Gallant Waif by Anne Gracie (best ereader manga .TXT) 📕

to move slowly towards the house. After a few minutes he glanced down at her. “You really are the oddest girl.”

“What makes you say so?”

“Ninety-nine women out of a hundred would be turning this into a major dramatic occasion, weeping and having hysterics over me, and here you are, having the audacity to tease me about bad language.”

“Would you prefer me to have hysterics, then, sir?” Kate pretended to consider it seriously. “I must confess that I haven’t had a great deal of experience in the matter, but if it would make you more comfortable, then I’m sure that I could undertake to stage a very convincing bout of hysterics. If you prefer it, that is.” Her eyes danced mischievously, but all the time she urged him onward, hoping her nonsense would distract him from the pain.

He threw back his head and laughed outright at that. “Good God, no! Heaven preserve me from hysterical females!”

They continued their laboured progress for a few more minutes, then stopped for a brief respite.

“You have no idea how refreshing it is to have a sensible female to deal with,” he said earnestly.

At this Kate was forced to lower her head and compress her lips to prevent herself laughing out loud.

He noticed, however. “What is it now?” he asked and, when she did not respond, he put a hand under her chin and turned her face up to his. Finding it brimful of suppressed merriment, he frowned in suspicion.

“Well, what have I said to cause this?” With a light finger he flicked at the dimple which peeped elusively out.

Her eyes danced irrepressibly. “For weeks now you have been calling me ‘the stubbornest, most infuriating female it has ever been my misfortune to meet’!” she growled in a deep gruff voice. Then she allowed her mouth to droop mournfully. “And now, when you call me a sensible female, alas, there are no witnesses!”

His lips twitched. “Well, most of the time…” he began.

Kate burst into peals of infectious laughter and reluctantly he joined in. As they laughed, she met his eye and felt the jolt of warm good humour pass through her. Slowly the laughter died in his eyes and she felt his gaze intensify. Suddenly Kate became hotly aware of the intimacy of their position, her body held tightly under his arm, wedged firmly against his hard, warm body, his mouth only inches away from hers. For a moment they stood there, their eyes locked, then she felt, rather than saw, his mouth moving down towards hers. Abruptly she turned her head away, her heart racing, her mouth dry.

“Come on now,” she murmured. “We’d best keep moving and get you in out of this chilly morning. Your leg will need to be examined by the doctor.” She felt him withdraw as they moved off.

“I’m not having any damned leech or sawbones maul me around any more. I had enough of them to serve me a lifetime on the Peninsula.”

“Oh, but surely you cannot compare the physicians we have here in England with some of the butchers that passed for surgeons during wartime?” Kate said incautiously.

Jack stopped and looked at her in surprise. “Do you know, you’re the first person in England that I’ve ever heard with an accurate notion of some of those bloody devils? Apart from anyone who was there, I mean. You sound as if you actually have an inkling of what it was like.”

Kate smiled slightly. “Do I, indeed?” Her face sobered. “Well, I did have two brothers and a father who died there. Now, have you had enough of a rest to continue, or do you wish to rest a moment or two more?”

That got him moving again. Kate was relieved, but, more than that, he’d given her the opening she’d wanted. “Not all doctors are butchers, you know,” she said after a time. He snorted.

“It’s true,” she insisted. “I once met the most wonderful physician, descended from a long line of physicians, right back to the Moors, who used methods of treatment that enabled some terrible wounds to heal almost like new.”

“Humph!”

“For instance, with a bad leg like yours,” she persisted, “where the wound had healed, but the muscles had lost their strength, he would order that the leg be massaged three times daily with hot oils, the oil being rubbed well in and each part of the leg stretched and pummelled.”

“Ah…” he said ironically. “A torturer. I have heard that some of those oriental types have the most subtle and fiendish methods.”

“I know it sounds like that, but it is truly efficacious, though it is not at all comfortable at first.” Kate remembered the groans of anguish that her brother Jemmy had uttered when the treatment first began, and how it had taken all her will-power to continue the treatment.

“After a few short weeks, the limb begins to strengthen and, with added exercise, I believe that almost full power can be returned in some cases.”

“Rubbish!” he snapped curtly. “Unscrupulous leeches preying on credulous fools.”

Kate understood his hostility. Hope could be very painful.

“Possibly,” she said quietly. “I suppose it depends on the wound, but this treatment had my brother walking after our English doctors had told him he would never be without crutches again.”

She paused to let that sink in. “And his wound was very bad, enough to have them planning to amputate.”

Kate would never forget frantically clinging to the surgeon’s arm, begging him to wait for another opinion, and then the final relief when her father had burst into the tent and wrested the saw from the man’s drunken hand.

“Perhaps the method may help your leg.”

“I doubt it!”

“It could not hurt to try, surely?” she coaxed.

“Dammit! You know nothing about it, girl! I have been mauled enough by incompetents from the medical fraternity and I will have nothing to do with any more quack cures, especially those dreamed up by mysterious oriental fakirs!”

Kate felt a wave of frustration surge through her. It was perfectly obvious to her that he had