Firefly (24 page)

"Don't bother lighting it now." He accepted her offer and dunked his arms up to his elbows in the fresh water.  "As soon as I get the worst of this off, I'll get Ted to come sit with this guy, and then I'll go home to clean up.  I've got plenty of hot water on the roof."

"On the roof?"  She handed him a towel and a tumbler of icy water to drink.

"Sure.  The sun warms it.  Saves on firewood, too."  He finished with the towel and tossed it back to her, then gulped down every drop of water.  "You keep an eye on Harry in there, and I'll get Ted."  A slightly crooked grin crinkled his eyes as he added, "You might want to clean up a bit yourself."

Then he rolled down his sleeves and headed for the front door.

Less than ten minutes later, when Julie had barely finished rinsing the last of the patient's blood from her own hands and was wringing out the towels that would need washing in the morning, Morgan's footsteps mounted the porch again, alone.

"Where's the marshal?" she asked.

"Sawing wood that'll never burn." At the puzzled look in her eyes, he explained with a weary smile, "Ted's asleep, snoring like a two-man saw.  Even if I got him over here, he'd be back in dreamland before I got out the door."

A yawn, the fourth since he'd left the marshal's office, sneaked up on him.  He tried, more or less successfully, to stifle it.

"You wouldn't last much longer," Julie told him.  "If you won't go home and leave me here with Harry, at least lie down on the sofa.  I'll bring you an extra blanket from home and a pillow, if you need them."

"All right, all right." He stretched, too.  "We've got to get Harry into the other room and on the bed first.  But as soon as he makes any sign that he's coming to, you wake me and take yourself home."

Julie nodded.  Morgan might have noticed her lack of sincerity, but he was in the midst of yet another yawn.

Moving their patient was no easy task.  Morgan took the man's shoulders, and Julie settled herself between Harry's knees with her arms clamped about his thighs.  Very carefully, they maneuvered him out of the surgery and into the single bed  infirmary, converted from Horace's dining room.  Harry groaned, but did not fully regain consciousness.  Dressed only in his ruined, one-legged pants and his boots, he lay like a fallen tree.

Slightly out of breath from his exertions, Morgan walked up to Julie and extended his hand.  At first, she hardly knew how to react, then slipped her own into it and let her fingers clasp his.

"I still wouldn't put good money on it, but I think he might make it," Morgan conceded in a cautious whisper.  "We done good, Miss Hollstrom."

She felt awkward, unaccustomed to such praise and less accustomed to the sensations his touch aroused.  She wanted to jerk her hand away, to break the circuit and stop the flow of current, and yet she was held by a force far, far stronger than his grip.

"You did most of the work, Dr. Morgan.  I just tried to help and stay out of your way."

He shook his head firmly.

"No, that's not true.  I couldn't have got him this far alone.  I needed you, Julie, and I'm damn glad you were there."

He was tired clear through to his marrow.  And he was sufficiently hopeful of Harry's survival to consider some minor celebration in order.  But when he kissed Julie, it was simply because he wanted to, not because he was too exhausted to know what he was doing or because he was elated over his success.

She let him pull her closer; she did not fight or try to push herself away.  And when his lips came down softly on hers, she did not turn her head.  He was gentle, as she had known he would be, and not demanding.  Her eyelids drifted down.

Chapter Fifteen

Julie heard the nagging little voice that warned her she was going too far, but the sweet pleasure of Morgan's kiss set her heart to singing.  His arms went around her, curling her into an embrace she fit so perfectly she might have been made exclusively for him and no other to hold.  As he lifted a hand to cup the back of her head, she let her own arms encircle him, and the bond was complete.

His lips were firm, his mouth cool from a long drink of icy water.  He demanded no response, but the slightest hint of his hunger, the barest pressure of desire, and her lips parted tentatively.  Delightful shivers spread through her whole body, and though she instinctively suspected they were the mere prelude to further pleasures, Julie had no idea what her own part should be.  She hesitated only an instant, but it was enough to alert Morgan to the danger.

With a sigh, he sealed the kiss and released her still trembling lips.  Her eyes remained closed, and she did not lift her back-tilted head. He did not mind holding it a little longer.

He kissed her nose, just the tip of it where those silly spectacles had always rested.  She panted slightly, breathing through flared nostrils and barely parted lips.  A wild pulse beat in the hollow of her throat and at her temple, where he placed yet another kiss on a strand of sweat-damp silver silk that had come free from her carefully twisted braid.  He was just about to brush his lips against a shuttered eyelid when it fluttered open.

Her cheeks turned the most succulent shade of scarlet, then paled as her eyes widened.  Slowly she drew away from him, until his hands slid from her shoulders down her back and came  to rest lightly just above her hips.  He knew by the quivering of her body beneath his palms that she was ready to run.  The terrified doe poised for flight.

He must not let her go--not yet.

He took his hands away but replaced them gently atop her own, still clinging tightly to his shirttails.  He covered the little fists, then pried them loose and held them chastely in the narrow open space between their tensed bodies.

"Go home, Julie," he ordered, unaware until he opened his mouth that his voice was hoarse and his words unsteady.  "We're both of us tired, and I don't think we really know what we're doing.  Tomorrow is Sunday, a day of rest.  We need it."

