Kid jumped down from the buckboard and came around her Lou's side.  He made a motion as if to pick her up out of the wagon, but she pushed his hands away in frustration and stood on her own.

"I can walk ya know.  It's my shoulder that had the bullet in it, not my legs," Lou muttered peevishly.

Kid sighed.  "Alright, but let me help ya down before ya fall down and hurt somethin' else, maybe somethin' serious," he replied.  He grasped her around her small waist and swung her down without another protest.

She walked toward the house, just staring calmly at it.  Her lack of reaction seriously worried Kid who wondered if she was in shock.  Following her, he could see that her attention had been drawn to the front wall of the house.  The wall was blackened and had fallen in on itself.  However, one whole window was intact, the glass unbroken but covered in soot.  Louise stared for long moments at the miraculous sight.  Surely the glass should've broken when the wall fell in if not from the heat, but it hadn't.

One windowpane, that was all that was left of the dream she'd worked so hard for.  One windowpane.  Suddenly, Louise bent and grabbed a rock from the ground near her feet and launched it at the window shattering the paneglass.  "One lousy, goddamned windowpane!" she shouted, furiously chucking rocks at the window and the rest of the ruined house.  "What the hell am I gonna do with one gaddamned window?!"  Her screams and curses were soon interspersed with sobs and her throws got weaker and weaker.

Kid rushed to her side, having been startled by the vehemence of her anger at first.  He wrapped his arms around her sobbing heaving form from behind, trapping her arms beneath his and supporting her weight as she sank to her knees.  He held her tight, burying his face in her hair as her whole body heaved with loud cries of anger, frustration, and sorrow.  "Shhhh, baby, it'll be okay.  Shhh," he soothed.

"What am I gonna do?" Lou sobbed.  "I don't have the money to start all over again.  Where am I gonna put the furniture I ordered that should be comin' any day?  Or the animals when they get here?  Can't just let 'em run wild.  And the babies.  Oh, God what about Tessa and the baby?  I put almost everything I have into this place and now it's gone!"

"We'll manage, baby," Kid said soothingly, kissing her neck and rocking her slightly.  "You ain't alone in all this, Angel.  Rachel and Teaspoon won't turn you out and we've always got my place in town.  We can stay there 'til we rebuild out here, but we'll manage."

She turned around in his arms to face him.  "We?" she hiccupped, hardly able to believe she'd heard him right.

Kid looked at the stunned expectation on her tear-streaked face that made her look so vulnerable.  He hadn't realized his blunder until she'd turned around, but it was too late to take it back.  He could try, but she'd caught him, caught him thinking and planning their future.  He'd been so worried she'd make herself sick with her actions, that all he'd focused on was calming her down and he'd let his guard down.  Kid swiped at her tears and swallowed hard.  "Yeah, 'we'," he replied.  "That is, if you'll have me."

Tell him, tell him! her mind demanded fiercely.  Lou looked down awkwardly a moment.  "Uh, Kid, there's, um, somethin' I need to tell you first," she said softly, pulling away from him.  "There's some things you don't know about me that you should if there's ever gonna be a...a 'we'."

"Alright," Kid said, standing up.  He extended his hand down to Lou and helped her to her feet.  "How 'bout we sit over there," he said indicating a large rock situated beneath a good sized birch tree.

Louise sat next to him, her hands shaking slightly so that she clutched them together.  "You've gotta promise me that you won't say anythin' 'til I'm done," she said.  She hated that even her voice shook as she spoke.

"Sure, no problem, Angel," he said softly, pushing back a piece of hair that had escaped her braid.

He seemed so confident, so sweet, so loving.  But for how long, Lou thought.  Would he still look at her the same way once he knew?  God, she hoped so.  She took a deep, steadying breath.  "Here goes.  Well, you know how Danny and I ran away from the orphanage.  I was fourteen and the real world outside the orphanage walls was tougher than I'd ever thought it could be.  We had no money, no food, and nowhere to go.  No one would hire a couple kids, so we did what we could.  Sleeping in the stable at night, stealing food during the day, sometimes pickin' pockets if we had to....  But that only lasted so long."

