One Wore Blue (53 page)

“Daniel, you’re bleeding.”

“And I’ll bleed again before it’s over, no doubt. Your place before ours, anyway. We’ll see how John is doing, and we’ll be just fine.”

Torn between her father and Daniel, Kiernan looked across the wagon at Jacob. He shook his head miserably,
having no help to give her. To complicate matters, she felt another searing pain. She stiffened, bracing her hand against her back, and resolved not to alarm the others.

Janey, looking at her, was about to speak. She knew what Kiernan was going through. Kiernan shook her head fiercely, and Janey closed her lips with disapproval.

Kiernan leaned back and felt the breeze bathe her face. The wagon jerked to a halt, and she heard Jesse swearing softly. Jacob, across from her, called out, “Rebs!”

“Jesu!” Kiernan whispered in panic. Their worst nightmare was now upon them.

“Hey, it’s a Yank!” drawled a thick southern voice. “A go’darned Yank! You, Yank! Get out of that wagon. What you got in it?”

Kiernan struggled to look. With alarm, she saw they were surrounded by a party of five Rebs. The one speaking had ridden forward and close and was sneering at Jesse. There were too many of them! Without daring to think, she launched into a reckless speech. “He’s got nothing in it! Nothing but an expecting wife and an injured man! Please, sir, let us pass—”

“Kiernan, shut up!” Jesse demanded furiously. He stood on the seat, one hand lightly on the Colt in the holster by his side, as he looked at the five rough-looking men in gray surrounding the wagon.

She stared at him blankly. “But, Jesse, if they only knew—”

“If they knew,” Jesse informed her flatly, “they’d still be deserters, Kiernan! Now shut up and sit down!”

“Deserters!” the leader of the Rebs said in an irritated cry. “Yank, what are you—out here all alone?” Kiernan shuddered, studying the man. He was unshaven, and his uniform was muddied and dirtied. She suddenly sensed that Jesse was right. The man smiled at her. “Well now, there’s a comely lass for you, even if she is in the family way!” He looked back to Jesse. “She’ll be some lively sport once you’re dead, Yank.”

“Son of a bitch!” Daniel hissed softly at her side.

The Reb grinned and aimed his Enfield rifle at Jesse. But
he never had a chance. Jesse moved like lightning with the Colt. Then he spun around and caught the second man in the hand. The third managed to get off a shot that sent the Colt spinning from Jesse’s hand.

Kiernan screamed, but Jesse ignored her, leaping from the wagon with his saber drawn. The third Reb deserter didn’t have a prayer of getting in a second shot with his muzzle-loading Enfield. He turned the weapon to use the bayonet, charging at Jesse. Jesse instantly parried the first blow—and the second, and the third. The two were quickly embroiled in a lethal and deadly dance.

The fourth man, shaking, took aim at Jesse’s back. Kiernan cried out, but a shot rang out from behind her. She spun around. Daniel was up, and he’d fired at the man.

And hit his target clean through the heart.

Then Kiernan saw another man emerge from the trees. She jumped from the wagon, hurrying to find the Colt in the dirt. Her fingers had just closed around it when a booted foot landed hard upon her hand. She looked up to see a man looming over her, laughing. “Come on, boys, get the hell out of here before they shoot us all down!” the man called out. To Kiernan’s horror, three more unshaven and muddied soldiers came crashing out of the trees. Jesse was engaged with two of them, while Daniel fought to keep shooting from the wagon.

“Get up!” the deserter raged at Kiernan. He reached down for her with his hand. She twisted and managed to kick him with all her strength in his groin. He screeched like a banshee, doubling over, then pulled a pistol from his belt and aimed it straight at her.

But he never fired.

His eyes widened, and he swirled about. Kiernan realized that Jesse was behind him, the point of his sword in the man’s back. “Throw it down!” Jesse ordered, indicating the pistol.

The deserter refused. He lifted his arm to shoot Jesse, a cocky grin on his face. But Jesse’s sword waved in the air like silver lightning. The man spun around again. He stared at Kiernan, stunned. A red stain was spreading across his
chest. He fell down dead on top of her. She screamed wildly, and Jesse quickly shoved the man’s body aside, reaching for her.

