by Carolan Ivey
Her expression told him he was taking too long to answer. “Sometimes men would come from a battle with minor wounds and die anyway, looking just like you did,” he began, determined to keep this as reasonable and impersonal as possible. “I stopped your bleeding, gave you water and,” he cleared his throat and said with studious dignity, “I kept you warm.” As if to emphasize his point, he used one hand to tuck her blanket more securely around her shoulders. Good, he thought. Very simple, very direct. Very incomplete. I should be telling her this from six feet away, not six inches!
“And…?” She wasn’t satisfied. He should have known she wouldn’t be contented with easy explanations. Well, his mother had always said he wasn’t an easy child to raise. As charming as an otter and slick as an eel, he’d once overheard her saying about him. Not slick enough to evade Miss Taylor’s questions, though.
He had to deflect her questions before they probed too deep. Still holding her blanket together at her throat, he dropped his mouth very close to her ear and whispered, “And, ma’am…I must confess…I took complete and shameless advantage of you.”
He expected her to jump away in shock. He expected her to slap him. Hell, he expected her to at least laugh at his outrageous remark. He didn’t expect her to stand stock-still and tremble exquisitely as his breath caressed her ear.
“Oh,” she said, her voice a bit unsteady, “In that case…um…thank you. I think. No, that’s not what I…”
She swallowed, and that small movement of her throat brought her skin in contact with his lips. He realized too late that he’d forgotten to lift his head after speaking. But he couldn’t for the life of him pull away.
“I should…should be thanking you, Miss Taylor.”
“Brannon,” she said faintly.
“Hmm?” He pulled his shoulders back, but his mouth stayed stubbornly hovering over her neck.
“My last name is Brannon. First name…Taylor.” His rational mind informed him she was beginning to drop words from her speech pattern. As fast as his brain was dropping the trappings of polite society.
“Pleased to make your acquaintance, ma’am.”
“And what are you thanking me for?” Her hands came up to rest on his shoulders, as if to help him in his struggle to pull away. But instead of pushing, her fingers dug in, and she tilted her head to give him greater access to her neck. It had to be an unconscious move, he thought. She had never willingly invited his touch before. But her question brought him up short, and he finally succeeded in lifting his head.
The blush he saw spreading up her chest matched the burning he felt in his ears. He couldn’t remember another woman, save his mother, who could make him blush and apologize as many times as she had in the few hours he’d known her. Far back in his mind, he heard the echo of his friend Grady’s derisive laughter. Grady would have taken one look at him, shaken his head and sadly announced the end of an era.
“What for?” He pulled up and ticked off on his fingers. “Let’s see…so far you’ve rescued me from thirst, starvation, Harris. Oh, and Harris again…”
Her scowl told him he’d successfully broken the spell. “Harris doesn’t count. You brought that on yourself with your big mouth,” she grouched. “Somebody had to save you from yourself.”
“…and you eased my pain,” he finished in a softer tone. He watched her face, but she kept her expression carefully neutral on that point. He tried another route. “If anyone should be asking ‘how’, it should be me.”
That did it. He saw fear flicker in her eyes just before her expression closed. Troy had been correct when he said she’d reveal very little about herself.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. What was I supposed to do, let you writhe around on the floor alone in all that pain? I was…I was just doing what anyone else would do. What I had to do to help a…a…”
He waited, then supplied, “Friend?”
She shook her head once. “A lost soul.” She took a step back and broke their tenuous connection.
“Because that’s what you are,” she said, her voice rising as she wrapped the blanket tighter around her body. “A ghost. A ghost who walks, talks, breathes, bleeds and radiates warmth from his body like a furnace.” She took another step back, running one hand through her sand-stiff hair and hanging on to a handful of it in the back, as if to keep a grip on her sanity. Whatever barriers had been broken down between them, Jared saw them being refortified before his eyes.
