He brought one of the chairs over and set it beside the bed. When Evangeline just looked at the thing, as though it had grown up through the floorboards while she wasn’t paying attention, he pressed her gently down onto it. He fetched his own blanket from the lean-to and draped it over her shoulders, then went to the stove to make coffee. He wished he knew how to make tea, wished he even had some to try with. That was what Miss June-bug wanted when she was feeling low, a good cup of tea, and it always seemed to brace her right up. Alas, there was none, so it had to be coffee.

He brewed it fresh, tossing out the old that was left over from breakfast, and when it was ready, he poured some into a mug for Evangeline, adding a spoonful of sugar and a generous splash of whiskey. When he carried it across the room and set it down beside Evangeline, on the lid of her traveling trunk, she looked up at him, hollow-eyed, barely daring to hope, but brave, even now. Brave as any of the men he’d fought beside, after the North invaded Dixie and thereby picked itself one hell of a fight.

“She looks a little pinker, don’t you think?” Evangeline whispered.

Scully assessed the child’s complexion. Her lips were bluish, from the cold of the snow-pack, no doubt, but there was the faintest twinge of color stirring beneath her waxen skin. She resembled a china doll, lying there, perfectly formed but not quite life-like. He wasn’t at all sure she would survive the night, though he wouldn’t have said so to Evangeline for anything. “Maybe a little,” he allowed. He couldn’t bring himself to lie to her, either. “Drink that coffee, Eve. You look all done in.”

She took up the mug, holding it in both hands, hands reddened from hard work and snow, and Scully felt an overwhelming tenderness, deeper somehow than everything else this woman had made him feel, and far more painful. He wanted her. Not just in his bed, but in his life, and in the history of his life, their names written side by side in a Bible, and their children listed after them, and their children.

But he was never going to have her and he’d better come to terms with the fact, once and for all. He could speak to Big John, when he got back, tell him right out that he was in love with Evangeline, that he hadn’t meant for it to happen, but it had, and that was that and what, precisely, were they going to do about it.

Big John might understand, and he might not. Women were exceeding rare in the West, and fine ones like Evangeline were seldom heard of, let alone come across. For some men, such an admission would constitute the gravest sort of betrayal, and thus be cause for killing.

Too, there was always the chance that Evangeline didn’t feel the same way he did. Oh, she’d conveyed a lot in the lean-to the day before, when he’d kissed her and she’d stood on tiptoe and wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him right back, but women were changeable creatures, with interior weather patterns all their own, sunny one moment and storming fit to scare off a banshee the next. It was part of the mystery that made them so exasperating and so wonderful.