“Don’t do that!” she demanded, even as the bandaged head appeared through the trap.
He was looking around. “I was getting a little chilly. Thought I’d lend a hand.”
‘‘You eat already?”
His answering smile was sheepish. “I... uh, can’t seem to figure out anything down there.”
Gen didn’t want to hear that, either. “Well, be careful. I have no idea what’s up here.”
He climbed up the rest of the way, and Gen was reminded just how little he wore. If it hadn’t been close in here already, it was now.
Damn it, hormones had no place here. She had business to attend to. It ended up that they did serve some purpose, though. To escape their effects—not to mention their surprising temptation—Gen finally turned with a vengeance toward the first trunk.
“Hopefully it wasn’t just the women who kept their clothes up here,” she offered briskly.
Rafe ducked to keep from hitting his head on the rafters. “I can’t see myself in hoop skirts,” he admitted.
“Not if you’re going to help me batten down the house,” she retorted, hands on the trunk, arms tingling with something she didn’t really want to identify.
“Batten down the house?”
She nodded. “Sorry, I should have told you. It seems we’re going to be stuck here a little longer than I thought. We might be visited by the edge of a hurricane.”
Rafe took a moment to consider that. “I see.” Then he took to looking around.
That left Gen with nothing but the task at hand.
The trunk she’d chosen was old, battered. It had been a beauty once, though, with brass fittings and a lovely arch to the lid. Gen just hoped nobody had locked it.
Nobody had. With unusual timidity, Gen wrapped her hands around the sides and lifted. It opened easily. Gen was glad. At least she was spared the creepy sound of creaking hinges. That would have been all she needed, especially up here.
There might not have been noise, but there was something. Some... feeling, as if whatever had been courting her in her dreams had lived here all along, and that she was truly letting it loose. Pandora’s box, with its humors, whether good or ill, set free to wreak their havoc. Gen felt it along her spine, at the base of her neck. Frissons of apprehension. Whispers of emotions, like the frail attar of long-pressed flowers, sorrow and joy and pain, escaping into the air as if they had waited a long time to be shared. Gen fought an unholy urge to run. Instead, she looked inside.
“Dear God...”
Right there, on top of the trunk, on top of the first trunk. Moth-eaten and old, ripped and stained and darkened from the smoke of a thousand guns. A long gray wool uniform coat, its twin row of buttons still shining dully, its sleeves decorated with elaborate frogging, as carefully folded as a christening gown, the old sabre reverently placed alongside.
Gen couldn’t breathe. She saw that jacket and knew exactly where the scars had come from, each and every one. She knew the feel of that heavy wool, the weight of the sabre as a woman stretched around a handsome man to clip it on. She saw where the blood had poured through the gash in the side, and fought sudden, hot tears.
“Fourth Georgia,” she heard over her shoulder in an awed whisper.
For a moment, it didn’t register. Then Gen was whipping around on her heels to find Rafe’s attention on that coat, his expression pensive, his eyes almost dreamy.
“What?”
He started, almost as if coming out of a trance. He looked down at her. “Fourth Georgia.”
“Fourth Georgia what?”
“Regiment. Until Spotsylvania, anyway.”
If Gen had been a woman to swoon, that was the moment she would have done it. Spotsylvania was a town in Virginia, southeast of the Wilderness, where some of the fiercest, most horrific fighting of the Civil War had taken place. Where, on May 12, 1864, Rafe had been mortally wounded.