“You’re not like any ghost I’ve ever seen. There’s nothing protoplasmic or cold-breath-of-death about you, Beaudry, and I don’t understand it. You scare the hell out of me.”
He pounced. “Seen? Have you seen other ghosts besides me?” So she was admitting something.
“Did I say that?” She stepped back, turning pale again. Worried, he took a step after her, lifting his hand as if to show an enemy he was unarmed. Best to back off this subject for now. So far he’d determined that two things frightened her…touching, and ghosts. He’d managed, just by existing in her plane of time, to hit both her sore spots.
“Look, how scary can one Bluebelly be?” he reasoned, trying to distract her from the fear he saw reawakening in her eyes. “And I’m not even a whole Bluebelly. I’m only the ghost of one. Perfectly harmless.”
She looked doubtful, then she relaxed just enough to smile. But she wasn’t quite ready to let down her re-established guard. Not just yet.
“I wouldn’t go that far. However,” she said thoughtfully, tapping her front teeth with her index finger, “maybe after this ghost has had a bath…”
He grinned, accepting the uneasy truce. He hooked the fingers of one hand gently under her chin, tilting her head up so she had to look right at him.
“As long as I am on this earth, whether as a man or a ghost of a man, I will let nothing harm you.”
He swallowed hard as he stared, transfixed, into her tear-shined eyes. Where had that come from? He had no business making such promises to anyone, let alone her. In 1861, he had gone off to war, swearing just such an oath to protect his country and his family, but Ethan had died just the same. Because Jared had been in too much of a hurry to see to the proper disposal of one unruly horse from the family stable.
But he’d been given one more chance to run the gauntlet, this time to emerge on the other side in one piece and maybe even with his honor. Reason continued to re-establish its hold. He wasn’t the only one who had to emerge from this whole. He had to make sure she did, too, or risk Troy’s eternal wrath. But that was all.
Absolutely all.
“Now,” he said briskly, tweaking her chin playfully before letting her go. “About that bath?”
“This way, sir,” she said primly, motioning him to follow her into the bathroom. The unconscious sway of her hips beneath the blanket she wore reminded him it had indeed been a very long century. And had him wishing his mother hadn’t taught him quite so well.
“Anyway,” he mused as he trailed behind her, “who is to say the water won’t pass right through me? I’m a ghost, remember.”
Taylor paused in the bathroom doorway and sniffed delicately.
“Even if it does pass right through, anything is bound to be an improvement.”
*
Taylor’s cousin Lane hadn’t had time to stock the kitchen before leaving for the re-enactment on Roanoke Island, but Taylor found a few staples. At least what Lane considered staples. Extra-chunky peanut butter, raspberry jam, Ritz crackers, and coffee. Raisins, cheese-in-a-squirt-can. A dented box of cereal, loaf of squashed bread. Taylor could guess how the last two items had gotten into such a sorry condition. Lane carried enough antique camera equipment to these events to flatten an elephant.
She put a pot of coffee on, spread the food out on the kitchen table, then, running out of things to do, finally sat down. Lane’s sweater and jeans felt good on her clean skin, but Taylor grimaced as she finger-combed her short, damp locks back from her forehead. She had always enjoyed styli
ng and arranging her long hair for re-enacting, but other than that rarely thought about it. Still, the sight of those two-foot strands hitting the floor, only days ago, had been hard to take. Her second cousin Anne, wielding the scissors only under protest, had taken it even harder and wept openly.
The peanut butter in the open jar smelled rich, and the knife sticking upright in it gleamed invitingly, but Taylor could work up no enthusiasm for eating. She sighed and reached for the knife anyway, knowing she must force herself to eat if she were to have the strength to make it through the next hours. She nearly lost her grip on the knife, and the cracker broke to pieces in her hand when a baritone voice floated in from the bathroom, where Jared showered.
