Her name was Cassandra Connor, and it seemed he'd loved her forever. Surely he'd known her forever, watched her grow up with a flicker of interest that had become a full-blown crush he'd considered too embarrassing to act on.

And that was the problem. By the time he decided to act, he'd been too late. Joe Dolin had already claimed her. They would be married in June, just two weeks after she graduated from high school.

And there was nothing he could do about it.

He made sure not to watch her walk away from their booth. His brothers had sharp eyes and he would never be able to tolerate being teased about something as intimate and humiliating as unrequited love.

So he looked out the window at Main Street. That, he thought, was something he could do something about. One day he would give something back to the town that had been such an intricate and important part of his life. One day he would serve and protect here. It was his destiny. He could feel it.

The way he sometimes felt, in dreams, that he had done so before' or tried, when the town was ravaged by war, split and frayed by divided loyalties. In dreams, he could see it the way it had been, the way it was in those old Civil War photos. Stone houses and churches, horses and carriages. Sometimes he could almost hear the men gathering on corners or in the barbershop, discussing the War between the States.

Of course, he thought with cool rationality, the town, or parts of it, were haunted. The old Barlow place on the hill just outside of town, the woods, his own home, the fields he helped plow and plant every spring. There were echoes there of lives and deaths, of hopes and fears.

A man had only to listen to hear.

"Almost as good as Mom's." Shane shoveled mashed potatoes into his mouth, and the MacKade dimple flashed as he grinned. "Almost. What do you figure women do on their night out?" ~

"Gossip." His plate clean, Rafe leaned back and lit a cigarette. "What else?"

"Mom's entitled," Jared commented.

"Didn't say she wasn't. Old lady Metz is probably giving her an earful about us right now, though." Rafe grinned wickedly at that thought, and at the knowledge that his mother could handle even the formidable Mrs. Metz with one arm tied behind her back.

Devin looked away from his view of Main Street, back at his brother. "We do anything lately?"

They all thought about it. It wasn't that their memories were poor, it was just that they found trouble so easily, they often overlooked the results.

Anyone breezing by the big window of Ed's cafe would have seen the four MacKades, dark-haired, green-eyed devils, handsome enough to raise any female's blood pressure, be she ten or eighty. Reckless enough to have most-men bracing or backing away.