Patricia Rice (28 page)

Or maybe he would do it for her.

Gareth's agile mind immediately worked its way through several interesting possibilities.

* * *

Pace felt the heat of the sun boiling his uncapped hair as, stomach churning, he gazed down at the broken figure of the small boy at his feet. The child couldn't have been more than five or six. He would never see seven. Blood seeped from the crack in his skull.

His glance returned to the path of destruction he had observed when he rode up. He had hoped to find the boy alive at first. Now he had little hope of survivors. His stomach writhed with the horror of what he saw now, of what he had seen every day over these past weeks. War had turned men into animals.

His men stirred restlessly behind him, and Pace pressed himself to continue up the drive to a small farmhouse. Sherman was bent on destroying the symbols of wealth and slavery in his march across Georgia, but Sherman wasn't responsible for this. This lowly farmhouse held nothing of interest to an army on the move. It reminded Pace of Dora's home, two-stories of love and family with flowers outside the front door. They had no slaves here. No riches. Just a lone woman and her children, struggling to survive without the men in their family.

The woman lay in a bundle of worn cotton and twisted petticoats. Pace could tell by the way she lay sprawled across the grass that she hadn't died slowly or peacefully. The bloodthirsty animals running from Sherman's army had satisfied all their hungers here. Pace couldn't tell whether the attack came from deserters from his own side or the other. It scarcely mattered. Dead was dead, no matter who took that life.

He threw his coat over the fair face and cascade of golden hair and shivered. The cold February wind didn't cause his shiver. He thought of Dora living in her farmhouse alone. Charlie would no doubt return to the farm any day now. She wouldn't like staying in the same house with him. Pace didn't like the comparisons between what he saw now and what he'd left behind.

Pace finally retched and threw up the bilious contents of his stomach when he reached the old lady. No human being should suffer the degradations committed on her wrinkled old body. A person should be allowed some dignity after a lifetime of quiet living.

The frozen look of horror on her face stayed with him long after his men had dug shallow graves and buried the bodies. Pace ordered crosses marking the graves in case some poor man should wander home and wonder where his women had gone. But chances were good that man would never return, as thousands would never return. This was the land of the dead.

Even though he walked through hell, Pace still didn't quit. He'd signed on to do a job, and he hadn't finished it. Lee still wreaked havoc in the East. Despite his damaged arm, Pace calculated he wasn't completely useless to the war. He would be if he went home.

Not until the day he took his rest beneath a pecan tree, closing his eyes as the young boy who usually rode beside him took a leak in the shrubbery, did Pace face his future and know his failure.

He heard them coming. That was the terrible part of it. If he'd fallen asleep, he could have excused his ineptitude, but he heard them. They were too far away for his pistol. He reached for his rifle, but he'd laid it on his right side and his arm wouldn't make the stretch. The first bullets rang out as he turned to grab the rifle with his left hand. The piercing scream of the young soldier who had trusted Pace to guard his back destroyed whatever soul remained within him.

Somehow, Pace aimed the rifle and shot the bastards. The repeating action undoubtedly saved his life. There were four of them, and two lay dead before the rest of his troop rode up. The men rode hard after the other two and brought them down, but Pace had gone beyond caring by then. The young soldier in the bushes died in his arm. His one arm. The useless one could scarcely hold the boy.

He had filed his request for discharge by the time the letter arrived.

Pace had read some of the earlier letters from home when they caught up with him. He'd received the telegram notifying him of his father's death, but he wasn't hypocrite enough to attend the funeral. His father had despised him in life; he had no reason to believe he would want him around in death.

He'd held Josie's letter for a few days before opening it. He no longer felt any emotion for the girl he'd thought to marry, but she could still wreak havoc with his thoughts. When he eventually read the letter, her tirade was an anticlimax, and he threw it in the fire.

Dora's letter, on the other hand, frightened the hell out of him before he even opened it. Pace knew Dora well enough to know she wouldn't write unless it was important, not unless he wrote her first, and he hadn't. He didn't want to hear her admonishments for leaving a household of women alone and undefended.

He'd heard of Charlie's imprisonment. It didn't matter anymore. Charlie would come home. Dora had her farm. They didn't need him. He didn't want to think she had any more than that to say to him. He wasn't the man she thought he was.

He eventually burned that letter without reading her quiet admonishments. He was doing his damnedest to come to terms with the fact that he no longer had a home.

He had a future of his own to carve out of the ruins of his life. The political situation in Kentucky had already made it plain no one would welcome a returning Union soldier. Any hopes of a government career had evaporated. The army wasn't precisely his choice, but he’d thought he had possibilities with the army that he didn't have at home.

But the death of that boy soldier and his inability to react quickly in a dangerous situation finished that notion. Death and destruction had seared his soul until he had nothing left. He was worn out, burned out, and a hollow, rotten shell by the time the last letter arrived. He didn't much care what he found inside this new envelope.

The news that Charlie had died in prison didn't even touch him.

Pace calmly folded the letter and shoved it into his inside coat pocket where he had just tucked his discharge papers. He shook the hand of the officer who had handed it to him, walked out of the hotel in Nashville where the office was stationed, and headed for the nearest saloon.

He sat in one corner and quietly drank himself into a stupor. He woke the next morning beside a blowzy brunette who whispered sweet nothings in his ear and tried to earn her keep. Pace lay back against the pillow contemplating her oversized breasts with their flat dark nipples and couldn't find any desire in him. He'd gone without a woman since Dora. He should feel some physical reaction. He felt nothing.

