Catherine shooed her out anyway. At first he thought she’d leave as well, but she hesitated in the doorway.

“Why didn’t you tell me who you really were?” she asked.

He stared at her. “I liked the man you saw me as. To you, I was a decent man, not some no-account outlaw drifter. The last thing I wanted was for you to change your mind about me and hate me.”

“So you lied to me?”

“Not really. I just didn’t tell you everything.”

She shook her head. “I always knew you were hiding something from me. I was just never sure what. Funny, I used to think it was another woman you loved, not a lunatic brother.”

He gave her a hard, meaningful look. “I could never love anyone but you.”

“Do you mean that?”

“On my life.”

And then she gifted him with one of those loving smiles that had kept him warm on the coldest days. “So tell me, Michael, where do we go from here?”

Epilogue

Christmas Eve. Two years later

“Hey, Pa, where do we go from here?”

Michael looked up at nine-year-old Frank’s question. After Catherine had given him his second chance, the two of them had decided to adopt the orphans she’d been keeping. And every day of the last two years, he had spent every minute making up to her for the time they had been apart.

She would never again have cause to doubt him, and he reveled in the blessing of his family and home.

“I think you’d best be asking your mother that question,” he said to Frank. “Catherine?”

“It’s the big white house at the end of the street,” she said as she waddled up to them beside the train station.

Michael grinned at the sight of her pregnant body. He’d missed seeing her carry Diana, but he was definitely enjoying her now.

The way Catherine figured, they had two more months before the baby would join them. Just enough time to visit her parents with their passel of children in tow, and then make it back home in time for the little one’s birth.

Four of the orphans still lived with them. Five children total with Diana. Michael smiled as he watched all of them climb aboard the wagon he had rented.

He’d always wanted a big family.

“You nervous?” he asked Catherine as he draped a comforting arm over her shoulders. She hadn’t seen her parents since the day they had eloped almost seven years before.

“A little. And you?”

“A little.”

Even so, he was too grateful for his life to mind even a lengthy visit at his in-laws’. He still found it hard to believe Pete had lied to save him.

“I’ve ruined your life enough, Kid. This is one place I think I’d best go to alone,” Pete had told him.