“Jesse!”

She crushed herself against him, her head next to his heart. She felt the pounding of his pulse, the heat of his body, and the tenderness of his hands as he stroked her hair.

“Jesse, get down!” Daniel shouted.

A shot rang out. Kiernan and Jesse spun to see another deserter Reb fall dead to the ground behind them. Jacob had taken the man with Daniel’s service revolver.

Jacob leaped from the wagon and rushed to Kiernan’s side. He led her away from Jesse, who strode off to search out the nearby trees.

“Is it the last of them?” he demanded of his brother.

Pale, Daniel nodded. “I wasn’t a hell of a lot of help,” he said.

“Damned good for an unconscious man,” Jesse told him. Daniel grinned weakly.

Kiernan started toward the wagon, leaning on Jacob, then staggered at the worst pain yet took hold of her. She couldn’t help but cry out.

Jesse swung back, startled by her cry. With his sword still in his hand, he ran to take her from Jacob’s hold and support her weight.

“Kiernan!”

“I’m fine,” she insisted, and started for the wagon. But as she did, a shot rang out from the trees.

Jesse let out an oath, spun around on the dirt road, and fell flat.

Daniel instantly returned the fire, and a man fell out of a tree, stone dead before he hit the ground.

But Kiernan barely noticed him, for her eyes were upon Jesse lying in the dirt, his eyes closed. She threw herself down upon her knees beside him. Blood stained his arm and his chest, where his arm lay flung over it. “Jesse!” Tears running down her cheeks, she lifted his head into her lap, cradling it. “Jesse! Oh, my love! Where are you hit? Jesse, open your eyes! Damn you, Jesse! Just live! I’ll be your wife
in truth, I’ll love you, I swear, I’ll love, honor, and obey until death do us part. Oh, Jesse, I do love you. You can’t leave me. Jesse, please, I love you. I love you so very much. I want to be your wife, to love you forever—”

Her words choked off as he opened his eyes and smiled at her. “Really?”

“Really. Jesse, just live!”

“You’ll love me forever?”

“Forever!”

“Swear it?” he whispered huskily.

“I swear it!”

To her astonishment, he sat up. He pulled her into his arms and kissed her, and it was hardly the kiss of a dying man at all. He kissed her in the dusty roadway with fever and passion and tenderness, so much that she nearly returned the urgency of it, nearly forgot where they were.

She jerked away from him, staring at him hard.

He grinned ruefully. “I was only nicked by the bullet. See? It caught my arm here. Just a little bit of blood on my chest—”

“Oh, you blasted Yankee scoundrel!” Kiernan accused him.

His smile broadened. “That’s fine, just as long as I know you’ll love me forever.”

“Jesse!”

“Horses!” Tyne called out.

Jesse leaped to his feet, pulling Kiernan up and pressing her body behind his. Tyne jumped down from the wagon, making a dive for the Colt.

“Tyne! Give it to me! If it’s Rebs, they’ll shoot you for having that weapon.”

“Master Jess, I’m willing to fight for you.”

“No, dammit man, you won’t hang for me!” Jesse snatched the weapon from Tyne. With his sword in one hand and his pistol in the other, he shouted to his brother, “Daniel, get down!”

“No, damn you, Jess, I’ll fight with you too!”

“It’s Rebs!” Jacob cried out. “Look!”

Kiernan looked. Horsemen were coming, Rebel horsemen.
They broke upon the road, a bearded cavalry captain with a company of twenty or so.

The bearded man reined in and raised a hand to stop the troops behind him. He saw the gray-clad men on the ground, then looked hard at Jesse.

“Well, Yank, what have we here?” the Rebel captain asked. His gaze took in Jesse’s medical insignias—and the weapons he held with such menace.

He dismounted from his horse. Kiernan felt Jesse stiffen, felt his hand tighten around his sword.

“It seems that I have a prisoner, one who might well meet with a firing squad. Who in the hell are you, sir? What in God’s name is a Yank doing in this neck of the woods? Colonel, you are mine!”

“I’m afraid I can’t let you take me, Captain.”

