Homefront Hero

by Allie Pleiter

  John took a step closer, his hand on the house railing. “We were. I was the envy of every man there.”

  “Oh, I doubt that.” He was the center of the attention, so handsome and charming people flocked around them when they left the dance floor. If anyone was an object of envy, it was her. She had little doubt that every single woman in the ballroom coveted her position on the captain’s arm.

  “I didn’t dance with anyone else now, did I?” The way he said it let her know John was aware of how she’d noticed the attentions of other ladies at the ball.

  She crossed her arms over her chest. “You couldn’t have. No one else knew our system.”

  John stepped in again. “Our secret. But even if they did, I wouldn’t have danced with anyone else.” He’d downed several glasses of champagne after they’d danced, saying he needed it to dull the pain, and she suspected that was the reason his words took on such a dramatic flair. She also knew John used dramatic flair to get what he wanted.

  His eyes were intense, as dark blue as the night sky behind him. It was becoming clear he wanted to be closer to her. Clearer yet was that she was beginning to want it, too, despite a hundred reasons to resist. He leaned in, and while she took a breath to stop him, no sound would come out of her mouth. He ran one finger down the length of her hand. The sensation made her head spin. “I can’t dance with anyone else. Just you. Another of the Almighty’s impressive ideas, I suppose.”

  Leanne was thankful he’d managed to say the one thing that would shake her senses back into place. “John.”

  “We’re an excellent pair. Socks come in pairs.” He let his finger feather against her wrist.

  She removed her hand. “We are a mismatched pair.”

  He looked into her eyes, his voice silken. “I don’t see it that way.”

  “You are looking for the conquest you did not gain tonight. And you have had too much champagne.”

  “It kills the pain.”

  “It kills the senses,” she corrected. “We are a pair of friends, and that is how it must stay.”

  He stepped entirely too close. “Are you sure?”

  Leanne pulled in a deep breath. “Not at all, but as Dr. Madison would say, ‘there it is.’ Good night, John.”

  John took her hand and kissed it dramatically. It was a showy kiss, not the delicate kind he’d placed on her hand at the end of their waltz at the ball. “Good night, my dear friend Nurse Sample.”

  Leanne was grateful she could almost laugh. “Do you even know how to be friends with a woman?”

  “You’ll find I can be the epitome of paternal civility.”

  Now she could laugh. “Don’t you mean ‘platonic’?”

  He tipped his hat. “Perhaps I should not have downed that last glass. But it is a lovely thing not to have one’s leg on fire every moment. So perhaps your friendship will allow you to forgive my indulgence.”

  “We are all in need of forgiveness.” She stepped up onto the short flight of stairs that led into the house.

  “Not you.” He looked up at her with an unchecked, wide-eyed admiration. “You’re perfect.”

  She fought the urge to lean down and kiss his cheek. Never in her life had she been so tempted to cross such a line—but it would do neither of them any good. She was his friend. She was his nurse. That was all she could ever be. “I most of all, Captain Gallows. Good night.”

  He put his hand on his heart, a theatrical wounding, before turning off to spin his cane as he disappeared into the night.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Leanne was reconsidering her agreement to meet John today. Yes, they needed to prepare for Monday’s photograph session, but she wasn’t at all sure time alone with John was a good idea. Before the ball, they’d decided it would be smart to have John’s sock heel nearly completed in the photographs. It would show off well, and most knitters knew turning a first sock heel was a significant accomplishment for the novice knitter. She wanted John’s sense of victory to show up in the photographs, hoping to convince the intended young boys to see how challenging knitting could be. Still, it was a complicated lesson, requiring much more interaction and—regretfully—much more touching than she would have liked given how things had transpired after the ball. To cancel, however, felt like too much of an admission, and she needed to return the sock he’d left at the Red Cross House last night. She suspected John saw right through her insistence that they meet outside “for the good sunlight.” The way he looked at her now, Leanne had little hopes of hiding how she fretted over the prospect of being in close quarters with him.

