Megan Chance (31 page)

Michael sighed. "You were such an obedient girl once, darlin'." The words held affection, the familiarity of an old jest.

Conor felt sick. "Don't be stupid, Sari."

"I'm not being stupid," she said quietly. "Say what you have to."

He recognized that stubbornness in her voice, and he wondered why he was fighting her. She wanted to stay; well, then, let her stay. If she was strong and smart enough to lie to him, she was strong and smart enough to protect herself.

He turned back to Michael. The other two had not dismounted; their horses pawed nervously at the ground. But there wasn't a nervous twitch in Michael's big body. He seemed completely relaxed—as well he should, Conor thought. There were three of them, and only one of him.
And one big gun,
he amended silently.

"It's been a long time since we've had the pleasure," Michael said, smiling. "I've been looking forward to seeing you again." '

"I've been looking forward to killing you," Conor said.

"Such anger in your voice, Roarke. Surely we ean be friends? We were once." Michael spread his big hands, laughed shortly. "I've missed your stories, laddie. Tell me one now."

"A story?" Conor lifted a brow. "I can tell you a story, friend. I can tell you a story about a priest who never hurt anyone. A good man who met his end when a bomb exploded in my house."

"A priest." Doyle nodded with exaggerated sadness. "It's a sorry tale. But no sorrier than a man who betrayed his friends, and left them all to hang. One priest for nineteen men. Too bad he was a man of God, but that's the way it goes sometimes, eh? A nasty bargain."

Conor's eyes narrowed.

Michael smiled. His teeth flashed in the blackness of his beard. "We wanted you, Roarke. But you're a stubborn man. Too stubborn to die."

Conor caught his breath, remembering the way the Mollies had gathered at the train depot in Shenandoah to kill him. He'd eluded them then and gone to his boardinghouse, where he'd waited up all night, revolver ready, staring through tattered curtains at the moonlight bathing the mountains.

"Protected by that whore, he was," Timmy interjected, scowling.

From the wall Sari gasped.

Michael spun on his heel. "Shut up about her," he said. "She's my sister, don't forget."

Conor waited. Tension coiled inside him, along with a sweet, hot anger, the emotion he relished.

Michael looked back at him. "I want you to leave her alone, Roarke," he said. He nodded toward his sister. "She knows nothing about what I do. Nothing. She'd be just as happy if I disappeared forever."

It was a strange thing to say. Conor wondered if it was true, but he didn't glance at her to see her expression. Told himself he didn't care.

Michael watched him steadily. "Whatever it is that keeps you hanging round my sister, Roarke, you'd better decide if it's worth her life. Because every minute you're around her, you put her in danger." He glanced at Sari; his expression softened for a moment. He murmured something to her, something Conor couldn't read—an apology maybe. Then Michael motioned toward Timmy. "He thinks she betrayed us all. He doesn't believe me when I tell him she knew nothing. And he wants her, Roarke." Michael's voice lowered; it crackled like breaking ice in a spring thaw. "He wants her dead. And he hates you almost as much as I do. Now, I might be able to keep him from hurting my sister, because he loves me like the brother he never had. But I can't keep him from you. And if you're with her..." He shrugged, and smiled again. "He can kill two birds with one stone. Understand me, laddie?"

Conor did. He understood too well. Sari's life was in danger as long as he stayed near her. The thought of it ached like a fist in his gut. But it didn't hurt him the way her lies had. It didn't make him feel empty and foolish and cruel.
"I washed my hands of him."
She'd said the words; he heard them now in his mind, the echoing of her voice, her inflection. He knew she'd said them. But her brother was standing there before him, that thin smile on his lips, and moments before, she had been standing with him, wrapped in his arms, her head bent close to his.

Now Conor understood her evasions. He understood the glances away and her avoidance of him the last few days, and he cursed himself for believing her—loving her—so completely he hadn't seen the lies. She'd been protecting her brother, and she was a terrible liar, and still he hadn't seen it.

