One Wore Blue Read Online Free PDF Page A

the most charming and elegant manner imaginable. He was dedicated to his father, and to Virginia. He was bright and fun, a wonderful dancer, a man quick to plan a picnic with her or a daring horse race with a friend.
    Maybe she did love Anthony. They had everything in common, and she enjoyed him tremendously. Yet for reasons she didn’t understand herself, she waited and stalled about marrying him. She didn’t mind flirting with him in the least, and she loved dancing with him and being with him, it was just …
    She had dreamed of love being something different, something that would make her whole body tremble. She would feel a vast excitement knowing that she would see the manshe loved, of feeling a rush of heat and fever every time that he was near.
    Feelings she tried to push to deep corners of her heart and mind plunged forward despite her best efforts.
    She wanted love to feel the way she had once felt about Jesse Cameron.
    Oh, but that was so long ago! she thought. When she had been a very little girl, she had thought that the sun rose and set on him. No man had ever sat a horse better. No man had ever managed to shoot quite so well, or tease a little girl so gallantly.
    Jesse was ten years her senior. She had just been leaving her dolls behind when he had first returned from West Point in his uniform. No one had been as fascinating as Jesse in that uniform. No one had ever had quite such an effect upon her. He was always cordial when he saw her, his flashing blue eyes filled with humor and affection when he greeted her in his husky Virginia drawl. “Mornin’, Miss Mackay. I swear, but you do grow more lovely by the day.” Naturally, he teased her. He was always surrounded by girls, the belles of the South—and the North.
    Or at least he had teased her until recently, she thought. Not that she saw him very often. He had come out of West Point to move on to medicine, and he had been spending an awful lot of time in Washington. And then she had spent time with her father, and with Anthony Miller.
    Now she had to remind herself that her feelings for Jesse had been a childhood infatuation and nothing more. Their families had been friends for decades. Jesse’s brother Daniel had been one of her best friends, and he had admitted to her that Jesse had often laughed at her mischief-making and said that she was a “wayward little dickens,” and that any man had best watch out when she was in the vicinity.
    Of course, she’d never
really
been a “wayward dickens.” Jesse had overreacted. She had simply been careful to stand up against some of the pranks that others played around her. In school one day Tristan Tombey had tried to get her attention by dipping her hair in an inkwell. Well, she’d justgotten back at Tristan. Admittedly, she’d flirted with him, teased him, smiled, tugged upon his heartstrings. But that had been the only way to attach the inkwell to his suspenders so that every single thing he was wearing and his body could be coated in ink. As it happened, Jesse had just been on his way home, passing by the schoolyard, when Tristan had first put up his fuss.
    Jesse had laughed, but he’d also pulled her up on his horse and insisted on taking her home. “Miss Mackay, you are an outrageous little flirt, and I pity the poor young lad who falls for you next!” Jesse had told her firmly.
    Then he’d taken her home, and despite her outraged protests, he’d laughingly told the entire story to her father. She’d gotten into horrible trouble, of course, but Jesse had still been amused. On his way out he had taken hold of her chin, and those striking eyes of his had lit like blue fire into her own. “Take heed, Miss Mackay, you’re too young to be practicing such a talent for flirtation. Someday, some poor soul may fight back.”
    “A gallant southern gentleman?” she had taunted sweetly in turn. “Such as yourself? To cause a lady—oh, no! a child!—distress?”
    “Ah, but men will not always be