She backed away finally, letting her hands fall from his only when neither of them could reach without straining.  Then her eyes fell, too, and her shoulders slumped with something more than ordinary weariness.

No one had seen them, no one need ever know what had happened, and yet Morgan couldn't help but think that Julie walked away from him with a terrible burden of guilt on her  slender shoulders.

At the precise instant that Julie turned the handle and opened the door to leave the room, Harry stirred, drawing Morgan's attention.  Though it took him only a few seconds to determine that the patient was still far from regaining consciousness, when he turned again, she was gone.  The quiet latching of the front door told him she had left the house.

*   *   *

Julie walked down the steps and out to the street, intending to enter her yard by the gate.  She did not hurry, for she needed every second to settle her emotions and compose her features.  A light burned in the parlor; someone waited up for her, and she could not let either her mother or her father see her in this state.

The noise from the Castle drifted down the street, but it did not cover the sudden angry voices coming from much nearer than the saloon.  Halfway home, Julie stopped and turned in the direction of the voices, one male, one female.

They stood in the edge of a lantern's pale glow, silhouettes against the general store's blank north wall.  Another step or two and they would have been in the alley between the main block of commercial buildings and the detached bulk of the Olympia House.  Julie strained to hear the words  they spoke, but now her ears were attuned to every night sound--the crickets, the owls, the bark of a single coyote out in the desert, the piano at the Castle--and the argument was not nearly as loud as it had been.

The woman, identifiable by her ankle- and calf-revealing skirt, let out a little shriek after some low, rumbling words from the man, whose shadow she partially blocked.  Julie would have gone on, having ascertained that the disputants were only one of the girls from Nellie's and a customer, but the sharp crack of flesh on flesh and the woman's louder cry this time halted her steps.

The man grabbed the woman's arm and tried to drag her down the alley that led towards Nellie's establishment.  He slipped almost completely into the invisibility of the buildings' shadows.  As Julie hesitated between confronting them herself and going for Morgan's help, the girl in the short green dress broke free and ran toward the Castle.  The man cursed a single word, then went after her.  His legs were longer and he was unhampered by high-heeled shoes in a street of thick dust.  In three long strides he had caught her.

He had also walked through the bright pool of light from the lantern.

Julie put a horrified hand to her mouth to stifle her gasp.  She could not be mistaken; no one else had that tousled golden hair, that strong, broad physique, that purposeful gait.  Yet she stared unbelieving as Hans returned through the lamplight, dragging the girl with him.

Julie stumbled through the house, her mind blank except for that image of Hans with the nameless prostitute.  Though a lamp burned in the parlor, no one had waited up.  Julie promised a special prayer of thanks for that; she could not have faced anyone after the shocks of that evening.

She collapsed onto her bed after she had forced herself through the rituals of removing skirt and blouse and underthings and slipping a nightdress over her head, of unplaiting and brushing her hair prior to rebraiding it for the night.  Her arms ached, but the pain in her heart was worse, much worse.

Last Sunday, when she had so accidentally discovered that Morgan did not and could not want her, she had reluctantly allowed Hans to speak to her father.  She had not told Morgan.  She should have.  Though no specific wedding date had been set, Wilhelm had agreed that autumn, when Hans had most of his work finished and before the busy spring calving season arrived, would be a good time for the marriage to take place.  This would give ample time for the negotiations on Julie's dowry, a tradition both men insisted upon even though neither of them had any intention of returning to most other Old Country ways.  And time for the less important aspects of the union, the things Julie herself needed to take care of: a wedding gown, trousseau, and acquisition of such items as she would need to set up housekeeping as Hans' wife.

She was too exhausted to dwell on it now, but though she fell asleep almost instantly, the thought remained with her and troubled her dreams.  When she wakened not many minutes into the pinkness of dawn, the same worries nagged at her.

Hans wanted her; he had assured her of that every time they met since her arrival in Plato.  He was not a man to declare his emotions in simple terms, but surely his insistence upon a wedding at the earliest possible date was proof of his desire for her.  And he was respectable, something Morgan might or might not be two weeks or two years or two decades into the future.

After dressing quickly and quietly in the cool of her room, Julie slipped downstairs to begin breakfast.  Already the morning promised more heat, but she knew mere sunlight could not match the burning torment in her soul.

She took her place in church with the rest of her family, joined somewhat to her surprise by Hans.  Knowing that she could not confront him here and now, she forced herself to put on a smile to greet him.  He did not immediately return it.

Nothing that the Reverend Wintergarden said penetrated her thoughts.  She sang the hymns distractedly, losing her place more than once.  She didn't even try to follow the sermon; she sank into her own world of hopes and dreams and nightmares and horrors and disappointments.

Hans who wanted her and had slapped the girl in the green dress.  Hans who kissed her so clumsily and then blushed.  Morgan and his cool, gentle kiss.  Morgan and his fiery outburst as he confessed his debility to Hans.  Ted Sheen, the man who had promised her so much.  Lieutenant McWilliams, the soldier who had asked her for so much.  Del Morgan, who had lost as much as she had, or maybe even more.  Or maybe he simply had had more to lose.