Conor thought of her in the moonlight tonight, against the outside wall of the Grange hall, looking at him with sad eyes and saying, "Until you've reconciled it in your own soul, you'll never be at peace with it." He'd thought then he'd seen regret in her eyes, and pain, but now he knew it was only deception.

His heart felt hard as stone, but still her words bedeviled him.
"You'll never be at peace. You'll never be at peace."
He looked at Michael Doyle and knew it was true. He would never be at peace, but now he thought he could live with that. He could live with it because his father was dead, and the man who had killed him was standing in front of him now, a mocking smile on his lips and cold anger in his eyes, and Conor felt fiercely that only Michael's death could assuage that hollowness inside him. If the price was his own peace—well, he would pay it. Because the only reason he'd ever had not to was standing against the wall and watching them, and she had lied to him.

She had lied to him.

He raised his gun, aimed for the spot between Michael's eyes, and cocked the hammer. "I want you dead, Michael," he said as coldly as he could. "Nothing else matters to me. Nothing else."

But he didn't pull the trigger when Michael laughed and turned his back to him, and he didn't pull it even when Michael mounted his horse and looked over his shoulder.

"Good-night, my friend," he said, smiling. "We'll meet again, you and I. Then we'll finish it."

And Conor just stood there. He stood there and watched the man who had killed his father ride away, disappearing with his cronies into the dark vastness of the prairie night, and then he uncocked the gun and let his arm fall uselessly to his side.

"You'll never be at peace."

The words mocked him, and he cursed himself. Because Sari had lied to him, yet he still could not kill her brother in front of her. And though he told himself he hated her, that was the biggest lie of all.

S
he waited for him to say something. The night grew large and silent around them, but he didn't move. He stared off after her departing brother, watching until long after their shadows disappeared into the darkness, standing so still she would have thought him a statue if she hadn't heard the heaviness of his breathing.

Sari didn't move from the soddy wall. She pressed her hands into it, so hard she felt the imprint of the tough, frozen grass through her gloves. She felt frozen to the wall, pinned by the sheer force of Conor's presence, by the anger that floated between them, heavy and palpable in the dry air, and she wanted to go to him, to take his hand and tell him the truth and beg him to change his mind about her brother. She wanted to scream at him,
"I love you,"
and have it be enough for him.

But she knew it never would. So she stood there and waited, and after a while he turned his gaze from the prairie. Turned that cold, cold gaze on her. She shivered. The iciness of his eyes made the winter air feel warm.

"How long has he been here?" He asked the question slowly, so quietly she had to strain to hear him.

"A few days," she said.

"In the soddy?"

Sari licked her lips. "He was ill, Conor. He had a fever. I couldn't turn him out into the cold." She lifted her chin, facing him evenly. "He's family, Conor. He's my
brother
."

"He's a murderer."

"So are you."

That jolted him, she saw without satisfaction. His jaw clenched, his fingers tightened around the gun. "You lied to me."

Sari laughed bitterly. "We've lied to each other. You came after him. I protected him. I may not agree with his means, but do you honestly believe I would put him into your hands?"

"He broke the law."

"And you were going to arrest him and take him to the sheriff?" she challenged. "You were going to let the courts decide?" When he didn't answer, she went on, and all the pain and emptiness she'd felt since the dance came hurtling to the surface. "I didn't think so. You mean to kill him, Conor. You mean to kill my brother. You told me not two hours ago that if I loved you, you would give up this stupid vengeance of yours, that you would let him be."

"That was two hours ago," he said, his voice hollow. "And you didn't make the bargain, did you?"

She hated the sound of his voice. It was so empty, so flat. And she hated the look on his face. She saw the glittering of his eyes even in the darkness, saw the solid tightness of his expression. Sari turned away.

"How long have you been lying to me, Sari?" he asked. "Since Tamaqua?"

"I haven't spoken to my brother in a year," she said steadily. "I didn't lie to you about that. I hadn't seen or heard from him until four days ago. But I can't change the past, Conor. I can't change the fact that I warned Michael to run or that he killed your father. I can't change the fact that I'm afraid—of you, and of Michael, and of this ... this thing between you. I don't understand that kind of hatred. I don't want to be a part of it."

