Love, Come to Me(9)

Lucy didn’t notice the frequency with which his bright blue eyes flickered to her. Heath studied her unobtrusively, appreciating the picture she made with her hair tumbling loose and her skin gleaming in the light. She presented no small temptation to him, for although he had known many women, there had been none quite as sweet, as vulnerable, as unawakened as Lucy Caldwell. She had a strange combination of sweetness and spirit, and an innocence that both attracted and repelled him. All of her dreams were intact. And his dreams—what remained of them—were lying around him in bits and pieces, captured in the words and the lines of print of the old newspapers he had saved. He kept them and read them every now and then, to remember. He would never forget the lessons of the past five years, had never allowed himself to make the same mistake twice.

“What are you reading?” Lucy’s curious voice interrupted his thoughts, and he answered readily.

“An old edition of the Atlanta Intelligencer. About the campaign of Atlanta.”

“Why in the world would you want to read that?”

Heath smiled wryly. “For its mistakes. This account of Johnston’s retreat across the Chattahoochee, for example. The reporter states that the troops ‘retired in good order.’ ” He shook his head and snorted. “I was there. I served under Johnston.We didn’t retire in good order—we ran like hell, stepping all over each other in an effort to save our skins.”

“You were with Johnston? Why, Daniel served under Sherman in that campaign!”

“We probably came nose to nose. In fact, I’ll bet he was one of the bas—the soldiers who battered us with their flanking operations.”

“Why are you reading those papers for their mistakes?”

“It’s a hobby of mine to look them over . . . to see how they cover things, to see what the editorial policies were. Most of the time you get more information from looking at something that’s been done wrong than when it’s been done right. And everyone knows a lot was done wrong by the press during the war—on both sides.” He settled himself on the rug before the fire and handed the paper to her. “Look on any page—rhetoric. Rhetoric instead of facts. Now if I were an editor . . .”

“Yes?” Lucy prompted when he didn’t continue. “If you were in charge of a newspaper, what would you do to fix things? You might start it off doing things your own way, but sooner or later you’d probably bow down to the politicians, and start writing what they told you to write, and—”

“So hard-bitten,” Heath said, his eyes glinting with sudden amusement.

“Not at all . . . that’s just the way we do things in Massachusetts.”

He threw back his head and laughed. “I wouldn’t, no matter what everyone else did. If I were in charge of a paper, I wouldn’t let it be anyone’s puppet, and I’d steer my own course instead of following fashions. Most editors let anyone and everyone manipulate their newspapers, especially the politicians. And the papers up here are just as bad as anywhere else—they’re too soft, too partisan, too . . . timid. Hardly anyone has the backbone to step on a few toes, print the truth without using a lot of fancy words to soften it up—”

“But would you always print the truth if you were in the editor’s shoes? Even if you didn’t like it?”

“Damn right I would.”

“I don’t think so. Maybe you would at first, but eventually you’d start printing your own version of the truth, just like all of the other editors do.”

“Ah, but I’m different from all of them,” he said, smiling at her animated expression. “I wouldn’t be so eager to sweet-talk the subscribers that I couldn’t call a spade a spade. I have few biases—”

“Except that you hate Northerners.”

“Oh, that’s a little strong. When you get right down to it, I don’t. In fact, there are some I could get to be quite fond of.” He chuckled as she stared into the fire with renewed absorption.

“Tell me,” she said, still not looking at him, “have you ever worked for a newspaper? It seems like you have.”

“I was a journalist for the Mobile Register during the war. I reported for a few other papers, too. I tended to switch around, usually when the editors were too heavyhanded. Nothing makes a writer mad quicker than seeing one of his reports cut almost in half—”

“But surely they had good reasons for cutting your work.”

Heath laughed softly, shaking his head as if the world didn’t make sense and any man who tried to find reason in it was a fool. “Yes. They felt that a reporter should try to keep the public’s morale high. The editors didn’t like my battle reporting—said I was faultfinding, glum, that I didn’t look on the bright side of things. Problem was, I couldn’t find much cause for optimism in the middle of a battle—especially since I was on the losing side.”

As he smiled again, Lucy regarded him curiously, unable to share his amusement. The firelight turned his hair into a brilliant blaze of coppery gold, filtered through his dark eyelashes and cast long shadows over his tanned cheeks. He looked so carefree and handsome, as if he had never known the hardship of battles and gunfire. With all the horror and bloodshed he had undoubtedly seen, she could not understand why he could smile and talk so easily about the war. It seemed utterly heartless of him to be so comfortable about it all. Every other man she had ever heard talk about the war got all riled up, bitter, excited, proud. Frowning slightly, she sought another direction for the conversation.