  “I half worried you wouldn’t show,” he teased when she arrived at the bench they’d designated. Leanne felt like a walking battle—the conflict of “just fine” and “horrid” tumbling in her chest—whereas John looked as if nothing had transpired between them.

  “You can’t go forward without this,” she ventured without too much cheer as she produced the unfinished sock, which only served as an unneeded reminder of the previous evening. “And I could never miss the great Captain Gallows turning his first sock heel.” Leanne steeled her determination to get past this awkwardness and focus on the work to be done. She changed the subject by asking “Does your leg pain you much today?”

  “It hurts twelve ways to Sunday this morning. You’d think I’d set the thing on fire last night for the way it’s acting up. Not to mention my head. I hardly slept.”

  Leanne hadn’t slept much, either, but for entirely different reasons. “I’m sorry.”

  “Dr. Madison seemed to take no end of pleasure in torturing me this morning. Lectured me like some rascal schoolboy about how I had no right ‘gallivanting around like a circus pony’ last night.” John shifted uncomfortably on the bench. “A circus pony. The man’s a monster who feeds on other men’s pain.”

  She sat down cautiously next to him. One the one hand, John did strike her as a petulant child, sulking and thrashing about. On the other hand, it was clear Captain Gallows nearly always got his way and suffered obstacles with little grace indeed. “He is trying to keep your best interest at heart.”

  “My best interest,” John barked back, “is waiting for me back in France, if Barnes would stop listening to overcautious coddlers and just sign the orders.”

  “It’s good we have such an engaging project to distract you. Sock heels are challenging.”

  John stretched out his stiff leg. “You’re alone in your enthusiasm. I’ve been called ‘a heel’ so often in the barracks this morning, it’s losing its appeal.”

  “Don’t listen to them. A sock heel is a great personal victory. Just the sort of stuff warriors thrive upon.” Now she was letting her nerves make her hopelessly wordy. Perhaps friendship with John Gallows wasn’t possible after all.

  Not with the way he stopped her hand when she pulled her knitting from her bag. “Leanne.” It was unfair how the sound of his voice danced over her name.

  “Yes?” It came out a tight, girlish gulp.

  “I do know how to be friends with you. I’ll be a perfect gentleman.”

  To know her discomfort lay so transparent to him just made things worse. His words were perfectly aimed at the very thing that troubled her most; John Gallows very rarely bothered to be a perfect gentleman. She’d heard the stories, she’d seen his full-blown charm unleashed. It would be so much easier to hate him, to dismiss him as a cad, if he behaved badly. If he pressed his cause, or even if he discarded her for some other, more permissive female, she could dismiss him as the overblown, cinema-worthy hero with secret feet of clay. To her dismay, he did not. In fact, today John seemed more natural, more “offstage” than she’d ever seen him. The effect only heightened her attraction. His efforts to be “friends”—and the knowledge those efforts were exclusively on her behalf—well, that was distracting beyond measure.

  Leanne fled for the safety of the stitchwork. She pointed to his sock, determined to keep her hands from his for as long as possible. “Start across here, stoppin
g three stitches from the end.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  He’d never “yes ma’am-ed” her in any of their previous sessions. How on earth did he manage the paradox of such a respectful twinkle in his eye? To keep going with this was risky indeed, playing with fire. Were this any other task, she would simply write down the directions and leave him to his own devices. Turning a sock heel, however, really was something that needed teaching face-to-face.

  “Will you look at that?” John said when the heel began to cup, to take on the distinct curvature that turned a tube into a sock. At first she thought he was joking, but he was genuinely impressed. With himself, of course, but with the technique as well. He held it up, turning the work this way and that. “I’ll never dismiss a sock as ordinary ever again.”

  What red-blooded American knitter could dismiss a man’s respect for a well-turned heel? “It is extraordinary, isn’t it?”