Her eyes left his and she stared out over the landscape.  "We were found by a man named Simon Wicks.  We thought it was all over and we were headed back to the orphanage.  Wicks gave us jobs serving drinks and doing laundry at one of his gaming houses."

Lou's mouth hardened into a thin line.  "Seems Wicks had more in mind for me than just doin' laundry.  A year later he, uh...."  She stopped short, trying to find a word she could use.  "He busted into my room and...and forced himself on me.  I tried to forget about it, tried to wish it away, but I couldn't and I never told anyone what he did...including you," she said, her voice breaking a bit at the end.  "I never told you that I wasn't the girl you thought I was because I was so afraid you wouldn't want me if you knew."

"Of course I'd want you," Kid protested, unable to keep silent anymore.  "What happened wasn't your fault, Angel.  It's never a woman's fault that a man can't control himself.  Even if you'd told me, it wouldn't have changed a thing, Lou.  I wanted you then and I want you now."  He reached for her and was surprosed when she pulled away.

"There's more," Lou said in a quiet voice.

"More?  What d'you mean more?"

Lou stood and turned her back on him where he still sat on the rock.  "It happened again in Denver."

Her voice was so quiet, Kid wasn't sure for a moment that he'd heard right.

"I was hiding in the house with the children, watching from a window when the soldiers grabbed Tanner and began to string him up.  Before I could stop him, 'Miah had run out into the middle of them.  I sent Tessa into the basement with Lexi, knowing they'd be safe there and ran outside, but not in enough time to stop one of the soldiers from grabbing 'Miah," she continued.  She could see it all as if it were yesterday, every image burned indelibly in her mind.  "They were gonna kill him, Kid, and I couldn't just stand by and watch.  So, I...I offered myself in his place.  I knew what they'd do to me, but I'd lived through it before.  I'd do anythin' to save my baby brother."

The world wavered before Kid's eyes as the reality of what she was trying to tell him penetrated his brain.  Unable to stop himself, Kid's brain filled in with detailed images the rest of her story.  He saw her as she desperately negotiated with the soldiers, watched as the leader pushed her to the ground and tore at her clothes.  In his mind he cried out as Jeremiah tried to run to her aid only to be met with another soldier's bullet.  He heard Lou scream, the soldiers' laughter ringing out, and saw her pass out in terror before the leader actually began his abuse of her unconscious form.  Kid shook his head furiously, trying to dislodge the images that tortured him.  He closed his eyes tightly and pressed the heels of his hands against them to stem the tears building up.  "Stop!  Just stop," he ordered.  "I don't wanna hear anymore!"

Lou'd turned to him, her eyes overflowing once again, knowing, seeing that she was hurting him, but unable to stop being honest once she'd started.  The end was so close.  If they could only last until the end....  "You may not want to hear this, but I've gotta tell you," she sobbed.  "I've gotta trust you with this because I don't want there to be anymore secrets.  I owe you the truth, Kid."

"Maybe I don't want the truth anymore!" Kid ground out between clenched jaws.  "Maybe I don't wanna hear about how many men I've shared you with."

She walked to him, confused over his reaction.  "Why?  Why is this so different for you than when I told you about Wicks?" Lou asked.

"Because Danny already told me about Wicks, dammit!  Never told me about this, though, and no wonder," he said angrily.

Betrayal rocked through Lou, but she couldn't focus on that for the fog of hurt that shadowed her senses.  For one moment she prayed that the tree would fall on her and kill her.  Anything would be easier than this, this ache filling her stomach.  Her eyes were wide as she shook her head in denial.  "I never should've told you," Louise whispered.  "This is why I never told you before.  I knew you wouldn't understand."  She was getting angry now.  How dare he judge her when all she was trying to do was make things right between them.  "You know what?  You pretend to be such a good man, so understanding.  You say you're different from the rest of them but you're not really.  This just proves that you're just like every man I've ever known who thinks there are two sets of rules in this world!"

"You lied to me, Lou!  You've had all this time to tell me the truth about Denver and you didn't."

