Chapter 3
Pain lanced through his left side as he tried to roll over, pitching Sean from the arms of sleep. The muscles in his side and abdomen tightened until they were rock hard, catapulting the sensation from pain to agony. A groan worked its way up his throat but he closed his lips tight against it, not daring to make a sound.
Where was he? He remembered the fight with the Reb, getting stabbed twice, saving the dog—he hoped—then an angel. Surely he couldn’t be dead, though. Death wouldn’t hurt this much, would it? Perhaps. After all he had done in this war there was a strong chance he was not bound for anywhere good in the afterlife.
“Lie still, or else you are liable to tear your stitches,” came a feminine voice with just a hint of an Irish accent to it. It certainly sounded heavenly.
The word stitches brought back the memory of a lovely woman dressed in men’s clothing pouring something horrible onto his wounds. Not dead after all then. Slowly, he forced his sleep-gummed eyes open. The instant they set upon the beauty hovering over him, his pain faded into the background. Sunlight filtered through long golden tresses that framed a face with high cheekbones and stunning blue eyes filled with concern. A loose, button-up blue uniform shirt hid much of the outline of her upper body and breeches clung to legs that folded beneath her.
“An angel in wolf’s clothing,” he murmured.
Casting her gaze to the earthen roof above them, she shook her head. Not so much as a dab of rouge entered her cheeks at the comment. He would have to try harder.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
He recalled her having more of an Irish accent. But then, she had an air of propriety to her now that she hadn’t possessed when he’d been bleeding out. Like many of his kind, she likely hid her accent as best she could when in the company of others. It was what they were taught, after all. But it was one of the expected things of society that he had never likened to. The fact that she worked hard at it meant she was likely of at least the middle class and he would need to be on his best behavior.
“Like someone shoved a red-hot poker into my side and arm.”
The fight replayed in his memory. His eyes shot to his arm. A long breath eased from him when he saw it was whole—swollen, but whole. Just to be sure, he flexed the fingers of his left hand. The movement hurt all the way up to the wound near his bicep, but each finger moved at his command. Again he sighed. The skin gleamed. It was so clean, a line of neat stitches cutting a red and black swath through it.
“Keep that up and you will pass out,” the woman said.
“’Tis just…I cannot believe you saved it. The doctors would have cut it off.”
An old anger that likely had nothing to do with his wounds filled her eyes. She shook her head. “’Tis because they are idiots. There was no need to take the arm. It will heal.”
There was that lovely accent.
His head tilted and his brows rose. “But the risk of infection…”
She fussed with the dressing that covered the wound on his side as if she didn’t want to meet his eyes. “Is far less because of the precautions I took.” Her voice was guarded, defensive.
With his good hand, he reached over and touched her arm, drawing her gaze to him. Such a touch was completely inappropriate, he knew, but their situation was hardly normal. The heat in her crystal-blue eyes warmed him from the middle outward. “I did not mean to offend you. I’m grateful for what you did for me,” he said.
The stiffness in her shoulders melted away a little. “I was happy to do it. You saved Cliste, after all.”
A tail thumped to the left near his head. He turned to see the huge gray hound lying beside him, head upon its massive paws. “She belongs to you then? Quite an amazin’ creature you have there.”
The tail thumped harder.
Lips turning up into a smile that lit her radiant face, she patted the hound on the head. “Aye, that she is.”
Reluctantly, he withdrew his hand from her arm. Tempting as she was, he couldn’t allow a brush with death to compromise his sense of honor and propriety. “My apologies for being so forward. ’Tis just that I have never brushed shoulders with death so closely. Since we’ve no one to properly introduce us, I suppose I shall have to make due. I am Sean MacBranain, Corporal with the 69th regiment. And who do I have the pleasure of addressin’?”
Pink brightened her cheeks, taking a bit of the haunted look out of her eyes. “Ashlinn O’Brian, nurse of the 69th regiment.”
“’Tis a pleasure to meet your acquaintance, Ms. O’Brian,” he said.
“And yours, sir.”
The moment her gaze dropped in a demur, ladylike fashion, he looked away as well. He had to, else he would run the risk of staring at her. She captivated him more than he wanted to admit. From the earthen ceiling and walls and the nearby rush of water, he guessed they were hidden away in a hollow somewhere very near the river. What a nurse was doing way out here amidst the battle, he couldn’t fathom. Slowly, and with far more care this time, he started to sit up.
“We have got to get back to the regiment,” he said through gritted teeth.
Hunger roiled through him at the movement, morphing quickly into pain, a lot of it.
“Easy, easy,” the woman warned as she reached out to help him.
The hound whined and inched closer, crawling on her belly.
Once he achieved a sitting position, he had to stop. Struggling to draw breath through the haze of pain, he blinked and breathed deep until the darkness framing his vision went away. The woman’s hands were like brands upon his arms, wonderfully hot, but almost too hot.
“Your hands are so hot.”
He didn’t realize he’d spoken the words aloud until she made a small sound between a grunt and a laugh. “’Tis warm out for sure, but my hands only feel that way because you lost so much blood.”
The sunlight upon the ground behind her seemed to have retreated a bit since he’d first awoken. That or time was playing tricks on him. “How long was I out?”
Her head turned in the direction of the light. “Two nights and almost two days now.”
Heart pounding out a rhythm a drummer boy would be hard pressed to keep up with, he pushed himself to a knee. “The regiment…”
Dipping under his good arm, she helped him stand. “Careful of your head; the roof is low.”
Hunched from the pain twisting his guts, he had no need to worry about striking his head. He couldn’t stand up straight if he wanted to, which he most certainly did not. One hand sliding around his waist, below his wound enough to make him blush had he more blood in him, the woman stabilized him. The touch was so inappropriate, so improperly familiar, that he started to draw away. The world swam. Moving faster than such a large creature should be able to, the hound was suddenly at his other side, pushing her muzzle beneath his hand.
“The 69th has withdrawn to Harrison’s Landing,” Ashlinn said.
His heart picked back up a frantic rhythm. “But it seemed we were winnin’.”
“We did. They withdrew after the Rebels retreated.”
Sean shook his head. “That makes little sense.”
“True enough, but I am certain of it. I walked back through enough of the soldiers to know.”
She let go of him long enough to put her satchel and coat