  “Extraordinary,” he said all-too-smoothly, dropping the knitting to look directly at her.

  Leanne raised an eyebrow and applied a “please behave” expression to hide her inner smile.

  “In the most platonic of ways, of course,” he declared, not bothering to hide his grin one bit as he continued the required stitching. “You’re right, this is going to be far more difficult than I thought.” When she looked at him, he added, “The knitting, I mean. Tricky stuff, this.”

  Leanne began to wonder if her resolve would last an entire sock.

  * * *

  “Turn a little to your left, please, and hold the thing up a little higher.” The photographer assistant’s voice grated like a rusty hinge as the afternoon heat increased the friction. Leanne was trying hard to be pleasant, but the stiff starch of her nursing uniform—they’d asked her to come in uniform today—grated like Mr. Palmer’s voice.

  John had stopped trying to be nice twenty minutes ago. “It’s called a sock, Palmer,” he snapped at the young assistant. “I know it doesn’t look much like one now, but that’s the whole point of this, isn’t it?”

  “It is a rather fine ankle and gusset. It will photograph wonderfully, don’t you think, Mr. Palmer?”

  “Just grand, Miss Sample.” Mr. Palmer droned as if rather be doing just about anything else.

  John bristled. “You wouldn’t take that tone if you’d just put your feet into a warm, dry sock after four days in the trenches.”

  Leanne hadn’t the nerve to ask John how his morning session with Dr. Madison went, but it didn’t take a cross examination to see John wasn’t pleased. It made her grateful she’d had her first soldiers’ class this morning and hadn’t been in the gymnasium. John stalked through the photography session like a uniformed grizzly bear, smiling when called upon but otherwise dark and surly.

  The photographer peered around his large camera. “Slide a little farther over on the chair, Captain Gallows. We don’t need that much of Nurse Sample in the shot.” Evidently photographers had little need to master social graces for he seemed to have no idea how dismissive his command sounded; as if she were a vase to be moved or a lamp casting an unwanted shadow.

  John nearly growled. “Nurse Sample is in the shot or you’ll have no captain to shoot. Do I make myself clear?”

  The photographer’s remark did sting a bit, but Leanne had no wish to become the center of a photographic squabble. “I assure you, Captain Gallows, it’s not necessary that I be featured.”

  “These young boys aren’t interested in learning knitting from their grandmothers. They want to know pretty young ladies like Nurse Sample will spend time with them if they sign up. They won’t know that if you don’t show it, now will they?”

  The photographer’s words may have been “Yes, of course,” but his tone was much closer to you stick to your job and I’ll stick to mine. By the end of the session, Leanne couldn’t imagine how any of the images would do the Red Cross much good. I don’t know much about “red,” she thought with a sour humor as she pulled her knitting from the prop basket they’d given her to use at these sessions and returned it to her usual canvas bag, but “cross” certainly applied today. John looked as if he would throw his cane across the room at the next person to ask him to smile. He dumped his sock on a table at the back of the room and hobbled out into the hallway at the first opportunity. She’d never seen anyone slam down a piece of knitting before.

  She caught him in the hallway. “John…”

  “I need to stop all this parading and get back to France. Now.”

  Leanne touched his elbow gently. “You have things to finish here, John.”

  He turned to her. “I’ve nothing to…” He caught himself, running one hand down his face while the other gripped his cane with white knuckles. “It’s not that what you do isn’t important. You wouldn’t understand, I’m afraid.”

  “Perhaps you should try to explain it to me.” She started to tell him to sit down, but remembered how poorly he took such orders. “Would you care to rest your leg on that bench over there?” she said in a deliberate tone meant to highlight it as a request, not a command or manipulation.

  John didn’t answer; he simply set off toward a bench in irritable, limping silence.

