The Officer and the Traveler (4 page)

In the far corner, she spotted a small cluster of men chewing and spitting and leering at her as they licked their lips. Nervous chills ran up her spine. She jerked her eyes away and saw a man walking toward her. He looked a bit more clean and young than some of the others, but he was still a man and for a reason she couldn’t name, the idea of being alone with him caused terror to build in her chest. Not wishing to provoke him or let on to how uncomfortable he made her, she crossed the boardwalk to the staircase that was only a few feet away and started to ascend. Surely he wouldn’t follow her up the stairs?

She was halfway up when she felt the stairs shake under the weight of his booted feet. Her pulse picked up and she sped her pace. What did he want with her? That was almost laughable. He wanted what all men wanted. The intensity in his eyes spoke that proclamation loud enough.

His heavy footfalls sounded closer and closer to her despite her quickened pace. There wasn’t much room left on this shared balcony before she reached the end and would have to turn around and face him.

Her heart began pumping faster. She grew lightheaded as she neared the end. There was one last door on the left. Perhaps she should see if it was unlocked and pretend she belonged inside. Would he know she didn’t?

Suddenly, that very door swung open not six inches in front of her and a man stepped out, halting her and stealing every ounce of her breath at the same time. Her eyes bore into the man’s shirt. Would he help her or only pass her off to the man who’d followed her? Or worse, would he want a turn, too? Panic built in her chest. She forced it away along with her fear and met those all-too-familiar bluish-green eyes. Suddenly, her throat went dry and words failed her. Perhaps facing the man who’d followed her seemed far less dangerous.

“
Gray,” she heard herself breathe in relief.
 

Ever the gentleman these days, Gray reached forward to steady her and she pulled away. No. It was bad enough that her father had witnessed them kissing earlier, if this man saw him being affectionate toward her—even if Gray was just trying to protect her—who knew what might happen to her?

“
Looks like yer luck has finally changed,” the man behind her said with a chuckle, reminding Michaela not only of his presence, but also that he was just like all soldiers who thought women were for entertainment purposes only.
 

“
You touch her and it’ll be the last thing you do, McCorkle,” Gray barked.
 

“
I—I was just trying to help her find her way,” the man said, his voice nothing more than a broken whisper.
 

Once she could no longer hear their guest’s retreating footsteps, she stood as tall as she could manage. “Consider your saving me from the likes of him as fair payment for attempting to use me to escape a conversation with my father.”

Gray’s lips turned up into a hint of a smile and he made a
tsk, tsk
noise. “I didn’t kiss you because I was trying to evade your father.”
 

“
No, but you can’t deny that evading my father was the reason you climbed through the window.”
 

“
No. And you can’t pretend you didn’t enjoy our kiss.”
 

Flames licked her face. “Is that what you came up here to do? Mock me?”

“
No, it wasn’t my plan.” He crossed his arms and blew out a breath. “Why are you here?”
 

“
We came to see that Ella’s new husband is treating her right.”
 

“
He is,” Gray clipped. “Now you may go.”
 

“
Excuse me?”
 

“
While you and your father were down there celebrating your successes and strategizing the next part of your plan, I’ve been up here trying to make sense of everything. I have yet to discover just how Jack got involved in all of this, but make no mistake, I will find out. What I do know, is that you’re not here simply for the sake of seeing Ella. Your father brought you here so he could foist you upon me—”
 

“
Foist
me
upon
you
?” She shook her head. “I don’t think so. I’d say it would be me who’d come up with the losing end of that bargain.”
 

He grinned at her. “You didn’t always think that way, though, did you?”

Michaela’s eyes widened. He knew she’d had a girlhood infatuation with him? “Well, I don’t think so now.”

His handsome grin didn’t falter. “I have a hard time believing that. Otherwise you wouldn’t have made it to what...four-and-twenty unmarried.”

“
Congratulations on your ability to solve a basic math equation,” she said sarcastically. “However, my decision to remain unwed has nothing to do with any infatuation you think I might hold for you, but rather the knowledge that no man will ever deserve me.”
 

Gray laughed. “You certainly are your father’s daughter, aren’t you?” A cool, impassive look came over his face. “Which also means, you’re not above scheming to get what you want, no matter what it costs those around you.”

She stared at him. For whatever reason, he’d taken some silly notion into his head that she was scheming against him. She nearly laughed at the absurdity of his suggestion. He would be last on her list of possible husbands, were she to ever come down with a brain fever and make such a list.

“
Have no fear, Captain Montgomery, I’ve already spoken to my father and there will be no wedding between the two of us.”
 

Gray howled with laughter. “Spoke to him? Michaela, I was recently tied to a tree by a group of yelling savages who had every intention of peeling my scalp from my skull. I think I’d have had better luck convincing them not to harm me than using my words to get your father to change his mind.” He shook his head and scoffed. “I have no plans to marry, but I also don’t want to see you get hurt or forced to marry a man who will treat you wrong because of whatever foolishness your father has taken into his mind.”

“
You’ve become quite the gentleman, haven’t you, Gray?” she said, her voice a pitch higher than normal. “Don’t worry yourself. That won’t happen. I promise. You go have dinner with the men and tomorrow this will all be behind us.”
 

He pressed his lips together. “So then you and your father will be leaving soon and your scheming will stop?”

She ignored the part where he accused her of scheming or playing some role in all of this and said, “I expect that we’ll be gone from here shortly, yes. Pa just wants to catch up with Uncle George for a bit and make sure Ella is doing well.”

Gray narrowed his eyes on her, but didn’t say anything. “And that is your intention, too?”

“
Well, despite your inflated male pride, I didn’t come up here to visit with you.”
 

He nodded once, very slowly. “Very well. She’s in that room.” He pointed behind her to door on the end. “May you have a safe journey home.”