Louise turned her back on him and began walking toward the buckboard.  Suddenly she turned back to him and stomped over to stand beneath his nose.  "Well, I'm sure as hell not the only one to lie in this relationship, Kid," she ground out.  "You told me once that you'd love me forever, that nothing I could ever do or say, nothing I'd ever done in the past would change that.  Do you remember that lie, Kid, huh?  I was bein' honest when I told you I couldn't marry you.  And you know why?  Because of this!  What happened to loving me forever then?  It was forgotten pretty easy when the next pretty face came into town!"

Kid looked down into her angry and hurt face, her words biting into him.  "So I screwed up, Lou," he shouted.  "I screwed up really bad and I paid the price when you disappeared without a trace.  This has nothin' to do with what happened then or what happened since with Wicks and the soldiers.  It's about trust Lou.  Obviously you don't trust me and if you don't trust me, then you don't love me either!"

"And if you ever loved me, you wouldn't have moved on to the first skirt you saw barely a week after you and me broke up!"  Lou yelled back at him.  "You have no idea what I've gone through, how horrible I've felt because I couldn't tell you.  And I did trust you Kid.  I do trust you.  I let you touch me and hold me and kiss me when I'd never let any man touch me outside of a handshake since Wicks.  If letting you make love to me, having your child, and going through this hell just to be honest with you doesn't prove to you that I love you and I trust you, then I don't know what else to do!"

"I don't know, Lou," he sighed.  Kid passed a weary hand over his face.  "It's just...just so much and I've got all these damned pictures in my head that I can't get rid of!"

"Do you think it's easy for me?  It was my body?!"  She walked away from him again, crossing her arms as best she could across her chest.  "Do you have any idea what it's like to feel so...so helpless, to fight as hard as you could and know it wasn't enough?"  Lou shuddered uncontrollably.  "You have no idea what it's like to know someone had touched you in places that were meant to be sacred, places only your husband was to touch.  You'll never know what it's like to have someone use your body without askin', to have him inside you and never be able to wash his touch away no matter how hard you scrub!"

Kid closed his eyes desperately trying to rid himself of the pictures that continued to swirl through his head, pictures that got increasingly more graphic.  They whirled within his mind, behind his eyes and he was powerless to stop them, powerless to stop what was happening -- what had already happened.  He couldn't help her, couldn't stop the man from nearly crushing her tiny, delicate body with his own or the large, dirty hands that gripped and bruised and tore and took.  He didn't want to see it anymore.  He didn't want to watch her go through hell, knowing that if he'd only patched things up with her sooner, she'd never have left, never have witnessed the brutal murder of her friend and baby brother, never have had her freedom and her trust and her joy taken away.

Why wouldn't the pictures go away? Why couldn't he stop them?  A rising tide of fury threatened to drown him in darkness and he struck out at the nearest object: the hard trunk of the birch tree beside him.  "Get out of my head?!" Kid shouted to the spectral images, striking out against the wood of the tree repeatedly.

She'd never seen him so angry.  If the tree had been a man, the man would easily be dead, probably unrecognizeable by the end.  His anger brought images of Wicks and the soldiers back to her and she jumped, longing to run away and hide, to shelter herself from the storm.  Lou'd never realized he was capable of such cruelty and she found herself actually scared of him, fearing that his anger may yet turn on her.

The pain that exploded through his hand upon impact with the tree's bark felt good.  It was nothing compared to what Louise had gone through, he knew.  He wished he could take the pain from her, feel it himself and he hit the tree again and again and again, imagining it to be the body of Lou's anonymous abuser.  Wood chips flew from the trunk as he slammed his fist into it.  Then his hand began to throb and he looked at it as it reddened beneath his eyes.   Panting, from the force of his anger as it abated, he couldn't resist a couple last hits against his imaginary adversary.  As he did so, however, his eyes noticed Lou watching him with terror-stricken eyes.  As his hand connected with the tree, her eyes closed tightly and she jumped bodily.