The captain’s brows raised. “Sir? I seem to have the greater number, since you are dealing with a boy, a girl, two darkies, and a lady very far gone with child, it seems. Ma’am, I’ll ask you to move away now.”

Kiernan shook her head fiercely. She tried to step around in front of Jesse to protect him.

“Kiernan!” he thundered, stepping back around her, his sword flashing. “Sir, I repeat, I cannot allow myself to be taken.” He actually grinned a reckless grin. “And I beg to differ with you, sir. I am an extraordinary swordsman, and the boy in the wagon is one of the best shots in the world, I dare say. As to the lady, here, why, she may well be the most dangerous of us all.”

He was teasing her still, Kiernan thought. Tenderly, gallantly teasing, when they could no longer wage battle and win, when the odds against them were overwhelming. He intended to fight these men, until he could fight no longer.

“Wait!” she pleaded.

“Why, it’s Greenbriar!” Daniel’s voice called suddenly, interrupting her. Holding his gut, he had managed to stand up almost straight in the wagon.

The captain spun around. “Cameron!”

“In the flesh,” Daniel grinned. “I’d stand with more ceremony to greet you, Greenbriar, if I could. But I’m in a
rather sad position here. And this Yank—who
is
an extraordinary swordsman, by the way—is my brother, Jesse. He’s also the best surgeon in or out of Virginia. Colonel Jesse Cameron, Captain Nathaniel Greenbriar, Virginia militia.”

Greenbriar stared from Daniel to Jesse, and back to Daniel again. “Captain Cameron—just what is going on here?”

“I was shot up keeping the Yanks out of Richmond. Our troops were gone, and I looked up, and there was Jesse. So he spirited me across the river, and then my sister-in-law here made a timely arrival, and Jesse’s been trying to get me home ever since. Greenbriar, it isn’t a spying mission, I swear it. He’s trying to take me home. You can’t take a man in for that!”

Once again, Greenbriar looked from Daniel to Jesse, and back to Daniel again.

“Sir!” one of the men said from behind him.

“Yes, Potter, what is it?”

“That’s Shelley on the ground there, sir. He deserted last month, raided the Halpren estate last week, and was accused of a lot more. We’ve been trying to chase him down for ages. He shot down three men in cold blood when they were trying to arrest him. Seems like this Yank did us a bit of a favor.”

“Is that a fact?” Greenbriar said. He scratched his chin.

There didn’t seem to be a breath of movement on the roadway. The leaves didn’t rustle in the trees, and the stillness seemed to last forever.

Greenbriar moved at last. He mounted his horse. “Let’s ride,” he told his men.

“What about the Yank?” Potter asked.

“What Yank?” Greenbriar said. He set his heels to his horse’s flanks and rode by.

All the Rebels rode by, looking straight ahead and seeing nothing in their path. Potter held back and spoke quickly to Daniel.

“That Yank who isn’t here had best be gone within the next few minutes. We’ll have to come back to bury that riffraff, and I’m afraid of what will happen to him if we get a glimpse of him on the road again.”

“He’ll be gone,” Daniel said. Potter smiled and rode off.

When he was gone, silence reigned once again. Kiernan was aware of the tension all about Jesse and in the air—and then the sweet explosion of it as they all realized they were safe.

“Jesu!” Daniel exclaimed. “We’ve made it!”

“Thank the good Lord!” Janey breathed.

Kiernan wanted to laugh and to hug Jesse. She wanted to hug Daniel, and she wanted to thank the good Lord too.

But it was all suddenly too much for her.

The light paled all around her, and she felt herself falling.

“Oh, Jesse!” she whispered as she toppled to the ground.

He swept her up and walked fast. She fought the darkness descending upon her and opened her eyes to his.

“Why the hell didn’t you say something?” he demanded.

“About what?” she said weakly.

“You’re having the baby now.”

“I can’t have the baby now. You have enough medical emergencies at the moment.”

“Whether I do or don’t, Kiernan, you’re having the baby. And you’ll have it right here on the road if we don’t get moving!”

“No,” she told him, her eyes were wide, dazzling and emerald on his. “I’m having the baby at Cameron Hall!” she insisted.

But then darkness did descend upon her, and for the moment, she could argue no more.

Twenty-Four