Read Online And One Wore Gray by Heather Graham - Free Book Online Page A

Union soldiers. You could even kill my kin.”
    He leaned against the door, suddenly very weary again. “I could kill my own kin,” he said softly. Then his eyes shot open again. “I’m very sorry, but you are going to help me. I am not going to bleed to death on your property!”
    He suddenly gripped her hand and dragged her along with him into the kitchen. At the sink he began to pump water. Callie gritted her teeth, but she reached for a clean towel and soaked it, and when shehad done so, she pressed it against the wound on his side. “Hold this!” she snapped.
    He did so, and she dragged a chair over by the sink and stood on it and delved into a cupboard above it. She found some clean linens and brought them down, and began to rip them. “Lift your shirt!” she commanded him, and he did so.
    Once again, she was uneasy at the closeness between them as she wound the linen around his bronzed torso. “It seems that whoever sewed you up didn’t do a complete job; And they slander our Yankee surgeons!” she muttered.
    His fingers were suddenly digging into her arm, drawing her eyes to his as she gasped at the jolt of pain.
    “A Yankee surgeon sewed me up, Miss Stars and Stripes. And a damned good one. He just wasn’t expecting me to be riding quite so hard so fast. He did the best damned job he could for me.”
    Startled, Callie stared up at him. “Why, you’re kind to our side, Colonel. Why should a Yank do the best damned job for you?”
    “Because he’s my brother,” he said impatiently. “Are you done?”
    “Your brother?” Callie said, startled.
    “My brother,” he snapped flatly in return. He didn’t intend to be questioned about his words—or his family.
    Perhaps she shouldn’t have been so surprised. Her own brothers had asked to fight on the western front, just so that they wouldn’t be expected to shoot their neighbors or friends from Virginia. Maryland itself was a state with totally divided loyalties.
    “Are you done?” He nearly bellowed the words this time.
    Callie jerked away from him. “You’re—bound up the best that I can do for you. Now will you please leave?”
    He pulled down his shirt and tucked it into hisbreeches, wincing slightly. He strode out to the parlor, his boots crunching over the glass. In the darkness, he opened the door and stared out over the fields. He stood there for the longest time, and she wondered what horrors of war he relived as he waited.
    He finally closed the door and turned around, striding back toward her.
    She moved away, but he didn’t intend to touch her, it seemed. He strode in and pulled out a chair at the big oak table and sat. “Have you got anything to eat in here?” he asked her.
    She didn’t know why she suddenly felt so nervous in his presence. She wasn’t afraid anymore. Despite his threats, she didn’t believe that he would have really hurt her, no matter what she had done. Perhaps his chivalry was not the spoken kind. It had been in his eyes when he had looked out on the battlefield.
    She wasn’t afraid of him but she was becoming increasingly more aware of him as a man. Not as an enemy, not as a Reb. Just as a man. Aware of his height, his scent, his voice. His nearness. Even the way he sat with his long, booted legs stretched before him.
    “Look, I’ve done everything that I can for you—”
    “Right. There’s nothing like a good kick in the head. You definitely owe me for that!”
    “I did not kick you in the head!”
    “I do beg to differ, darlin’. I felt it, that tender touch of your delicate foot!”
    “I certainly didn’t intend to.”
    “Then you would be merciful to your enemy, eh?”
    “I’ve been damned merciful!”
    He tilted back his hat. He watched her with heavy-lidded, curious eyes.
    “But I am the enemy?”
    She gripped the back of a kitchen chair. How dare he sit there in his gray uniform with his gaunt and haggard face and say such a thing to her.
    “Yes! Yes, you are the enemy! And I don’t