So, then. Singing in the shower wasn’t a modern invention. She’d shown him how to work the controls, then fled before he could make some smart remark about needing further instruction. For a man facing his doom a second time, his singing voice sounded totally oblivious. And also quite good. Not as good as her other cousin Gray, who sang for a living, but…something was wrong. Taylor cocked her head to listen to the tune.
Jared Beaudry, First Sergeant in the Union Army, was singing “Dixie”.
She threw back her head and laughed out loud, ending with a wince at the sudden stretch of her sore shoulder muscles. She frowned as Jared swung into verse two. She was quite certain, if her shoulder injury hadn’t gotten in the way, that she would have given herself to him right there on the floor earlier that afternoon. And again in the bedroom, with his lips barely touching a spot on her neck she’d never known was so sensitive. For a split second her mouth had gone completely dry and she had come within a hair of asking him to wet it with his tongue.
Good heavens! She picked up a paper napkin and fanned herself. Thank goodness her better sense had kicked in.
She shuddered and rose to get a cup of coffee. If she didn’t find some way to regain control, to repair the hole in her soul, he might touch her once too often and reveal the darkest corners of his heart, without even meaning to. She might see things that would frighten him, let alone her. She had always sensed that she had the ability to reach that far, but never had the inclination nor the courage to do it.
She had to ignore the raw places Jared had uncovered, stifle these unfamiliar and frightening sexual feelings he stirred up in her, and get back to the business of survival—of her unit and of Beaudry’s ghost. She could focus on that now, since Troy had made it clear by his absence that he had no intention of ever speaking to her again, in this life or the next. Pain twisted in her heart, but she quelled it.
Sighing with renewed determination, she took up the knife, slathered another cracker with peanut butter and popped the whole thing into her mouth. Food was what she needed. Food, strong coffee…and some way to shove a bucket of ice inside her belly, which throbbed hotly at the mental picture of Jared standing naked in a shower.
*
“That’ll do for a start.”
Taylor looked up from trying to open the jam jar one-handed, and quickly masked what she knew was an expression of absolute agreement.
Jared stood, damp and tousled, in the kitchen door, with only a strategically wrapped towel around his waist. Lean muscle curved on every surface of his body, but Taylor’s critical eye observed he could probably stand to gain a few pounds. She searched his face and skin for any sign of his earlier embarrassment at their unaccustomed intimacy, but he only returned her frank interest with some of his own. She wished his eyes weren’t so blue, so direct. She wished those eyes would stop appraising her like they hadn’t seen a female for… Remember why you’re here, she told herself sternly. For that matter, remember why he’s here.
“The food.” He gestured, then quickly rescued one side of the sagging towel at his hips. “Will do for an appetizer, I mean. Remember I haven’t eaten a decent meal for about a hundred years.”
He sounded about as tentative as she felt, she observed. Taylor tilted the jar and studied the nutritional listing on the label. “I know what you meant,” she said evenly. Twenty-nine calories per tablespoon.
She glanced up and caught the tail end of Jared’s grin just as it disappeared, to be replaced by a contrite look. She narrowed her eyes at him as he bowed slightly.
“You’ll have to excuse my undressed state, ma’am,” he said, “but it seems some Johnny Reb has made off with my clothes.”
Two grams of protein. “No, she…he…they…” She put the jar down. “No one stole your clothes, First Sergeant. Not that anyone in this territory would have wanted them for anything but to polish the family silver. They’re in the washer.”
“The…?” His raised brow asked for a repeat.
“Hear that swishing sound?” She twirled a finger in that general direction. “That’s a washer. You put clothes in, push a button and it washes your clothes for you. There was so much sand and bl—um, I figured you would…”
Jared swiveled his head to listen, then strode off in the direction of the sound, leaving the rest of her sentence hanging. Taylor smiled as she heard the washer kick on and off several times, indicating Jared must be lifting and lowering the lid. Curious as a cat, he was. A dark cat in search of a bright yellow canary. Her hand rose to her yellow hair. If only…
If only! Her head sagged forward onto her hands in sudden weariness. She’d lived the last several months of her life on “if onlys”. If only she’d been able to talk Troy out of re-enlisting. If only they hadn’t had that bitter argument about it right before he left that last time. If only she could see him once more. If only she hadn’t been forced to fire live rounds at those unarmed men. If only her blasted power to touch things and see departed souls would work! Then it wouldn’t matter whether Troy chose to see her or not. She’d just go ahead and do it.
