Bride of the Night

The president of the United States stepped back from the podium. Some of the crowd applauded enthusiastically. Some stared ahead with such glazed eyes that Finn wondered if they’d really even heard the man.

But Finn’s quarry, she was a young beauty, and she seemed to be watching the president with rapt, splendorous eyes. Huge, hazel eyes fringed with impossibly dark lashes. Her long wavy hair fell down her back in shades of reddish gold—

A murderous agent didn’t have to be ugly on the outside to carry out a heinous deed! Finn reminded himself.

Just as he made it to her side, she reached beneath the encompassing warm cloak.

He’d expected a gun.

Or a knife.

His arms encircled her just as he saw what she carried….

A beautifully knitted scarf in the colors of the American flag.

Her eyes, gold and gleaming, turned on his. They seemed to burn with a strange fire, and yet, one he knew too well.

“Idiot!” she whispered at him.

She turned away, somehow escaping Finn’s grasp and backing out of the crowd.

The scarf fell to the earth.

Blood-soaked earth …

For a moment, Finn lost her, but whether or not she had been carrying nothing more lethal than wool, his instincts told him not to trust her. He moved quickly and saw her again, hurrying away, toward the woods.

The crowd was clearing, enough so that he could whistle for Piebald. His horse came to him, carefully moving through the dispersing crowd. He leaped atop the animal and urged it into a trot to clear the crowd, and then a lope to hurry in pursuit.

The beauty had already disappeared….

Finn rode into the woods and reined in, looking, listening. He heard the rustle of a tree, and quickly turned.

Yes, something moved, just ahead….

He urged his steed on and tore ahead. There … darting from one tree to the next!

When he was almost upon her, he jumped from his horse’s back and tackled her back down to the earth. She lay beneath him, staring up at him with hatred and fury.

“What? What?” she demanded. “What do you want from me?” “What ill intent did you intend President Lincoln? Who are your coconspirators? What is the plan?” he demanded.

“Coconspirators?” she said blankly.

But there was the hint of a soft Southern drawl in her speech….

She took him completely by surprise; that was his downfall. He knew his own power and strength, but he’d been so damned confident in it that he’d not bothered to ascertain hers.

“Ass!” she hissed.

And then she shoved him up off her and backward, much to his surprise.

She was on her feet in seconds. “For your information, I would do anything for that man! Anything at all!”

He leaped up, staring at her. “Then stand here and tell me who and what you are!”

She shook her head, and turned.

He lunged for her, and caught a lock of her hair. She cried out in fury and escaped his hold. And then …

She seemed to disappear into thin air.

He held nothing…. Nothing, save a lock of her hair.

He held on to the red-and-gold lock of that hair, intending to find her, come hell or high water.

He would hold on to it, until he found her again.

And find her he would.

But well over a year of war, bloodshed and death would follow before he did.

CHAPTER ONE

Winter, 1865

“LINCOLN, LINCOLN, LINCOLN,” Richard Anderson said, shaking his head sadly. “Frankly, I don’t understand your obsession with the man.”

Richard pointed out beyond the sand dunes and the scattered pines to the sea—and over the causeway to Fort Zachary Taylor where the North was in control, and had been in control since the beginning of the war, despite Florida being the third state to secede from the Union. He sat down in the pine-laden sand next to Tara, confusion lacing his gray eyes.

“You’re at the southernmost tip of the southernmost state. A Confederate state. I don’t see you gnawing your lip and chewing down your nails to the nub over Jefferson Davis, who has certainly had his share of trouble, too. Seriously,” he said, scooting closer to her, “Tara Fox, if you’re not careful, you’re going to get yourself killed.”

“Getting myself killed is highly unlikely,” she murmured. She smiled at Richard, her friend since childhood. They were seated on the small dunes on the edge of the island, away from the homes on the main streets of the town, and far to the east of the fort and any of its troops that might be about. Tara loved to come here. The pines made a soft seat of the sand, and the breeze always seemed to come in gently from the ocean, unless a storm was nearing, and even then she loved it equally. There was something about the sea when the sky turned gray and the wind began to pick up with a soft evil moan that promised of the tempest to come.

“Hardly likely? More than possible!” Richard said hoarsely. “My dearest friend, your passions make you a whirlwind!”

“Honestly, please. This is a war between human beings. The Northern soldiers don’t run around killing women—from what I understand, they’re only locking up spies when they’re women, and not doing a great job keeping any of them in prison at that.”

“There’s nothing human about war at all.”

“But, Richard, I’m not a spy, and I’m not trying to do anything evil. I just keep dreaming about Abraham Lincoln.”

“My dear girl, he’s not the usual man to fulfill a lass’s dreams of fantasy and romance,” Richard said, grinning widely.

She cast him a glare in which her effort to control her patience was entirely obvious. “Richard, that’s not what I mean at all and you know it.”

“It was worth a try,” he said wearily. “You are like a dog with a bone when you start on something, and it terrifies me.”

Tara ignored that. “I’ve already gone north once, Richard.” She said the words flatly, as if they proved that she could well manage herself. Yet, even as she spoke with such assurance to him, she was startled to feel a chill of fear.