. You saved my life; I'll do'what I can to make sure they don't take yours."

Sari felt numb. Her brother's admission shocked her; she hadn't truly believed Conor when he told her she was marked; she had believed Michael had the power to prevent it. That he didn't surprise her. That he'd had nothing to do with the raid . .. She didn't know what to think about that, wouldn't let herself think.

She stood again, backing away from him. "The sleepers are dead, brother," she said firmly. "That way of life is over. Pinkerton crushed it. It's rime you and the others understood that."

His face tightened. "You're wrong—"

"Nineteen men died—not because of Conor but because they broke the law. How many others have to die? How many, Michael?"

"It's not over," he insisted. "We have plans. There are ways...."

"I'll see you hanging from the gallows yet," Sari said. She rose and grabbed her scarf from the table, wrapping it around her hair before she turned to look at him. She saw the anger on his face, that brilliance in his eyes, and wished he were different. Wished everything were different. "I want you to understand one thing, Michael. I'm not helping you get well just so that I can watch you die. This is the last time I help you. The last time. The Christmas dance is in two days. I want you gone by then."

He eyed her steadily. The silence fell between them, stark and heavy, and then he nodded—a short, hard morion. "I understand, sister dear," he said, and there was a touch of mockery in his words and no affection at all.

Sari knotted her scarf around her chin and stepped out into the cold.

C
onor struggled with the fence. The barbed wire ripped at his heavy gloves as viciously as the wind whipped at his face. Particles of ice blew off the evaporating snow on the ground, biting at what little skin wasn't covered by hat or coat or scarf, but he was sweating so with exertion that the frigid blasts almost felt good.

He paused, letting the fence sag, wiping his face with the back of his hand and staring out at the bleak gray and white horizon. This was a hard land. Harder, he expected, than most, but he was beginning to see promise in the far-reaching plains. There was something strangely peaceful about the prairie, something lonely too. He liked the way the land went right to the edge of the horizon, stopped only by the shadowy range of the Rockies that loomed up as if to say,
"Stop right there. No farther for you."

He thought of how it would look when these plains were planted, when wheat and corn nodded their heavy heads in the wind. He wondered if he would like the change, and then smiled at the thought. A month ago just the idea of this land put a chill inside him, made him feel lonely and strange. Now, suddenly, he was imagining how it would look months from now. Imagining himself standing here, watching the changes.

Conor Roarke, a farmer. God, how his friends would laugh if they knew.

Conor frowned at the thought.
Friends
. He tried to put faces to the word and couldn't, and it dawned on him then, standing there in the freezing wind with barbed wire glinting mean and ugly in the cold sun, that he didn't have any friends. He'd had the Mollies, the men he'd laughed and played with—lied to—for two years. The men he'd turned in to the law with a sense of duty that didn't allow regret.

He'd had his father.

And he had Sari.

He wondered if she would laugh at the notion of him tilling the soil. Wondered if she ever imagined it, if she ever thought of what it would be like if he stayed.

He'd been wanting to ask her that question for days now, but he hadn't had a chance to talk to her alone. Charles was always around, and when he wasn't, Sari was mysteriously gone—out to milk the cows or tend the animals, he supposed, and wondered if he would ever know all the things that had to be done on a farm. If she even wanted him to learn.

The question burned inside of him. Lately she'd been evading his gaze; there had been an edge of tension in her body that hadn't been there before. He knew Sari well enough to know what it meant. She was having second thoughts; probably she was regretting those days during the blizzard. She had a tendency to think about things too much; no doubt she'd already decided what the future should be— and whether or not it included him.

Conor glanced down the line. Charles was farther down, working his own line of fence. Conor waited until the old man looked up, and then he waved at him and motioned toward the house. Charles waved back at him, telling him to go on, and Conor stepped away from the fence and walked toward the soddy, determined to find Sari this time, to talk with her.

He was nearly to the house when he saw her. She was hurrying from the back of the yard, her chin lowered, her face buried in her scarf. Her step was quicker than he'd seen it before, almost furtive, and she was carrying something in her arms, holding it tightly against her chest.

He smiled at the sight of her. Quickly he took the last steps and pressed against the soddy wall, waiting until she rounded the corner. When she did, he reached out and grabbed her arm, pulling her against his chest.

She squeaked a scream, dropping what she held in surprise. It clattered to the ground and rolled—a bowl, he saw, splashing what was left of what had been inside across the thin snow.

"Conor," she said breathlessly. "You startled me.”

"Sorry, love." He smiled at her, and then he swooped down and retrieved the bowl, handing it to her with a flourish. "Feeding someone?"

"The... the birds," she said. She motioned limply to the back of the soddy.

"Oh?" He raised an eyebrow, teasing her. "They like stew?"

"Yes." The word came out on a rush of sound. She backed away from him, clutching the bowl again to her chest. Her brown eyes shifted—to his feet, to his chest, to the wall behind him. "You aren't working on the fence?"

"I'm taking a break," he said. "It occurred to me it's been some time since you and I were alone together."

"Oh." She laughed slightly; there was a nervous edge to it that he found endearing. "Yes, I guess so."