Nearer, he drew nearer to her, nearer and nearer…
He started to cough. His eyes flew open.
The only Circe that awaited him was the faithful bay mare, snorting now upon his soaking cheek. Malachi staggered to his feet and looked from his sodden clothing to the stream. He had fallen in, he realized, and nearly drowned.
He had been saved by a dream. The dream of a lush and beautiful woman with golden hair that streamed down her back, and eyes to match a summer's day.
He touched his cheek. At least the stream had cut his fever. He could ride again.
He should find attention for his leg, he thought. But he couldn't spare the time. He had to reach Missouri. He had to warn Cole.
"Come on, Helena," he told the mare, securing the reins and leaping upon her back. "We need to head on west. Home. Only we haven't got a home anymore. Can you believe that? All these damned years, and we still aren't at peace yet. And I get shot by a kid who still has to have his mother tell him to scrub behind the ears. And I dream about beautiful blond temptresses." He shook his head, and Helena whinnied, as if she doubted the sanity of her rider.
Maybe he wasn't sane anymore.
He grinned as he kept riding through the night. It had been a funny dream. Curious how his Circe had seemed so familiar. His sister-in-law, Kristin, was a beautiful blond, but it hadn't been Kristin…
Malachi was so startled that he drew in sharply on his reins and the bay spun around.
"Sorry, old girl, sorry!" Malachi told the horse. Then he went thoughtfully silent, and finally laughed out loud.
It hadn't been his sister-in-law in the dream, but it had been Shannon, Kristin's little sister. Kristin's obnoxious little sister! Willful, spoiled, determined, proud…obnoxious! He'd itched to take a switch to her from the moment they had first met.
But it had been Shannon in the dream. Shannon's eyes had beckoned him, sultry and sweet. Shannon's hair had streamed in a burst of sun and fire around the slender beauty of her form. Shannon's lips had formed to issue whispers of passion.
And he had thought when the dream ended that he had lost his temptress! he told himself dryly.
Well, he had not. He was riding toward the spitfire now, and he could almost guarantee that their meeting would not be sweet, nor would she beckon to him, or welcome him.
If he knew Shannon, she wouldn't be waiting with open arms.
She'd be waiting with a loaded Colt.
"Doesn't matter much, Helena," he told his horse. "Damn it!" he swore out loud to the heavens. "When will this war be over for me?"
There was no answer. He kept riding through the night.
CHAPTER ONE
June 3rd, 1865
The Border Country, Missouri
The McCahy Ranch
Someone was out there.
Someone who shouldn't have been out there.
Shannon McCahy knew it; she could feel it in her bones.
Even though the sunset was so deceptively peaceful!
It was peaceful, beautiful, quiet. Radiant colors soared across the sky, and sweetly kissed the earth. There was a silence and a stillness all around. A soft breeze just barely stirred, damp and sweet against the skin. The war was over, or so they said.
The night whispered tenderly of peace.
Peace…
She longed for peace. Just ten minutes ago she had come outside to watch the night, to try to feel the peace. Standing on the wide veranda, leaning idly against a pillar, Shannon had looked out over the landscape and had reflected on the beauty of the night.
The barn and stables stood silhouetted against the pink-streaked sky. A mare and her foal grazed idly in the paddock. The hills rolled away in the distance and it seemed that all the earth was alive with the verdance and richness of the spring.
Even Shannon had seemed a part of the ethereal beauty of the night. Elegant and lovely, her thick hair twisted into a knot at her nape, little tendrils escaping in wisps about her face. Tall and slim, and yet with curved and feminine proportions, she wore a luxurious velvet evening gown with a delicate ivory lace collar that fell over the artfully low-cut bodice.
She was dressed for dinner, though it seemed so very peculiar that they still dressed every evening. As if their pa was still with them, as if the world remained the same. They dressed for dinner, and they sipped wine with their meat— when they had wine, and when they had meat—and when their meal was over, they retired to the music parlor, and Kristin played and Shannon would sing. They clung so fiercely to the little pleasures of life!
There hadn't been much pleasure in years. Shannon McCahy had grown up in the shadow of war. Long before the shots fired at Fort Sumter signaled the start of the Civil War in April 1861, Missouri and Kansas had begun their battling. Jayhawkers had swooped in from Kansas to harass and murder slave owners and Southern sympathizers, and in retaliation, the South had thrown back the bushwhackers, undisciplined troops who had plundered and killed in Kansas. Shannon McCahy had been only a child when John Brown had first come to Missouri, but she remembered him clearly. He had been a religious man, but also a fanatic, ready to murder for his religion. She had still been a child when he had been hanged for his infamous raid on the arsenal at Harper's Ferry.
So she really couldn't remember a time of real peace.
But at least the thunder now no longer tore at the earth. Rifles and pistols no longer flared, nor did swords clash in fury. The passion of the fight was over. It had died in glorious agony and anguish, and now every mother, sister, lover and wife across the nation waited…
But Shannon McCahy hadn't come outside to await a lover, for she had the questionable luxury of knowing that her fiance lay dead. She even knew where he was buried.
She had watched the earth fall, clump by clump, upon his coffin, and each soft thud had taken a bit more of her heart.
The war had robbed her blind. Her father had been brutally murdered in front of her by bushwhackers, a splinter group of Quantrill's infamous Raiders. And in the summer of 1862 Zeke Moreau and his bushwhackers had returned to the McCahy ranch to take her sister, Kristin. But that had also been the day that Cole Slater had walked into their lives, his guns blazing. He had saved them from being murdered and eventually married Kristin. After that his name kept them safe from the bushwhackers, but the war had still gone on. And ironically, she and Kristin had then been arrested by the Yankees for giving aid and succor to Cole, just because once upon a time Cole had briefly ridden with Quantrill.
But Shannon had fallen in love with the Yankee officer who had pulled her from the wreckage of their prison when the faulty old building had literally fallen to pieces. For a brief time, she had believed in happiness.
Until Robert Ellsworth had been slain by the bushwhackers.
In the end, Zeke Moreau and his bushwhackers had come back to the ranch one last time. Cole had ridden in with his brothers and their Confederate cavalry company, and Shannon's brother, Matthew, had brought his Union compatriots. For one sweet moment, there had been no North, and no South, just a fierce and valiant stand against injustice.
But the war was over now.
No…never. Never in her heart, she thought. Then she stiffened, suddenly alert and wary.
There was a movement out by the stables. She blinked and stared again, and felt a quickening in her stomach, a streak of cold along her spine.