Michaela watched the bizarre man walk away for the second time since he’d kissed her today. With the whirlwind of events that had happened since she’d awakened alone in her father’s hot and stuffy carriage only to emerge and see a man climbing out his window, she was in desperate need of a respite that only seeing Ella would bring.

Hesitantly, she went to Ella’s door and gave a delicate knock, suddenly aware that Ella might not be in a state to accept a visitor.

The worry was quickly banished from Michaela’s mind when the door swung open to reveal a very excited, if not somewhat out-of-sorts Ella.

“
Oh how I’ve missed you,” Ella said, wrapping Michaela in a strong hug.
 

“
I’ve missed you, too,” Michaela confided, squeezing her sister back in equal measures—and then a little more.
 

“
Is something wrong?” Ella choked, trying to free herself.
 

“
I imagine she finds a great deal wrong after being accosted that way by Gray,” a man, who Michaela presumed to be Ella’s husband Jack, said from somewhere behind Ella.
 

Ella giggled. “Michaela, I’d like you to meet Jack. Jack, this is my sister, Michaela.”

Michaela forced a smile as she greeted her newest brother-in-law. Michaela hadn’t been so sure about him when Ella had begun writing letters to him, but seeing the way he looked at her sister, with adoration for his wife shining in his dark brown eyes, Michaela was certain this black-haired man was a good match for her sister.

The sound of Ella clearing her throat brought Michaela back to present. “Sorry,” she murmured, blushing.

“
It’s all right,” Jack said with a grin. “I couldn’t imagine what must be running through your head as you recover the travesty of being kissed by Gray.”
 

“
Would you stop?” Ella chastised him.
 

Jack threw his hands into the air. “I’m just trying to be sympathetic as she has to begin navigating the rest of her life after such a distressing experience.”

“
His unwanted kiss was only the beginning,” Michaela said, forcing a wobbly smile. “Apparently Pa saw it and thought it was grounds to demand marriage.”
 

Ella’s eyes grew as large as Ma’s old tea saucers. “You’re engaged to Gray?”

How strange that he’d said he’d hated it when she’d called him Gray, preferring Grayson, instead, and now that’s what all of his friends called him. She pushed away the thought. Michaela began pulling her pins from her hair so she could fix it. “No. Pa wants to push the match for some reason, but I got him to agree that if Gray doesn’t ask me to marry him tonight, Pa will take me back to Savannah.”

“
And did you give Gray a reason to ask you?” Ella asked with a slight giggle.
 

Michaela did her best to hold a straight face and twisted her lips. “No.”

“
Well, that’s a shame. By the looks of what we witnessed up here, it seemed quite obvious that if the two of you marry, you should have no trouble engaging in the physical side of your marriage.”
 

Gray almost slammed the door to the stables in frustration, but didn’t wish to spook the horses, so he settled for punching himself in the thigh and grunting as he made his way down to Quicksilver, his favorite stallion.

Something
was afoot. He didn’t know what it was, but there was no way he fully believed Michaela’s claim earlier. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to; his problem wasn’t necessarily with her. It was her father he couldn’t trust. And neither could she for all he knew. What he remembered of her was from so long ago that he honestly didn’t know if he could trust her.
 

Forgoing the saddle and the time it would take to put one on Quicksilver’s back, Gray slipped the bit into his horse’s mouth, hopped up on his bare back, then guided him out to the open fields and let him run at full speed. So much of this afternoon made sense now—and it all disgusted him.

His past dealings with Michaela had been few and fleeting. She was the daughter of General Davis, the man who thought he was in a position to play God in Gray’s life. Of course were he to put aside his own stubborn pride and general dislike for the man, Gray would admit that his life overall was better for the general’s interference. If not for General Davis, who knows where Gray would be: Working at the docks? The owner of a brothel? Chained up in prison? Dead? They were all genuine possibilities. Possibilities he didn’t want to think about, but that didn’t make them any less true.

The truth was, before General Davis showed up one night, Gray was nothing more than a fifteen year-old illiterate bastard (literally) of a prostitute and destined for a miserable life. But that didn’t mean he’d done anything to earn the education nor experience General Davis had seen fit for Gray to have received—neither the positive, nor the miserable. And as if the general’s interference wasn’t enough then, it would seem that General Davis was set on giving him his daughter, too. The very daughter that Gray had gone out of his way to treat coldly in an effort to stifle her well-intended, but unreturned affections.

He winced at the memories and spurred Quicksilver to ride faster. It wasn’t that he hadn’t liked her, for he hardly knew her. Most of what he knew about her he’d heard in the form of teasing from the privates in the military camp where he was living at the time in the home of Colonel Jones. He’d respond to their taunts with a grunt and act disinterested that Michaela Davis had been spotted spying on him; and to be frank, he didn’t care one way or the other. She was just another pitfall he couldn’t afford to fall into at sixteen. If word were to get back to her father that someone suspected he was the least bit interested in Michaela, who knew what might happen. Nothing good. He was certain of that and he was in no position to risk it and be sent back to the brothel. Not that she was a temptation. She wasn’t. A year younger than him, carefree, and the daughter of the commander of the fort, the decision to avoid her was very easy. And avoid her he did. Well, he did until she was no longer avoidable, that is.

A chill came over him as an image of the two of them together presented itself in his mind. Gritting his teeth, he slowed Quicksilver and turned him back toward the barracks. It wouldn’t do to run at full charge into Cherokee land. He’d gone there uninvited mere days ago when Jack was in need of a miracle from the medicine man for Ella. They’d gone together that night, and had somehow survived, despite being shot at and tied to a tree before being made to suffer other forms of torture. Gray returned home that night with enough knowledge and fear to convince him to never return without the sun high up in the sky, a flank of men, and an invitation.