The Touch of Fire Read online

  She looked pale and dazed. She didn’t glance at him, but instead stared fixedly at the fire. He saw her slender throat move as she swallowed.

  “It was just a kiss,” he murmured, moved by an impulse to comfort her, since she seemed to need it. He scowled as he had an unwelcome thought. Though she had seemed to respond to him, it was possible she was afraid he would assault her. She had opened her mouth for him, but he couldn’t say that she had returned the kiss. It infuriated him to think that maybe he’d been the only one feeling that buildup of heat and tension inside, but the possibility was there. “I’m not going to attack you.”

  Annie struggled to compose herself. If he thought her reaction was caused by fear, that was much better than him knowing she had wanted him to continue what he’d been doing. She looked down at her hands, but couldn’t think of anything to say. Her mind felt sluggish, and her heart was still racing.

  Rafe sighed and sought a more comfortable position, dragging his saddle over to lean against. It looked like he needed to get her settled down as he had the night before. “What made you want to be a doctor? It’s not the usual thing for a woman.”

  That was the one subject guaranteed to bring her out of herself. She gave him a quick look, grateful for something to talk about. “That’s certainly been impressed on me time and again!”

  “I can imagine. What made you do it?”

  “My father was a doctor, so I grew up around medicine. I can’t remember when I wasn’t fascinated by it.”

  “Most doctors’ little girls play with dolls, not medicine.”

  “I suppose. Papa said it really started when I fell out of a barn loft when I was five. He was terrified that the fall had killed me; he said that I wasn’t breathing, and that he couldn’t find a pulse. He beat on my chest with his fist and started my heart again, or at least that’s what he always told me; now that I’m older, I think I was probably only stunned. Anyway, I was very taken with the idea that he had started my heart, and from then on all I talked about was being a doctor.”

  “Do you remember the fall?”

  “Not really.” She gazed at the fire, raptly watching the small yellow tongues of flame tipped with palest blue as they wavered back and forth. “What I remember is more like a dream about falling, rather than a real fall. In the dream I had fallen, but I got up by myself, and there was a lot of light and people coming to get me. I don’t remember what Papa says happened. I was only five, after all. What do you remember from when you were five?”

  “Getting my ass tanned for letting chickens in the house,” he said bluntly.

  Annie hid a smile at the image. She wasn’t shocked by his language, for after working in a boomtown for so many months, she thought there was very little that she hadn’t already heard. “How many chickens?”

  “Enough, I guess. I couldn’t count very well at that age, but it seemed like a lot of them.”

  “Did you have any brothers and sisters?”

  “One brother. He died during the war. How about you?”

  “No, I was an only child. My mother died when I was two, so I don’t remember her at all, and Papa never remarried.”

  “Was he happy that you wanted to be a doctor too?”

  Annie had often wondered that very thing. “I don’t know. I think he was proud, but worried at the same time. I didn’t understand why until I entered medical school.”

  “Was it difficult?”

  “Just getting into school was difficult! I wanted to attend Harvard, but they wouldn’t accept me because I’m a woman. I finally attended medical school in Geneva, New York, where Elizabeth Blackwell got her degree.”

  “Who’s Elizabeth Blackwell?”

  “The first woman doctor in America. She got her degree in ’49, but little had changed in the years since. The instructors ignored me and the other students harassed me. They accused me to my face of being nothing more than a loose woman, since any decent woman wouldn’t want to see what I’d be seeing. They told me that I should get married, if anyone would have me after that, and have babies as women were supposed to do. I should leave medicine to people who were smart enough to understand it, namely men. I studied alone and ate every meal alone, and I stayed.”

  He looked at her thin, delicate face, outlined by the glow of the fire, and could see fierce stubbornness in the set of her soft mouth. Yes, she would have stayed, even in the face of violent opposition. He didn’t understand the fervor that drove her to work herself to the bone in the name of medicine, but her instructors and fellow students had certainly underestimated it. She was the only female doctor he’d ever seen, but during the war a lot of sick and wounded men would have died if it hadn’t been for the women volunteering to work in the hospitals and take care of them. It was damn certain those women had seen a lot of naked men, too, and no one thought any less of them for it. More, in fact.

  “Don’t you want to get married and have babies? Seems to me like you could do that and still be a doctor.”

  She gave him a quick smile, then shyly returned her gaze to the fire. “I’ve never really thought about getting married. All of my time has been taken up with being a doctor, with learning everything I can learn about it. I wanted to go to England and study with Dr. Lister, but we couldn’t afford it, so I’ve had to learn any way I could.”

  Rafe had heard of Dr. Lister, the famous English surgeon who had revolutionized his profession by using antiseptic methods, greatly reducing the number of deaths by infection. Rafe had seen too much battlefield surgery not to realize the importance of Dr. Lister’s methods, and his own recent bout with an infected wound had impressed him with the seriousness of it.

  “Well, what about now? You’ve learned how to be a fine doctor. Are you going to be looking for a husband now?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so. Not many men would be willing to have a doctor for a wife, and besides, I’m too old. I’ll be thirty my next birthday, so that makes me an old maid, and men would rather have someone younger.”

  He gave a short laugh. “Since I’m thirty-four, twenty-nine doesn’t seem so old to me.” He hadn’t been able to guess her age, and he was a little surprised that she had revealed it so easily, since in his experience women tended to evade the issue after they reached their twenties. Annie often looked tired and worn, with good reason, which made her seem older than she was, but at the same time her skin was as soft and smooth as a baby’s and her round breasts stood upright like a young girl’s. The thought of her breasts made him shift uncomfortably as his groin tightened. He’d only seen them through her shift, and he felt cheated because he hadn’t felt them in his hands, hadn’t seen the color of her nipples or tasted their sweetness.

  “Have you ever been married?” she asked, jerking his attention back to their conversation.

  “No. Never even came close.” He’d been twenty-four, and just beginning to think of the security and closeness of marriage, when the war had started. The following four years of guerrilla fighting with Mosby had hardened him, and after his father had died during the winter of’64, he’d had no family left and so had drifted after the end of the war. Maybe he’d have settled down, though, if he hadn’t run into Tench Tilghman in New York in ’67. Poor Tench, he hadn’t realized the terrible secret he’d been guarding, and it had cost him his life, but at least he’d died without knowing how they had been betrayed.

  Blackness welled in him at the memory and he struggled to quell it rather than inflict the ugliness of his mood on Annie. “Let’s go to sleep,” he muttered, suddenly impatient to have his arms around her again, even if it was in sleep. Maybe the peculiar sweetness of her touch would lighten his dark spirit. He stood up and began banking the fire.

  Annie was startled by his brusqueness, for she had been enjoying their conversation, but she obediently got to her feet. Then she remembered that she had been using one of their blankets as a dress and would now have to give it up. She froze, her pleading gaze fastened on him.

  When