Oh, God, he'd terrified her acting like some insane wild man attacking a tree.  She was huddled in on herself, her head turned away and her eyes closed in horrified expectation as if she thought he'd turn on her next, as if she thought he could do what those men had done.  But he didn't know how to bridge the silent gap now open between them, the gap he'd widened through his own stupid, useless anger.

The minutes stretched by in agonizing silence, neither knowing what to say or do.  Kid's heart finally broke as he heard her whisper brokenly, "Guess I can't blame ya for not wantin' soiled goods.  It was stupid of me to think I'd ever be anythin' else."

"You are not 'soiled goods' you hear me, Lou?" he said fiercely.  Kid walked toward her and gently turned her toward him, nearly doubling over in agony when she initially flinched from his tender touch.  He'd failed her as a lover and as a man through his reaction, placing even more hurt and doubt in her eyes than had originally been there.  Her brokenness was his brokenness.  He damned himself for yelling at her.  Someone had abused his love, the mother of his child and instead of supporting her, he'd bawled her out and terrorized her.

"I-I would never hurt you, Lou," Kid whispered around the lump in his throat.  "You gotta believe that!  Sayin' I'm sorry just don't seem like enough does it?  I've been a jackass and I failed you when you needed me.  I was just so...so angry at those monsters.  And I was angry at myself too, if I hadn't driven you away....  If I hadn't....  It would never have happened if I'd been there or you'd been here."

The agony in his eyes turned her soul liquid.  He blamed himself for what had happened to her!  Louise shook her head wordlessly, unable to speak.  How could she have feared him only moments before?  She knew in her heart, knew in her soul he'd never hurt her.   It had been mere instinctive reaction that had made her flinch away from him, instinct borne of her experiences with angry men.

"It would've happened anyway even if you were there," Lou said moments later, when she'd regained her voice.  "It's me, Kid.  There's something wrong with me that stuff like that happens.  One time may not have been my fault but twice?!  Even you can't say I didn't do anything to bring it on a second time."

Kid looked at her, horrified, unable to believe that she could think she'd asked for something like that to happen to her.

All her pain, anger, hurt, and worthlessness was too close to the surface to stem the tide of emotion now, though.  Even if Kid had tried to soothe her in that moment, he would have been unsuccessful.  It had built up over the years like water behind ice floes until now when suddenly the ice floes were gone and the water rushed out, flooding everything.  "Don't you see?  I'm not good enough for you, Kid!  I can never be good enough!" Louise insisted.  "Y-you deserve a lady...."

"You mean like Laura or Samantha?  I never wanted them, not really," Kid said.  "I wanted you and it hurt so bad that you didn't want me.  When you left I was a wreck, Lou.  I was less than half a man without you.  I looked everywhere, not knowin' if you'd run away and were living a happy life without me or if someone had ambushed you on the trail and left you for dead.  It was my fault that you'd left.  I wanted to make things right between us but my damned pride wouldn't let me.  It got so bad that I just wanted to end it all."

He gently tugged on her hand, leading her over to sit on the rock beneath the birch again and knelt at her feet.  "A part of me died when you left only to come back to life again when I saw you in that house nursing Lexi," Kid said quietly, holding her free hand tightly.  "The night of the fire I was so sure I was gonna lose you again that I promised God and myself that if you made it, nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, was gonna stand in the way of us bein' together -- not my pride, not your fear, not anything in the past, present, or future."

"Kid, I...."

"Just let me finish, Lou, please," Kid begged.  He had to get it all out now, before he lost his nerve, before the moment passed.  "Yes, I was mad that you didn't tell me about what happened to you and I'm sorry if you thought I was angry at you.  Thing is, I was more upset at myself for giving you reason not to trust me and mad at the men that hurt you than anything else.  Don't you ever think that I blame you for what happened or that it's made you unworthy or unloveable.  I don't know much of anything, but I do know this:  I love you, Louise Kathleen McCloud, and I want you more than anything else in this life or the next."

Lou couldn't believe it.  There he was kneeling at her feet saying everything she'd always longed for him to say and it left her speechless.  All she could do was cry.  She opened her mouth to try and reply and all that came out was an embarassing and uncontrollable sob.