The woman finally took herself off in a flurry of muttered imprecations which didn't improve any when she discovered he had next to nothing in the way of money. He'd sent the last of his pay home to the family of the boy who had died because of him.

Closing his eyes against the raging pain in his head, Pace allowed memories of Charlie to creep in. Charlie had always been there for as long as he could remember. Handsome, well-behaved, easygoing Charlie, the apple of his father's eye. The son who could do no wrong. The perfect son with the perfect wife. Josie was a widow now. Josie owned the farm.

Those thoughts didn't ease the raging pain. Pulling his clothes on, Pace staggered down the stairs and back into the bar. He could gamble his last few coins into a bottle of whiskey without too much trouble.

In the end, one of his men found him passed out in the street and poured him onto the next train going north. All the trains going north out of Nashville went to Kentucky.

* * *

Pace expressed his displeasure vehemently when the conductor woke him from a drunken stupor insisting they'd arrived at his station. He staggered off the train rather than argue. His only problem, when he stood on the wooden station platform and watched the train pull out, was that he didn't know where the hell he was.

He considered it a minute. Most of the effects of the whiskey had worn off. For the moment, he couldn't quite remember why he'd got drunk. The more pressing problem of his location occupied his mind.

He was out of uniform. The coat he wore was unpressed and stank. Pace rubbed his hand over his jaw and concluded he had a three-days' growth at least. His head pounded and his arm ached. He stuck his hands in his pockets and came up empty.

A shout from behind him went ignored until it finally sank in that they addressed him.

"Hey, mister! Is this yor'n?"

Pace turned and noted the horse before discovering his interrogator. The horse was his, all right. Someone had looked out for him. The last time he remembered seeing the gelding, he had stabled it in Nashville. He tried to remember putting it on a train, but the memory failed him.

He staggered over and grabbed the animal's reins. Gallant yanked his head up and down in greeting, then shoved his nose at Pace's pockets, looking for a treat. He found a grubby horehound and offered it while grimacing at the stationmaster.

"Yeah, he's mine. Where in hell am I?"

Discovering he had arrived at a station only twenty miles from home didn't make him any happier. No doubt some good-hearted soul had thought to take care of him, but Pace would have liked it a lot better if they'd just left him in the gutter.

He didn't want to go home, to that house full of obligations that had never belonged to him, weren't meant for him. Let Josie find herself a new husband to take care of the place. He wasn't inclined to oblige anymore, even if marrying Josie meant that the house he called home would finally be his.

But he climbed on the horse and turned it in the direction of the farm, drawn by an instinct he refused to acknowledge.

He didn't allow himself to think as the horse ambled down the road at its own pace. He had a pounding hangover, an empty stomach, empty pockets, and a useless arm. If he thought about it, he'd realize he was dead broke with a wrecked career and no future. Most of his family had died, his friends were probably no better off than he, if they lived at all.

He had proposed marriage to one of the women waiting for him and bedded the other. Thinking about Dora made him doubly uncomfortable. He'd done her wrong, and he had no means of making it right. He'd sent her beau off to be killed, taken her innocence, and offered her nothing in return. He was a useless piece of wreckage.

Dora deserved someone whole in body as well as spirit. He could offer her neither. The best thing he could do for her was stay the hell away. He might be cynical enough to offer Josie the wreckage of what he'd once been, but not Dora. Maybe he should turn this mount around and head for Lexington.

But he kept down the same road. He rode all night since he didn't have money for lodging. He stopped long enough to rest his mount and bathe in a creek. March had just swept in, and the water was cold as hell. The sting took away some of the pain, but he was too tired and hungry to really appreciate the difference.

He was practically asleep in his saddle as dawn rose and his surroundings became familiar. Pace looked longingly at Dora's little farmhouse, but he couldn't tell if she lived there or not. He'd best not take chances. She would likely shoot him for a burglar if he staggered through the door like this.

Not Dora, he corrected himself. She wouldn't have a gun. Remembering that, he smiled a little, but he kept on going. He needed the rest that little house offered, and he knew where she kept the key, but he couldn't do that to her. He had to confront her properly first.

Pace cut across the field rather than go up the lane. No one had laid out the tobacco bed. He saw no sign of spring plowing, but maybe it had been too wet. The sun shone now, and the field seemed dry enough. Someone should be up and stirring, taking out the plow before the next spring storm arrived. These conditions didn't last forever this time of year.

As the house loomed closer, he only saw one figure out and about. A straggly trail of smoke wafted from the kitchen chimney, so perhaps someone else was up and just not visible. Pace strained his eyes to see who would hoe the kitchen garden this early in the morning, but the shape was unfamiliar.

The white bonnet was not.

Pace's gaze frantically swept the gray landscape, taking in the burgeoning tree buds, a scattering of daffodils, looking anywhere but at the cumbersome figure hoeing the garden. Awful curiosity drew his gaze back to those bulky skirts. His eyes rose again to take in the old-fashioned bonnet. He rode closer, his stomach clenching in knots.

The bonnet came up at the sound of his horse. Her fingers tightened around the hoe handle as she straightened when he rode through the back gate.

Dora.

Pace's gaze dropped to the full curve of her belly beneath the pristine white apron. Dora, pregnant. With child. His child. That awful certainty knotted beneath his breast.

He clenched the reins and tried not to stare, but his attempt came too late. Her cold gaze warned she'd already noted his horror. Her expression wasn't any more welcoming than his when he dismounted.

Chapter 21

They have ty'd me to a stake; I cannot fly,