Hot and Steamy by Jean Rabe Page B

into the dirt.
    Dusky knelt next to the man. She hadn’t seen someone hurt so bad since her daddy had gotten his arm caught in the cotton gin last spring, and he hadn’t survived the night. She hadn’t been able to help her daddy then, and she had no idea what to do now.
    Dusky jumped back up and started toward the house. After a few steps, she caught herself, spun around, and headed back in the other direction, back toward the shack that she and the other slaves called home. She didn’t know who she expected to find there, but anyone in the shack would have to be more help than Dr. Tucker and his friends.
    She burst into the shack, out of breath, and found it empty. Of course, she realized, the men—the ones who hadn’t run off yet or been shot trying—would be out in the fields right now, picking cotton right up until dark—or until the Union soldiers arrived. She turned to leave again and ran straight into Obadiah’s bare chest. As she bounced off of him, he reached out to steady her with his hands. Dressed only in tattered pants, his dark brown skin dripped with sweat in the steamy July heat.
    She looked up into the young man’s inquisitive brown eyes, and her tongue froze in her mouth. For months, she’d been watching him watch her, wondering about him with strange, wonderful new thoughts roaming through her head. While they’d grown up on the plantation together, Dusky and most of the other women lived in the house with Dr. Tucker, leaving the men alone down here in the shack. There were damned few of them left at all anymore.
    Dr. Tucker frowned on any interaction between the sexes, and he limited contact of any sort to the absolute minimum. Because of that, Dusky and Obadiah had barely spoken a score of words to each other over the past year. Still, her interest in the strong, handsome man he’d transformed into during that time had grown, and as she looked up at him her breath caught in her chest.
    â€œWhat is it?” Obadiah grabbed her by the shoulders, and Dusky realized she’d been about to swoon. He stared into her eyes for some hint of what might be wrong.
    Dusky could only point out the door and back up toward the main house. “Soldier,” she stammered out.
    That one word sent Obadiah sprinting toward the two-story, white-pillared house, leaving Dusky behind. A moment later, she chased after him. By the time she reached him, he was already kneeling next to the wounded soldier.
    â€œHe’s hurt bad,” Obadiah said. “Real bad.”
    â€œWe got to help him,” Dusky said. “He’ll die if we don’t.”
    Obadiah looked up at her, his jaw set and determined. Without a word, he picked up the soldier in his bare arms and cradled him like a baby. “Go get Mamma Esther,” he said. “Run!”
    Dusky charged toward the house, but before she got a hundred feet from Obadiah, she heard a shot ring out. She froze in her tracks and turned toward the barn. What she saw there made her scream.
    Dr. Tucker stood there on his one good leg and his prosthetic one, dressed in his grime-streaked work clothes, which he’d had shortened on one side to prevent the fabric from catching in his fake limb. He had pushed his tinted goggles—the ones he always wore when welding his contraptions together—back on his head, toward his mane of graying hair, and he blinked out at the world with ice-cold eyes unused to being so exposed to the evening sun. He held a smoking gun in his hand, and it pointed toward Obadiah. He ignored Dusky, not sparing her a first glance much less a second.
    â€œPut that filthy Yankee down, boy.” Dr. Tucker strode toward Obadiah, who had not moved a single one of his bulging muscles. As he walked, the servomotors in the brassy replacement Dr. Tucker had built for his left leg whirred and clicked in sequence.
    Whirr-click. Whirr-click. Whirr-click.
    â€œI said, put him down.” Dr.