Just a Kiss Away by Jill Barnett Page A

unchanged. He sat against a corner, knees drawn up, mud-encrusted boots flat on the ground, khaki-covered arms across his bent, grass-stained knees, his bound hands hanging between them as still as a dead man’s. But the strangest thing was the tension that spread from him throughout the small hut. She had the feeling that even in sleep his muscles didn’t relax. Like a cornered cougar ready to pounce, the man slept as if waiting. She wondered if he’d learned to do that as a child.
    The picture he’d painted with his blunt words remained in her mind. It wasn’t easy to imagine what his childhood had been like. She glanced up at him. He was still asleep. She couldn’t imagine having to steal to live, spending a child’s playtime picking pockets and running from the police.
    At Hickory House the nursery was half a floor wide, with a hand-painted rocking horse, imported German and French dolls, complete with trousseaux, and bright spinning tops as big as leather balls. Hundreds of her brothers’ iron soldiers lined painted shelves also filled with books and puzzles. One whole corner contained stacks of wooden blocks, a huge tin of pickup sticks, and the precious bags of colorful glass marbles her brothers never allowed her to touch.
    She remembered the times when, as a child, she’d been bored with it all and complained she had nothing to play with.
    As a child this man had played with broken pieces of brick. Glancing at his eye patch she wondered if that was how he had lost his eye. She felt a sudden urge to take every toy in that nursery to the poor section of Chicago.
    Footsteps clumped around the outside of the hut. An instant later the sound of a wooden bolt rasped against the door. It opened, spilling daylight over her. She looked at the Yankee. He hadn’t moved an inch, but he was awake. She could feel it, and when she looked at his eye , it was wide open, staring back.
    “Well, well, what have we here?”
    Her head jerked back around. A man stood in the doorway, his features undiscernible with the glaring daylight behind him. He had a stocky build and wasn’t overly tall, but he towered above the two soldiers standing just inside the hut. Both held long, deadly sharp knives like the one the Yankee had held against her throat.
    Very slowly the man stepped inside. His skin was dark, his hair slick and black, the same color of his eyes, which were looking right into her. She willed away the goose pimples she got from his penetrating stare, but she didn’t avert her eyes. Fear made her continue to stare at this man, at his wide face, pitted cheeks, and broad nose, at his coarse black mustache and beard, which suddenly cracked to reveal uneven teeth and a smile too sly to be friendly. It reminded her of the way Jedidiah’s nasty hunting hounds bared their teeth. She suddenly felt as if she were seven, treed by a pack of dogs and back in that giant oak. She made eye contact again, afraid not to watch him. And she could tell he knew it, too. He was, after all, as they said at home, in the catbird seat.
    He walked straight toward Eulalie, never taking his black eyes off her. He stopped only a foot in front of her, and she had to crane her neck back to continue to meet his eyes. He broke eye contact first, raking down her body instead. Then he slowly walked around eyeing her the way her brother Harrison eyed a prime piece of horseflesh.
    She was scared and knew her shaking hands gave her fear away. He finished his inspection, stopping for an obvious moment to stare at her clasped hands. She willed them to stop. They shook more. He held out his palm. The soldier on his right slapped his long knife in the man’s hand, then returned to his position guarding the door.
    Those black eyes met hers, and he placed the deadly tip of the cold knife against the throbbing pulse in her neck. “Where are the guns?” He still smiled.
    “Leave her alone, Luna.” Those words were the first the Yankee had spoken, an order to