Tempted (20 page)

“You hear me, Melody?” he snapped, his joy at finding the man he'd been hunting replaced by irritation with her.

Usually she'd immediately placate him if they weren't setting an ambush. But the strict rules that she followed, in an effort to keep the violence against herself reduced to some manageable level, were wiped away by the specter of this larger violence.

“I'm going to check on Annie.” She didn't wait for Jimmy's permission before lifting her faded blue skirts and sprinting across the clearing and into the forest.

Her sister—so calm, so familiar in their brother's old jacket, her glasses sliding down her nose—stood beside three horses who had long ago grown used to gunfire. They calmly nosed the pine needles on the ground, looking for grass.

We could ride away.

With Jimmy so preoccupied with Mr. Baywood, they could get on those horses and head west. Or back to Denver.

They had tried it once, with disastrous results. Jimmy had caught them outside of St. Joseph, hurt Melody so bad they'd had to stay for a week until she could move without pain. But certainly they'd learned something from that failure? How to cover their tracks better? How to move faster, ride all night?

The thought was mirrored in Annie's anxious and knowing brown eyes. She could practically hear her sister saying the words.

But Melody still remembered what Jimmy had said while beating her like a dog who'd disobeyed:
Next time it will be your sister I kick, and I won't stop.

“We can't,” Melody whispered, trying to talk both of them out of it. She'd done so little to protect her sister after the war, she had to try now. “We have no money. No means. He'd find us. Jimmy will kill Mr. Baywood, steal the gelding in the barn and find us within the day.”

And kill you. He'd kill you, Annie.

Annie grabbed Melody's hands.

“I know.”

“You go.” Melody's fingers bit hard into Annie's, so hard her sister gasped. Or perhaps it was what Melody was suggesting that made her eyes go wide with horror and astonishment. “I'm serious, Annie. Get on the horse and go. I'll keep him here. He might—” Well, this was awful, but probably true nonetheless. “He might not care.”

“I care and I will not leave you.”

“Jimmy means to kill this man.” A rare wave of hysteria swept over her. Mr. Baywood had been a Yankee soldier, a prisoner at Andersonville where Jimmy had been a guard during the last months of the war. Melody didn’t know what happened between them, how Mr. Baywood had escaped or why Jimmy deserted and fled with him. All she knew was that somehow Mr. Baywood had betrayed him. And Jimmy had spent the last ten months tracking him down. “I don't know what his crimes are. I keep telling myself that perhaps he deserves it. That he might be an evil man. But he has...he has built a cabin. With the most ridiculous porch...”

Annie squeezed her hands until the pain snapped her back from the edge of panic.

“Perhaps it's not his cabin?” Annie asked.

The lunacy of false hope. Melody had clung to it too many times, only to feel it capsize under the weight of her grim reality. Melody closed her eyes, wishing all over again with every scrap of strength that she had left that she could somehow reverse every decision she'd ever made that led them to this clearing.

“Please go,” she whispered. “You'll find work. You'll be safe.”

“Not without you,” Annie whispered. “This might not even be his cabin.”

Melody took a deep breath and then another, reaching out again for the thin, unpredictable comfort of false hope, if for no other reason than to help her sister cling to hers. “Perhaps.”

Hand in hand they turned and walked back to the cabin, going slowly to accommodate Annie's club foot, and because they were in no hurry to be party to an ambush.

“It's a fine porch,” Annie whispered.

Melody bit back a sob.