Seduced (9 page)

“I didn’t see you there, Melody,” he said. His face beneath the dripping water was red. He was embarrassed.

You are a man
, she thought. The tightening in her stomach, not quite painful, but not at all comfortable, not sexual in any way. Just precisely, exquisitely aware.

Since the war she'd been afraid of men, of the potential threat of them. Just days ago she'd been terrified of this same man, in this same clearing.

But suddenly she remembered
liking
them. Their bodies. Their smiles. The deep timber of their voices. The foreign nature of their masculinity and how it used to make her feel so protected and powerful all at once.

And she was lost somewhere in the awkwardness of his bare chest and her not being afraid. The manners that had ruled her life had long been forgotten, but the survival of the past few years left her with so few graces to navigate this situation.

“I was getting water,” she said, lifting the bucket, because she needed to say something.

He nodded.

“The other day—” She pointed to the flowers, where the indentation of her body could still be seen.

His smile was brief and startling, his face transformed. “Before the war that wouldn't have even made me look twice,” he said. “My sister was fond of naps in tall grass. It's something I forgot about.”

“Me too,” she said.

Silence rippled between them. The sun was skewered on the tops of the trees to the east.

“I slept two days away.”

“You must have needed it.”

“Who knew shooting your own husband could be so exhausting?”

Mama always said her sarcasm was ugly. Made her ugly, and his stunned expression was the proof right now. Mortification burned through her.

“I’m sorry—” she breathed. She was truly not herself and it was alarming to have so little control.

“You shot him three times,” he said. “Triple the exhaustion.”

Shocked, she laughed, a loud bark that wasn’t refined or ladylike or anything but honest. It felt good.

“That explains it.” This man standing here with the shy, quiet smile was a far cry from the cold killer she’d first thought him to be. “And you, you must just be tuckered from pretending to be an oil prospector.”

“Now that you mention it, I suppose I am.”

She narrowed her eyes at him, enjoying the teasing. “Do you even know anything about oil?”

“Not one thing. I have pretended to be a dentist, a doctor, a railroad man and an oil prospector. I fear since the war all I am is a very good liar. “

“You’re not alone,” she said, thinking of her many lies. “My mother would not be proud.”

His laughter was dark and rich and lovely, but it covered a grief. And perhaps a shame. Same as hers. “Neither would mine,” he said.

She smiled at him for too long and he began to clear up his shaving things with hurried hands.

“You…you and your brother must have so much to catch up on,” she said, reluctant to see him go. She'd been social before the war, a gossip more than anything, but Jimmy had kept them in hotel rooms and distant camps far away from people for ten months. She missed conversation.

“We do.” His smile was a glimpse into a hundred memories, a lifetime of shared moments. “I haven’t seen him since the war started. He was the first from our town to volunteer. I wasn’t so brave and joined later.”

Six years. The thought of those years without her sister was awful. She quite simply would not have survived.

“My sister has been my greatest comfort these last years. I could not imagine not having her by my side.”

“It’s… it’s like losing a little bit of who you are.” Cole wiped water from his face. He had a fine chin. Dimpled but strong. And his lips were . . . well, they were lovely. “And there are only the two of us left. My parents, my brother and sister. All gone. If Jimmy had killed Steven . . . ” He shook his head as if he just didn’t have words for that reality.

Her hands strangled the edge of the bucket. The threadbare charm she wore for Jimmy was nowhere to be found, and she felt naked and raw under Cole’s gaze. All she could think of was his face as he handed her that gun. The way he seemed to understand that her soul was less important than killing the man who had taken so much from her.

“I would have shot Jimmy myself,” he said softly, as if he could see the place her thoughts had gone. “He was going to die, by your hand or mine, it didn't matter. So if your guilt—”

“I didn't know I wanted that,” she whispered, interrupting him. “How did you?”

He blinked, but did not look away. Did not seem discomfited by the sudden familiarity between them. That act—him handing her the gun and her using it to shoot Jimmy—it stitched them together in an ugly violent seam. “I thought you should have the choice.”