“Is that coffee I smell?”
She jumped. Jared moved as silently as a ghost. Well, of course. He was a ghost. She had to keep reminding herself.
“Columbia’s finest,” she replied, finding it very easy to smile at his hopeful expression. Her smile faded as her eyes traveled down to the wound on his leg. The hot water of the shower had re-opened it.
“But first I’m taking care of that,” she said, pointing as she rose. “Then we’re going to find you something to wear.”
Jared backed up a step as she approached and Taylor wondered if he had come to the same conclusion about touching as she. “I can take care of this,” he insisted, then scowled. “And I refuse to wear a woman’s clothes. Although those…” he reached toward the soft material of her sweater, but she halted just out of reach. He curled his fingers and let his hand drop back to the towel at his waist. “…don’t do you justice, ma’am.”
She cocked an eyebrow at his attire, now accessorized by goose bumps. “I could say the same for you, Sergeant Beaudry,” she said. “That is, if you were wearing anything. Now come on. You’re going to get chilled and catch your death of…”
The words froze on her lips and her eyes widened in horror at what she had said.
Jared managed to keep his face straight.
For about three seconds.
He really ought not to laugh, he reasoned. She seemed genuinely mortified by what she’d said. He ought to nod solemnly and follow her obediently down the hall, allow her to dress his wound and drape him with whatever dry clothes they could find, even a pink satin ball gown.
In the back of his memory, Grady howled. Grady would have appreciated the macabre humor of it, even if, at the moment, Taylor didn’t.
Rather than explode, he let go of his suppressed laughter. After a long moment, she relaxed and joined him.
“All right,” she said finally, wiping her eyes, “you’ve had your fun, Beaudry. Now come on before I have to mop your leaking protoplasm off the floor again.”
Minutes later, a fresh pressure bandage on his leg, he accompanied her on search through the house for suitable clothing until his own had dried. She was back to performing those tactile gymnastics again, a
nd had tried to avoid looking him in the eye or touching him while she had ministered to his wounds.
She grew paler as the minutes wore on, and Jared knew she had tried to do too much, mopping up their trail of blood from the walls and floor, washing their uniforms and preparing food while he had luxuriated in what she had called a shower. He made a mental note, when he finally got to wherever he was going, to find the man who had invented it and shake his hand.
She turned on the light in the home’s second bedroom. A brown fabric suitcase lay open on the bed, the contents slightly askew, as if the owner had hurriedly grabbed a few articles of clothing and left without putting the rest away.
He followed, now wrapped in a blanket she had insisted he use instead of the soggy towel. It certainly made no difference to him; save for the fact he was warmer. After all that had happened to and between them in the past hours, he figured showing a little more bare flesh than was proper, unchaperoned, with an unmarried woman, was a minor infraction.
“Oh, this is interesting.” She lifted a man’s sweatshirt and blue jeans from the suitcase.
“What is?” He moved closer to peer over her shoulder.
“This. These clothes are waaaay too small for Uncle Hugh or his boy, my cousin Travis. Either Uncle Hugh has lost a lot of weight or Lane wasn’t kidding when she said she had someone she wanted me to meet.”
“Hm.” He glanced around the empty room. “Your uncle must be sleeping in the parlor, then, because I don’t see any of his bags in here.”
She draped the articles over her arm and calmly rooted around in the suitcase, coming up with socks and the smallest set of underdrawers he’d ever seen.
“I doubt you will,” she said placidly, turning to watch his face as she spoke. “He’s going home right after the re-enactment is over.”