"But you are a part of it, aren't you, love," he said, and there was such sarcasm in his tone, it made her shudder. "You deceived me—"

"You're a fine one to talk about deception, Jamie O'Brien," she reminded him.

"Tamaqua was a job," he said tightly.

"Maybe to you. But those men who died were friends of mine. They had families. They had children. And I..." she took a deep breath. "I fell in love with a man I thought was fine and honorable. Imagine how I felt when I found out everything was a lie."

He laughed bitterly. "The same way I feel now, I imagine."

"Is it?" Sari asked, and her whole body felt clenched and tight as she moved toward him. "Do you even know how to love someone, Conor? Do you even know what it means?"

He stiffened as if she'd shot him. "Go to hell."

Sari stopped. Only a few feet away, but it could have been miles. He was that much a stranger to her. "You go to hell," she said sadly. She walked toward the soddy, beyond him, and in those few steps it felt as if the past had loomed before her, swallowing her up, smothering her, blacking out the future she'd never believed in, the future she hadn't dared to want. "Just don't come back. Don't come back to me, Conor Roarke."

H
e left for Denver in the morning. He got on the train and sat on the hard seats and gazed out the window, watching the flat, treeless country roll by, brown and lifeless under a gray sky, hearing the wheeze and clang of the engine as it dipped uncomfortably into unsettled portions of the track and heaved out again. Now and again a lone soddy came into view. At one he'd seen a woman shade her eyes and turn toward the wind just to see the passing train. She'd waved and then turned back again, as if suddenly realizing she wouldn't see any return hellos, and the unbearable loneliness of the motion made his sadness swell inside him, choking him.

Conor turned away from the window, shifted on the unpadded wooden seat. It was freezing in the little car. The tiny stove in the corner provided little heat, and what it did give was greedily swallowed up by those passengers huddled around it. Not that it mattered. Nothing mattered. Not the cheap coach car filled with dust and the smell of sweat nor the overflowing spittoons that puddled brown and sticky on the floor. Not the noisy chomping of the couple eating hunks of sausage next to him.

The only thing that mattered was the self-hatred inside him. He had known it would come. It had been there when his father had died, along with a nauseating sense of loss and fear and that horrible, inescapable loneliness. It had been there when he turned away from Sari that last time in Tamaqua, had kissed her good-bye and promised to see her tomorrow and known he was never coming back. And now it was here again, tearing a hole inside of him, leaving him with that emptiness ... that horrible emptiness.

Except it was worse now than it had ever been.

Worse because, for a while, for a few moments, he'd harbored a hope that things might be different. That he might have a different future. But it was an illusion, just as it always was.

There had been a moment, when he'd turned from the barn to see Sari's shadow against the dark plains, along with three others, that the hope was still there. A moment when he didn't think immediately of betrayal, but instead thought she was in danger, that the shadows he saw with her must be outlaws. By the time he'd crept up behind them and eased around the back of the soddy, that hope was dead, replaced by another, stronger feeling. Replaced by anger. He should have known, he thought. He should have suspected the lie. She'd been showing the signs of it for days, with eyes that wouldn't look at him and words that were nothing but evasions. But he'd forgotten by then how she'd lied to him about Michael in Tamaqua. She had sworn she hadn't seen him, and yet her brother was gone. Had disappeared into the Pennsylvania mountains as if he'd been warned that hell was about to come crashing down around him.

Conor thought of the ashes of his home, the skeletal frame of a brick chimney silhouetted against the red-pink sky of sunrise. He thought of holding his father's frail, broken body in his arms, and the whispered plea,
"Leave it to God."

He couldn't leave it to God. Those few days when he'd told himself he could, when he'd been willing to trade it all to hold Sari in his arms—those days were gone. Deep inside he'd known it wasn't possible to walk away from it, that the fire of vengeance burned so deep in his soul that only blood could put it out. He'd thought love would be enough for him, but now he knew that Sari was right when she'd thrown those last words at him.
"Do you even know how to love someone, Conor? Do you even know what it means?"