“Choice?” A raw bubble of mirth exploded from her lips. There had been no choice but survival for many years. And now suddenly she had too much.

Choice was a burden she didn’t want to carry.

“My brother and I discussed your intention to leave in two weeks,” Cole said. “But my brother has to travel back to Denver to receive a shipment a month from now, which I know extends your stay, but it would save us a trip.”

She struggled not to take a giant, relieved breath. A month was a fine reprieve. “I'll have to talk to my sister, but I think that's agreeable.”

“Your . . . ” he gestured up to his own eye. “Your face looks better. Not so swollen.”

“That’s too bad, I was thinking of a career on the stage as a monster. Scaring children.”

“We’ll, we’d better get you back to Denver quick, before it all fades and you are beautiful again.” As far as flattery went, she’d had better. Christopher had been silver-tongued. Poetic, nearly, in his appreciation for her hair and eyes and lips. But still she felt a wild, hot blush sweep up her neck and across her cheeks.

She lifted the pail. “I . . . I need to get water. I’m making biscuits.”

Cole smiled and there was something boyish in his expression. Something young and happy. She had not seen that in their short acquaintance and it left her off-balance. “I haven’t had biscuits in a long time.”

“You shouldn’t get your hopes up. I haven’t made them in a while. I might have forgotten how.”

“I’m sure they’ll be wonderful.”

“I wish I had some plum preserves to put on them for you.”

His surprise should have been embarrassing for both of them. She’d been too forward with her sudden strange consideration. Too eager. But it was only kindness.

Which was why it seemed so odd, because kindness was an animal neither of them had seen in such a long time.

“What are you doing with this land?” Cole pointed to the soil she and her sister had turned what felt like years ago.

The plot was so pretty, a fresh black rectangle in a sea of green. “A kitchen garden. We wanted to grow something,” she said. At his silence, she realized how presumptuous that was. And all that embarrassment she refused to feel was a wave sweeping her up.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. The thin cotton of her skirt clung to hands that were suddenly damp. “Truly. Perhaps we could—”

“Put it back?” He laughed and she smiled at the thought. What a surprise this man was. “What were you going to grow?”

“My . . . my sister and I brought seeds from home and gathered more along the way.” She could feel him looking at her, the heat of his gaze like the sun against her skin. “Carrots, beets, peas, strawberries, corn. Some fruit trees. Plums, mostly. Peaches.”

“Plums,” he said. Actually, he nearly gasped.

Her smile was real; she felt its pleasure all through her body. “We will give you a seed to plant. The trees take a long time to grow, but eventually you will have your plum.”

“That . . . that is very kind. Once, on the march in Georgia, I found a jar of plum preserves in a cellar. I ate it with my fingers and nearly cried.”

She went cold at his words.

“You marched with Sherman?” she asked, and he stilled as if he realized what he’d done. He’d opened the door everyone preferred would stay shut.

Slowly, he nodded.

“My home was near Savannah.”

Sherman’s Christmas present to Lincoln.

“I’m sorry.” His words were as naked as he’d been when she walked out here. Truly he appeared sorry.

Sorry would not return her life to her. Her mother and father and fiancée. All her uselessness and frivolity. But all of that seemed very far away now. That girl she’d been, that life. It was a dream. She had no more hate and anger to heap upon this man. Perhaps killing Jimmy had lanced that wound; she didn’t know and didn’t have the energy to care.

“I joined the war believing in something,” Cole said. “But, at this moment, I could not tell you what it was.”

“You won,” she said.

“My father died at Bull Run, my brother and I enlisted with the Union, my younger brother went to the Rebels, and I have heard no word from him since the morning he left. My mother and sister, when the fighting grew too close, went south to Charleston to stay with her people there. I never saw them again. My family’s home was burned down, the fields are burial grounds. If that is winning, I can’t imagine what losing feels like.”

She touched his hand, just above the thumb where there was a dip, a small pocket of skin that was warm and damp, and then she pulled her hand away. Cold comfort perhaps, but all she had.