  Leanne let him arrange himself to his comfort on the bench, then sat next to him, her knitting bag on her lap. He brooded wordlessly for a minute or two, clearly not ready for conversation. Deciding it was better to wait him out than try to draw him out, Leanne reached into her bag and began the process of stitching up the toe of the sock she’d used in the photographs. If he needs to speak about it, she prayed, genuinely stumped as to how to help the captain out of his bitter gloom, let him do so to me. You know best what he needs—likely better than he knows himself. The prayer calmed her, and she stitched on at peace with his prickly silence, trusting God knew when and where to start the conversation. She would show patience, even if he had none.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “I am first and foremost a soldier,” John opened up after they sat there awhile. “Not a spokesman. I wonder some days if the army sees me as anything more than a mouthpiece, a hired verbal gun.”

  He’d said as much other days. She started to remind him that his speaking was a true gift, but stopped herself. He was blind to that gift, at least for today. Instead she tried a different tactic. “It can’t be a bad thing to respect your body’s need to heal. What possible purpose could be served by going back before you’re fully capable?”

  John gave a bitter grunt. “Capable? Who’s ever truly capable of facing battle? All men go to war with wounds, whether they are physical or otherwise. You think these boys, these young fellows funneled straight out of school onto ships, are capable?”

  No, she didn’t. Some of these boys looked so young and glory-hungry it made her heart break to know some of them would return with Private Carson’s hollow shadows in their eyes. “You’re an impatient man.”

  “You bet the…” She watched John swallow a curse. “Yes, I am, but even a patient man would be tested by Barnes’s dawdling.”

  She watched the way John’s leg relaxed and regained a bit of its flexibility. Did he realize how much his temper tangled his healing? It made her wonder if the skewed importance he’d placed on that waltz hadn’t been half the reason for his failure. He’d waltzed smoothly in the gymnasium. His gait always evened out when she got him talking. His pain seemed to disappear onstage. “I believe you will go back, John. Does that help?” It was true, but only half the truth. She believed he would go back whether it was wise for him to go or not. She was coming to realize that, wise or not, spiritually sound or not, a small part of her would leave with him when he left.

  He turned to look at her, and Leanne feared that part of her would not remain small for long. The blue in those eyes conquered her reason all too easily. “I must go back. I don’t know that I can explain it any more clearly than that. Honor comes close, I suppose, but I don’t know that I could explain that to you, either.”

  She could see that.
Despite the fact that all the scheming and persuasion might lead one to think otherwise, John Gallows was a warrior, a man driven by pride and honor. “Yes, I suppose honor comes close.”

  “Honor takes different shapes for different men. Don’t you see? That’s what makes a man into a soldier or a sailor, not the outcome of some physical test. Tomorrow is a foolish exercise in things that don’t matter.”

  Tomorrow. John had an exam with Dr. Madison the next day to assess his physical progress, one he’d hoped to circumnavigate with his waltz in front of General Barnes. Dr. Madison had told her it was a straightforward enough exercise—timed completion of tasks, measurements of flexibility ranges, such things.

  Such things as could not be manipulated. Facts even the cunning John Gallows could not bend to his liking, could not wield to serve his notion of honor.

  She nearly gasped, so striking was her insight: John’s body was at war with his honor. That’s what drove him to try anything—even a waltz—to sidestep his physical assessments. She instantly understood the basic struggle that drove him to do what he did. It had been there all the time in the steel edge in his eyes, the defiant way he brandished his cane, the cocky nature he hid behind: his honor would never, ever surrender to his body. The fact that he’d suffered a serious injury would never override his warrior nature—in fact, she was quite sure it would only feed the man’s need to prove himself.

  * * *

  John hated when she looked at him like that. All too often in conversation with him her eyes would widen, her lips part in the most unsettling way and her face would alter as if hit by a ray of sunshine. It always gave him the nerve-racking sense that she was receiving some sort of divine revelation—usually about him, which made it all the worse. He would have much preferred God left him alone. “I think I understand,” she said as though that was the last thing she expected.