Kid heard her sob and quickly leaned forward to pull her head onto his shoulder.  "Oh, please, don't cry, Angel," he begged of her.  "You don't know what it does to me."

"I-I'm sorry," Lou hiccupped into his shoulder, wetting his jacket with her tears.  "I c-can't help it.  Havin' a baby does this to a woman, makes her a hopeless wreck.  I hardly ever cried before. Ever since I found out I was expectin' Lexi, it seems I've cried enough for two lifetimes."

He pulled back and rested his forehead against hers, his hat falling back to rest against his back, and cupped her face in his hands.  "I want us to start all over again, Lou," he said.  "I wanna court you like you deserve, do it right this time."

She smiled at him, her eyes searching his.  "You don't have to, you know."

"But I want to.  I want to take you to dinner and on picnics.  I wanna walk down the street with you on my arm and show you off and have men glare at me for bein' so lucky.  I wanna sit on the porch with you and look at the stars and plan a life together.  I wanna steal kisses when no one's lookin' and hold hands under the table.  I wanna wrack my brain tryin' to find ways to spend time alone with you.  I want someone to walk in on us while I'm tryin' to seduce you and embarass the hell outta us.  I want it all, Lou and I want it with you," Kid stated happily.

"Yes," Lou blurted out suddenly.

Kid's eyes widened in shock.  "Yes?  Yes, what?"

Louise looked at him, his sandy waves mussed from his hat, his eyes wide and sparkling with hope and anticipation.  In that moment, she'd never been more sure of anything in her life.  She'd take him any way he'd have her.  "Yes to anything...everything...all of it...with you," Lou said softly, punctuating her pauses with kisses.

Seeing the love in her eyes, Kid realized what she'd just said and excitedly kissed her in response, putting everything he felt for her into his kiss.  She returned his kiss full force, feeling that unmistakable thrill roll up her spine for the first time since they'd parted almost two years ago.  Between them now was something that had been missing from their lives while they were apart:  hope, promise, and unity of spirit
 
 

Two days later...

How could you do this to us?  You've abused our trust in you.  You've lied and manipulated and tried to smear the reputation of a good young man, a responsible young man.  In short you've embarrassed both your mother and me.  Tomorrow, we're going out to the marshal's place and you will apologize to both Kid and Louise and then you'll tell them everything you know about the fire.

The words pronouncing her sentence echoed through Laura's head as she crept down the grand staircase.  That afternoon, her parents had confronted her with the lies Maria had fed them.  They'd even accused her of lying to the marshal about the fire.

She'd show them.  She'd show them all, starting wth that little snitch Maria.  That sneaking little wench had betrayed her to her mother.  She'd trusted Maria and she'd trampled over her trust.  This baby would be Kid's, he would be hers even if she had to kill to bring it about.  They belonged together and Maria's lies had threatened her chances at happiness. And what about that poor innocent little boy trapped in a miserable, neglected life with Louise McCloud?

She slowly and quietly crept into the kitchen.  Maria was at the stove again heating milk to help her sleep.  Her back was to the doorway where Laura stood and she was quietly humming to herself.  Poor dumb bitch, totally unaware of her betrayal, Laura thought.  Totally unaware of how much she hurt me.

Passing by one counter, Laura silently grabbed one of the large fillet knives, hefting it in her fist.  Maria wouldn't remain ignorant for long, she determined.
 

Nellie Wilson stood in the kitchen in her nightgown, screaming into her hand and pointing at something.  Harvey stopped in his tracks as he saw what had caused such a reaction in his normally staid wife.  The bright sunlight was oxymoronic in contrast to the scene before him. There across the room was the obviously dead body of their servant Maria, seated almost normally in a chair against the wall in a macabe mockery of a breakfast scene.  The woman's throat was gone, blood having stained her white nightgown red.  On the white wall behind the dead woman, written in Maria's blood in familiar handwriting was the single word, "Traitors."

Instinctively, Harvey Wilson knew that his daughter was no longer in the house.  Indeed, he wondered if there was anything left of his sweet, golden-haired pixie in the emotionally disturbed woman calling herself Laura Wilson.

Chapter 23