“Remarkably,” she said, “it feels the same.”

DAYS PASSED WITH a strange harmony. The kind he'd never thought to experience again. Cole built the smokehouse and in the dawn hours he hunted and fished to fill it so they would have food over the winter. Melody made the most of what he brought back to the cabin, surprising all of them with what she could do with the wild plants she and Annie found while foraging in the woods.

Steven got stronger, though Annie still clucked over him. Yesterday morning he'd snapped at her to stop touching him. That he needed no more fussing and he could dress his own wounds. Annie had stiffened, her hands pulled away as if she'd accidentally stuck them in a fire. She quit the cabin, mumbling something about finding Melody.

“You could have done that better,” Cole said into the silence.

"She touches me too much."

"She's only checking your wounds," Cole said.

Steven didn't answer.

"Are you accusing her of touching you for some other reason?" Cole asked, attempting to tease, but Steven's eyes flared and Cole didn't know what his brother was thinking.

"Whatever her reasons, it's too much," Steven said and rolled over, leaving Cole to wonder how his brother could be right there and at the same time, so distant.

The quiet industry of the four of them working together in that clearing, it reminded him of the very best days with his family. And those memories pressed against his skin, his head, making him ache. Every night, he found himself on his feet after supper, leaving the cabin at twilight as if it were an enemy to run from.

He’d marched for four years as a Union soldier and the war had replaced living and vital flesh with a cancer of memory. And then he’d gone west, eating his own heart so what was left of him wouldn’t notice the horrors he was committing in the name of finding his brother.

The countless dead, laid to rest with his hands.

There had been the boy soldiers in the war, with their hairless faces and terrified eyes. His first bounty outside of Independence, a stagecoach robber who’d pissed his pants and begged for his life. The two brothers who’d raped and murdered the mayor’s daughter outside of St. Louis. The horse thieves with dead eyes and bad aim. That red braid in the dust.

He’d thought when he found Steven, when he put his guns away, he would find some peace. But apparently, that was not to be.

And Melody. He'd thought, so foolishly that first night with Jimmy and all of her forced and merry conversation, that he'd been charmed by her, by the ray of sunshine her laughter forced into his world. But the sight of Melody lying in those flowers, staring up at the sky as if she'd seen the face of God, that rolled the rock away from his cave and now there was too much light to run from.

And he’d handed her that gun! Given her the opportunity to live as he did, restless and disturbed. Half-human.

She’d actually joked about killing her husband, but he could sense the edge of panic in her and he wondered if she was haunted now. If he’d done that to her, offered her the means with which to gather her own ghosts. He could not bear himself. He spread his own disease without thinking. Without noticing.

One morning, a week after he'd been in the clearing, he and Melody sat on the porch and skinned rabbits, waving away the flies that buzzed around their heads. The fur he would trade when they went to Denver, but he kept some aside for them, thinking of warm, fur-lined gloves for winter.

“My brother was a terrible hunter,” she murmured, breaking the thick silence between them. She was smiling. Thinking of her dead brother, her hands covered in blood and gore, and she was smiling. A quiet internal smile, so different than the forced frivolity she'd shown him at first. It was as genuine and real and sweet as anything he'd seen. “Fishing was worse. He couldn't sit still, or stay quiet for longer than a minute. He had the patience of a mayfly. Father got to the point he didn't even try anymore and he started taking Annie with him.”

“Was she a good hunter? With her leg?”

“Better than my brother. She could sit still and wait. Without her skill, we would have been far hungrier during the war.”

She did this all the time, engaged him in these small conversations as if she were leaving a breadcrumb trail outside his cave to draw him out. And it worked, over and over again it worked, and he found himself talking to her more than he'd talked for months at a stretch.

“Your brother died?” he asked.

“Kernstown.”

“First or second?”

“First. Mama died not long after. Went to sleep in her rocking chair and didn't wake up. But it's a relief to me now, thinking of her in heaven with Father and Joel.” With the back of her wrist she brushed back a long blonde curl that had fallen over her face. “What about your brother?”