Gemma sighed and brushed her hair back from her forehead with the back of a damp hand. She might be a gentleman's daughter, but she was a bit over-qualified to be a lady of leisure, and at the same time felt terribly under-qualified for the rest of her role.

Look at this fellow before her. This man might be beyond any help she could give. How was she to heal those inner hurts? Should she even try? Should she bind up his head, put him back on his fine horse and send him on his way?

For the rest of her life she would wonder what became of him twenty miles farther down the road. Mr. Bing was quite correct about one thing. She was rather too liable to take in strays, although she had never taken in one quite as handsome as this.

She adjusted his covers, smoothing them across his shoulders. Fine, wide shoulders on a well built man. Too thin, that was for certain. She ran her hand down his arm lying above the covers. The sleeve of the loaned nightshirt was a little too short, revealing a beautifully muscled forearm. Absently she took his pulse, then let her fingertips wander upward over the warm fine-grained skin between his wrist and elbow. He seemed somehow as if he were being burned up from the inside. Worn to muscle and bone. Even in sleep, the small creases around his eyes and mouth did not entirely ease.

There had been that flash of dark eyes in the single moment when their gazes had met. Shadowed eyes. Tortured?

So many things had been done in war, so many terrible things asked of the boys and men and yes, the women too. Things no one should have to do. She shut her eyes against the memories of the medical tents.

Then she realized that she still had her hand on him, was still smoothing the covers over his chest and shoulders, then stroking her fingers down to that bit of warm skin of his arm. She pulled her hand away, alarmed by being so starved for touch. It was one thing to acknowledge her own loneliness. It was quite another to pet her unconscious patient.

She leaned back in the chair and wearily closed her eyes. There was a state of half sleep, something that all nurses and doctors knew. A watchful sleep, ready to awaken at the slightest sound. She could spend all night sitting in a chair in that state and had done so more than once in the past. Yet, as her thoughts slipped into that wakeful sleep she let her memories slip back to what it was like to have a husband. To sleep next to a man, to feel his touch, to lie with him and wake with him and dine with him and live with him. And to live without him.