Lawman. Laurie Grant

when I come home to you…”

      She’d laughed then, scornfully and without mirth. Her face was that of a stranger, a stranger who smelled a foul odor. “Wait for you? You must be joking, Cal Devlin. Unlike you, I have some loyalty to my country—”

       “Your country is the United States of America, Livy,” he’d interrupted her to say. “We’re trying to preserve the Union—”

      “My country’is the Confederate States of America now,” she’d informed him in lofty tones. “And as a loyal daughter of the South I despise all her enemies— and that includes you, Caleb Travis Devlin.” She’d turned her back on him before saying, “I suggest you get back up on that stallion and ride outa here before my papa takes a bullwhip to your hide.“

      He’d ridden away as ordered then, and left to join the Union army the next day. A year later, in a letter from his mother—Sarah Devlin wrote him regularly, even if she’d deplored his choice—he’d learned that Olivia had married Dan Gillespie, a captain in the Confederate army, when Dan was home on leave.

      So much of that world was gone now, almost as if it had never been, Cal thought. He had ridden past Childress Hall on his way to Gillespie Springs. The plantation was a ruin. After Livy’s father had died, shortly after the war ended, the estate had been bought by carpetbaggers at a fraction of its value. Those scoundrels had had no notion of how to manage such a place, parceling it out to sharecroppers and living in just a room or two of the formerly splendid mansion. The big house looked as if it would fall down around their Yankee ears any day now.

      Yeah, he’d forgotten Livy could hurt him like that, but he wasn’t going to lie awake at night and ache, as he had after his long-ago dismissal.