Wes stopped in midgulp. “You saw Shadows? No one sees Shadows.”
“I did.” Nodding, Adam ordered, “You’d better get into dry clothes, too.”
Wes took another swig of whiskey. “Stop mothering me, Adam. I’ve lived in mud and rain for half this war. Could you find the Shadow camp again? I’d love to get my hands on a few of them.”
Adam shook his head. He thought of telling Wes about the black-haired, green-eyed woman, but somehow that seemed a betrayal. She’d saved his life, just as he’d saved hers, and they were bound by that even if they stood on different sides of a line. “They were riding out when I escaped. They’re too far south by now.”
Leaning back on his elbows, Wes ignored the mud on his boots as he relaxed on the cot. “For once, you may have an interesting story to tell, but I’ve no time. I’m just riding through toward a little place in Virginia called Appomattox. Word is Lee’s going to surrender. I saw the first of this war at Bull Run, and I figure to see the last.”
He finished the whiskey.
Wes’s words took a few minutes to register. “The war may be over?” Adam let out a long breath.
“It may.” Wes stood and looked at himself in the shaving mirror hanging by the bed. “Daniel is north already with a leg injury. May’s at his side. He’ll be home months before we can get there.” Wes touched a thin scar running across his left cheek, then turned away from his reflection. “But if this war ends, start home as soon as you can. I’ll catch up.”
Adam knew he’d be moving at a snail’s pace with the wounded. Wes would have no trouble finding him. Adam nodded as his brother stepped to the opening.
“Stay safe,” Wes mumbled. “Keep an angel on your shoulder.” He repeated the phrase their mother always told them.
Wes had said the same words since they’d been boys running half-wild. Then he added, as he always did, his own ending. “And your fist drawn until your brother is there to cover your back.”
The older brother disappeared into the maze of tents. For four years, he’d been the best fighter the Union had produced, but if the war was ending, Adam could only guess how Wes would survive. War pulsed through his veins as strongly as peace pumped through their younger brother, Daniel’s.
Adam would be going home to a fiancée, Daniel to a wife, but Wes…
“Bergette!” Adam slapped his forehead. How could he have forgotten about her? He’d kissed another woman without one thought of his fiancée waiting at home. Sweet little shy Bergette who’d promised him she’d wait.
He should be feeling guilty or calling himself every name of the fool he was. But Adam could still taste Nichole’s kiss on his lips. The warm feel of her body sleeping against his chest was still with him. Bergette was a faraway memory, no more than a tintype in his mind, but Nichole had been flesh and blood. He’d almost risk running into her brother if he thought he could find her again.
This war better end fast, Adam thought, or he’d go mad.
Perhaps he already was. He was daydreaming about a Shadow… in every sense. A woman who slipped back and forth across enemy lines. A woman who, if he ever found her again, would probably slip just as easily in and out of his life.
THREE
WES MCLAIN GUIDED his horse ahead as adam spotted the first sight of their farm near Corydon, Indiana. The morning air felt cool, but everything around them was green with the summer of July 1865. Their parents’ home looked like a painting framed in nature’s fullness. The small white two-story house, the old barn in need of repair, the few apple trees their mother always called the orchard, the garden out back big enough to enable them to lay up winter supplies, all spoke of a peace Adam hadn’t known in four years.
“We’re home!” Adam shouted as he started racing his brother down the road.
Suddenly they weren’t soldiers hardened in war, but boys again, racing to their mother’s porch at full gallop. Only a year in age separated Wes from Adam. The two men were within an inch of the same height and with the same coloring, no one doubted they were brothers. But there was a hardness about Wes and a thin white scar on his left cheek that made him seem ages older. He was born to soldiering and it showed in his carriage.
They rounded the corral at full speed and laughed when dust flew to roof high as they reined.
“I beat you as always,” Wes bragged.
“I got out of practice the past few years,” Adam defended as he swung down. “If Mom were alive, she’d be out of her kitchen yelling at us by now.”
Both men glanced at the kitchen door as if expecting her, even though she’d passed on the same winter as her husband. He’d been wounded when Morgan led a raid into Indiana in 1863. Though their father was up there in years, his Irish blood had demanded that he serve in the home guard. Corydon was one of the few towns hit hard by the Southerner’s raid. He’d turned his horses loose at dawn and rode to fight. By nightfall the rebs had taken his entire stock of supplies and left him dying with no one to care for him except their mother.
Adam missed her, but he often thought of the pain she must have felt losing her husband while her sons were far from home fighting.
“And Dad would be running from the barn yelling that we almost rode over Daniel again.” Wes’s words brought Adam back to the present. “Or that we woke Danny boy from a nap and now we’d have to watch him till supper. I don’t remember a day from the time the kid was born that they didn’t accuse us of trying to kill him.” Wes laughed.
“And you almost did!” a voice shouted from the house a moment before Daniel appeared.
Unlike his brothers, Daniel McLain was blond and still thin with youth. Even though he was twenty and had been married for two years, Adam thought of him as “the kid brother.” Not even the leg Dan nursed as he moved down the steps made him seem old enough to have fought in a war.
The McLain men became children once more, roughhousing and hugging one another. A bystander might have had trouble telling whether the brothers were greeting each other or fighting. They didn’t stop until May appeared on the porch. One look at Daniel’s petite wife’s new girth stopped Adam and Wes in midlaugh.
Daniel straightened with pride at their sudden shock. “I guess my letters didn’t reach you two. You’ll both be uncles before the month is out.”
Wes looked uncomfortable, mumbling his congratulations as he moved to the horses. But Adam couldn’t hold back his delight. He hurried up the steps and gave his sister-in-law a careful hug.
Waiting for her nod of approval, he spread his hand over the rounded ball at her middle. She was a tiny woman, not pretty at first sight, but her gentleness softened her imperfections better than any paint and powder could have. The McLain boys had always treated her like a treasure since the day she followed Daniel home from school.
“I’m so glad you made it home before time.” May covered Adam’s hand with her own. “Dan and I want you to deliver our baby.”
“But,” Adam was flattered, and a little frightened, “I haven’t delivered a baby since medical school.”
“Doc Wilson said he’d be near to act as second in case the new uncle faints.” Daniel joined them, slipping his arm lovingly around May’s shoulder. “But with the war over you’ll be birthing plenty of babies now. You might as well start by bringing a new McLain into the world.”
They moved into the kitchen with Wes mumbling about how he hoped he wasn’t going to be asked to do anything. Children had never liked him, he claimed. And now with the scar, most were afraid of him. In fact, he went so far as to comment that babies were like cats-a man wasn’t meant to hold them, but he ought to avoid stepping on them.
Adam stopped just inside the kitchen, closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Nothing had an aroma like his mother’s kitchen. The stove, the hint of soap, the years of baked cinnamon bread and apple pie.