The Officer and the Traveler Read Online Free PDF

“Apparently Pa saw it and thought it was grounds to demand marriage.”  
    Ella’s eyes grew as large as Ma’s old tea saucers. “You’re engaged to Gray?”
    How strange that he’d said he’d hated it when she’d called him Gray, preferring Grayson, instead, and now that’s what all of his friends called him. She pushed away the thought. Michaela began pulling her pins from her hair so she could fix it. “No. Pa wants to push the match for some reason, but I got him to agree that if Gray doesn’t ask me to marry him tonight, Pa will take me back to Savannah.”
    “ And did you give Gray a reason to ask you?” Ella asked with a slight giggle.  
    Michaela did her best to hold a straight face and twisted her lips. “No.”
    “ Well, that’s a shame. By the looks of what we witnessed up here, it seemed quite obvious that if the two of you marry, you should have no trouble engaging in the physical side of your marriage.”  
     

 
     
~Chapter Four~
     
     
    Gray almost slammed the door to the stables in frustration, but didn’t wish to spook the horses, so he settled for punching himself in the thigh and grunting as he made his way down to Quicksilver, his favorite stallion.
    Something was afoot. He didn’t know what it was, but there was no way he fully believed Michaela’s claim earlier. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to; his problem wasn’t necessarily with her. It was her father he couldn’t trust. And neither could she for all he knew. What he remembered of her was from so long ago that he honestly didn’t know if he could trust her.  
    Forgoing the saddle and the time it would take to put one on Quicksilver’s back, Gray slipped the bit into his horse’s mouth, hopped up on his bare back, then guided him out to the open fields and let him run at full speed. So much of this afternoon made sense now—and it all disgusted him.
    His past dealings with Michaela had been few and fleeting. She was the daughter of General Davis, the man who thought he was in a position to play God in Gray’s life. Of course were he to put aside his own stubborn pride and general dislike for the man, Gray would admit that his life overall was better for the general’s interference. If not for General Davis, who knows where Gray would be: Working at the docks? The owner of a brothel? Chained up in prison? Dead? They were all genuine possibilities. Possibilities he didn’t want to think about, but that didn’t make them any less true.
    The truth was, before General Davis showed up one night, Gray was nothing more than a fifteen year-old illiterate bastard (literally) of a prostitute and destined for a miserable life. But that didn’t mean he’d done anything to earn the education nor experience General Davis had seen fit for Gray to have received—neither the positive, nor the miserable. And as if the general’s interference wasn’t enough then, it would seem that General Davis was set on giving him his daughter, too. The very daughter that Gray had gone out of his way to treat coldly in an effort to stifle her well-intended, but unreturned affections.
    He winced at the memories and spurred Quicksilver to ride faster. It wasn’t that he hadn’t liked her, for he hardly knew her. Most of what he knew about her he’d heard in the form of teasing from the privates in the military camp where he was living at the time in the home of Colonel Jones. He’d respond to their taunts with a grunt and act disinterested that Michaela Davis had been spotted spying on him; and to be frank, he didn’t care one way or the other. She was just another pitfall he couldn’t afford to fall into at sixteen. If word were to get back to her father that someone suspected he was the least bit interested in Michaela, who knew what might happen. Nothing good. He was certain of that and he was in no position to risk it and be sent back to the brothel. Not that she was a temptation. She wasn’t. A year younger than him, carefree,