Page 32 of At Love’s Command

A gentle touch on his upper arm cleared the choking haze of memory. He blinked the smoke of past battles from his eyes and focused on lovely green eyes shining not with pity or disgust, but with understanding.

“I see them too,” she said. “The old man whose heart was too weak to endure the stress of removing the cancer that was killing him. The woman crushed by a wagon who’d lost too much blood by the time I got to her. The stillborn babe who never took a first breath.” Her lashes dipped, brushing across the freckles lining the tops of her cheeks. “I tell myself I did everything I could. That their deaths were outside my control, but I still feel regret.” She raised her lashes and peered into his eyes with a vulnerability he’d never thought to see on her face. “And when I’m particularly tired or discouraged, I torture myself with questions of what I could have done differently.”

“How you could have saved them.” He did the same. Not only with how he could have saved the old woman and those kids, but how he could have stopped the entire fiasco from happening in the first place. If he had forced the Lakota to surrender their weapons when they’d first tracked them down. If he had restrained the medicine man who’d incited the rebellion. If he had—

“But torture isn’t healthy,” Josie said, cutting off his spiraling thoughts. “It tears apart the soul.” She smiled at him, a knowing smile that made him suspect she knew exactly where his brain had traveled. “One of my medical professors liked to say, ‘You won’t find success with patients in the present if you dwell on the failures of your past.’ I think he was right. So when a loss comes, I examine what went wrong, learn what I can to inform future decisions, then leave it behind. I have to if I want to serve my patients to the best of my ability.”

“‘But this one thing I do,’” Matt murmured softly, “‘forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before.’”

Her smile stretched wide. “Exactly! I love that verse from Philippians. It’s seen me through many a late-night mental battle.”

He had a hard time imagining this strong-willed woman losing ground in any battle she waged, but he knew better than most how different things were in the dead of night, how nightmares could distort reality, and how shadows of doubt and recrimination loomed large.

“Preach quoted it the day we decided to leave the army and start the Horsemen,” he said. “It kind of became our creed.”

“A fitting motto.”

They fell into an easy silence after that and began walking again. Their arms hung loose at their sides, his knuckles brushing the back of her hand on occasion. Whenever the unintentional touch occurred, awareness zinged up his arm and shot into his chest, causing his lungs to constrict and his breathing to become slightly erratic. He could feel the pull of her. So close. Mere inches of no-man’s-land separated them. Territory yet unconquered. He steered his step minutely closer to hers, the warrior inside urging him to lay claim even as the gentleman insisted he hold the line.

The back of her hand brushed against his. At her instigation, not his. By accident or design? He slanted a look at her, but the hat she wore hid her eyes from him.

He chomped at the bit holding him in place. Her hand swung past his in a near miss just as a bird called from the south. The sound blasted through his ears like the bugle call to advance. The soldier surged forward. Crossed no-man’s-land. And claimed the fair maiden’s hand.

When she offered no resistance, his galloping heart slowed to a canter, the triumph rising in his chest tempered by the sheer wonder of the feel of her fingers resting against his.

“How long did you serve in cavalry?” she asked, finally breaking the silence that stretched between them.

“Thirteen years. Joined up after Custer’s defeat at Little Bighorn.” Matt thought back to the naïve kid he’d been, so eager to make a difference, not realizing the price he’d be asked to pay.

She tilted her face to peer up at him. “You must have been very young.”

He grinned. “I didn’t think so at the time. Twenty-two was a man grown. But looking back, the man I am today feels ancient in comparison.”

“Not ancient,” she said, humor sparking in her eyes, “just well-seasoned. At least, that’s what I tell myself when I overhear the old-maid whispers.”

“Old maid?” Matt’s feet planted in the ground as the need to defend her against such outlandish accusations fired his blood. “You are nothing of the sort. Old maids are spinsters who are either too timid to face the world or such grouches that they find nothing but fault in it. You are far too vibrant, intelligent, and kind to fall into either category. Not to mention the fact that the idea of you being old is ludicrous. Me? I’m practically in my dotage. But you?” His voice softened as he reached between them and ran the back of his finger across her cheek. “You are a rose in full bloom.”

A touch of pink colored her skin, and her lashes lowered to hide her eyes. He clenched his jaw. He’d said too much. Gotten too personal. But the idea of some snoopy busybodies calling Josie an old maid just because she wasn’t married riled him so much that words had just tumbled out of him before he could think better of it.

“Sorry. I know it ain’t exactly polite to comment on a woman’s age.”

Her head came up, and she pinned him with her gaze. “Don’t you dare apologize, Matthew Hanger.”

There she went again, throwing around his full name as if it were the exclamation mark on her sentence. A man really shouldn’t enjoy being harangued, but Josie’s rants were more like teasing in disguise, having more to do with lifting him up than tearing him down. And while her highfalutin vocabulary might intimidate him just a tad, it was hard not to appreciate her wielding it on his behalf.

She jabbed him with her finger again. “You will not retract that compliment. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He gave a sober nod. It really was hard not to grin, but she was making such an effort to look fierce, he didn’t want to ruin the game.

“Good, because I plan on holding on to those fine words for a good long while. And another thing.” She jabbed him again, though this time it was more of a full-handed pat than a jab, one that lingered against his chest, giving him the oddest urge to flex his muscles. “You are far from being in your dotage. I’ve seen your physique, if you’ll recall, and as a doctor, I can assure you that among male Homo sapiens, you fall far above the average.”

The fact that he had never heard the term Homo sapiens did nothing to impair his understanding of her meaning. She didn’t see an old man nearing his fourth decade with graying hair and aching bones when she looked at him. She saw a man in his prime. He did flex his muscles then, and that grin he’d been fighting found its way onto his face. Only it wasn’t humor inspiring its appearance this time. Nope. It was full-on swagger.

“And what if I’m more interested in your opinion as a woman than a physician?” he asked as he set a hand to her waist and tugged her closer.

“A physician is trained to catalog the strengths and weaknesses of the human anatomy,” she said as her palm flattened against the wall of his chest, “and report accurate findings. But a woman?” Her gaze lifted from his chest to his face. “A woman keeps her secrets.”

As close as they were, she had to tip her chin to meet his gaze. Her lips beckoned, and the urge to kiss her was so strong it required physical effort to hold himself back.