The bullet when it hit her had knocked her off her feet. She'd been watching two men drawing their guns on each other. Both fired the outlaw first and then Ethan and then George had run out in between them and without thinking, she'd gone after him pushing him down on the ground. She'd shielded him with her own body but not before getting hit…feeling the burning pain of the gunshot before darkness claimed her.

She woke up later…a couple days later and Mary looked down on her telling her how lucky she'd been to be alive. She felt sharp pain in her right side whenever she moved and she felt the tightness of a bandage applied there…then it had all come back.

That she'd been shot but she didn't know by whom. Mary told her that the old Indian with the feather in his hat that sometimes hung around town had removed the bullet and Amelia knew that Ethan must have fetched him. But then she'd heard that Ethan had been locked up in jail and then the news came out that she'd been hit by one of his stray bullets. Her reaction hadn't been to be angry with him but to chuckle at the irony of it. She knew that he'd hate himself for what he'd done to her and thus she couldn't bring herself to condemn him.

He'd come to see her when she'd been resting on the chaise in the living room and told her he was heading to Montana without the children who'd be heading off with another couple to go to live in Boston. About as far away from a gunslinger like their uncle as they could possibly go….and when she'd heard him say that, the words coming out haltingly, she just thought he couldn't be serious.

She had to speak up and correct him when he said he'd had nothing to give the children and tell him just how wrong he was about that. She'd held onto his hand and his hold on her had lingered…the expression on his face changing and she knew her heartfelt words had reached inside him.

Her head hurt a lot, like a sharp dagger going inside it. Like if she had been shot and she did remember the man in her dream holding a gun…but he hadn't shot her with it. She knew that and yet her last vestige of a memory had been of his voice…and then darkness.

She woke up briefly to see the inside of a cabin…rustic and dimly lit and a man by the fireplace stoking the embers inside of it with more wood. His back to her as he worked and then she started fading again…back into the dark recesses of some place she couldn't escape. But not before she said one word…

"Ethan…"

Bella pulled up her horse at the fork on a trail and Ethan joined her. They had split up where the road briefly forked into two narrower trails and then rejoined a mile later. Still no sign of her though there were faint hoof prints of a horse running quickly though how old they were…they couldn't know.

"We'll try further down," he said, "by the river…and there are a couple cabins there though they might be empty."

Bella nodded and they rode on together side by side except when the trail narrowed as it meandered through the foothills.

"What could have happened to her," Bella said, "Did she have an accident or run into trouble?"

Ethan didn't even want to guess what had happened. He wouldn't know until they found her but he hoped that whatever happened…that she was still alive…he couldn't even imagine what he'd do if he lost her. Amelia had confessed her deepest fears of losing him to his lifestyle and his choice of careers, so much did it scare her that she'd walked away from him. But he'd never told her that he shared them, that it terrified him to even think of losing her and there had been times since he first saw her that he'd been scared too. His heart beating so fast, his blood rushing in his ears and having to force himself not to panic, to think calmly and rationally about what to do to help her, whether it was to find her if she were missing or go after anyone who harmed her.

Not to mention what it'd done to him when he thought that he'd killed her with his own gun. The guilt that steeped up inside of him nearly broke him and he had time to think about it while sitting in that jail cell once he'd done everything he could to save her life, finally fetching John Taylor. If she'd died, then he wouldn't have been able to live with it. But she'd pulled through and got better…and not long after that their relationship changed.

Now some time later, she had turned up missing, her horse racing back to Bella's ranch and they'd gone out looking for her, not knowing what they'd find. Any bend they turned, any stream they forded, they might find her lying dead. His heart nearly stopped each time until they discovered that there were still no signs of her.

They kept moving even as the sun threatened to set and leave them in darkness. Ethan knew one thing and that was that he'd never stop looking for her until he found her.

Amelia felt her heart break as yet another wedding was interrupted by Ethan running off to fulfill some obligation to an old friend or relive some past glory with a gun in his hand. Finally she'd broken it off with him and it left her feeling as if a piece of her had died. She knew that she'd have to find a way to move on with the two of them living in the same small town but how? Sometimes she felt like getting on the stagecoach and finally leaving the town behind her. After all, she'd wanted to leave it for years but somehow she always stayed, often making excuses to do just that.

She finally did and for the first week away she cried, because leaving the man she loved, it just ripped her in half. No matter how far she traveled by stage, by train and on horseback, she always remembered what she'd left behind. She couldn't clear Ethan out of her head let alone dislodge him from her heart. She'd love him until the day she died and that realization sobered her…and after a few adventures fed a part of her that had been starving, afraid of being lost in her marriage to him she found that she was almost ready to go home. Her pride almost stopped her because she had told him she'd be leaving for good and it'd been months after all…maybe he'd moved on and found another woman who could give him what she couldn't. She'd be happy for him of course but she'd always ache a bit inside that it couldn't be her.

Until the morning she woke up and decided it would be her. She was going to pack up, head on home and ask him to take her back. She only hoped he and the children would forgive her for leaving them so abruptly. That's what she had told Warrick the night she'd met the charming young man and talked with him for hours about everything and nothing. It was amazing how free you could feel to share personal feelings and insights with strangers…more so sometimes than the ones you loved.

The last thing he'd said to her was to go after what she wanted…to not be afraid to fail at it…and to not be afraid to succeed either.

She felt her heart sink as she heard the gunshots again inside her head. Warrick hadn't any chance at all and he'd been killed and cast aside so he wouldn't witness what they did to her. She'd been grabbed and knocked out…then woke up inside a wagon with a thick piece of woolen blanket over her so she couldn't see where it went. It rocked from side to side violently after traveling smoothly so she knew they were taking one of the dirt alleys off of the street.

They'd ranted at her when they had her in some old building that looked like a rundown house. Her husband Pierce had been the source of their wrath. She'd had experience with angry men before who had invested in one of his crazy schemes but not like these two…she knew if they couldn't use her to track him down they'd hurt her instead in ways that couldn't be healed.

She'd told him she'd pay the money back…and she did have some cash stashed in the hotel safe. But Brock had just shook his head and told her that they'd taken out payment in other ways instead…then told the other man to take her to the bedroom for him.

Hurt didn't begin to describe it, terror didn't either but the bruises they left her with had faded away much quicker than the memories. She'd left those alone and let the emotions they invoked stand for them instead.

She'd gotten away, when they'd left her alone for a while…helped by a young street girl named Clara. Yes, she'd gotten away from them or so she thought.

Until Brock showed up.

Ethan and Bella rode up a path near the river where it formed a deeper pool of water, popular for fishing. They got off their horses and then Ethan noticed a depression in the grassy mud as if a body had lain there. He looked at Bella.

"Maybe she came down the river somehow and wound up here," he said, "She could be anywhere."

Bella nodded.

"I saw some cabins…we can check there to see if anyone's seen her."

Ethan sighed and they got back on their horses to head on up the trail but he knew that some of the cabins had been deserted. Though there was an old man who lived in one and tended to the others using them as resting posts when the mail had come through this way some time ago.

Maybe the man had seen Amelia or might know what happened to her. That's what he hoped at least as the two of them rode up the trail to the cabins.