Loner's Lady Read online

  “Gundersen place,” she whispered. “Seven miles.”

  Oh, God. He would have to do it.

  In the kitchen he boiled a kettle of water, tore a clean dish towel into strips and searched for a knife. The worst part for him would be cutting her drawers off. The worst part for her would be when he explored the break.

  He stuffed a sharp paring knife under his belt and turned to the back door. Outside, he strode to the front gate and snapped off two relatively straight branches to use as a splint. On his way back through the kitchen, he lifted the kettle off the stove and grabbed a china bowl from the dish shelf.

  Upstairs the sun threw dappled light across the upper part of her body. She rested the wineglass on her chest, holding it with both hands. Almost empty, he noted. Good girl.

  Grasping the knife, he bent and started slicing at the lacy hem of her drawers. He slit them halfway to her waist, and she didn’t make a sound until he straightened.

  “How does it look?”

  “Your left leg is fine.” It was the right leg that made his breath catch. Under the pale skin he could see the bulge of the bone where it had separated. “To set the break in your right leg properly, I’ll have to manipulate it.”

  Jess wiped his fingers across his forehead; they came away wet with sweat, which didn’t surprise him. He’d rather rob the Ohio Central than put his hand on her leg.

  “Don’t drag it out,” she muttered from the bed. “Just get it over with.”

  “Don’t rush me,” he countered. “I like to take my time with some things.”

  He was damn glad she didn’t ask what things. He settled one hand on her knee, then cupped the joint with his other. Watching her face, he moved both hands toward the break. The closer he got, the tighter she scrunched her eyes shut.

  His belly knotted. “I’m sorry, Ellen.” Gently he eased his fingers onto the bulge of skin, then felt below her knee with his other hand. There it was, plain as pudding. He could feel how the edges of the bone fit together.

  Mentally he reviewed exactly what he had to do. Before he made a move, he glanced up at her face. Hell, she was sweating worse than he was. He’d try to make it quick.

  He braced himself. Holding one hand steady under the break, he pressed his palm down hard from the top. Her anguished scream sent a sharp, cold blade into his chest, but an instant later he heard the soft snap as the bone shifted back into place.

  She screamed again.

  “Yell if you want, just don’t move,” he ordered.

  While she panted on the bed, he laid out the makeshift splints. One of the gate sticks curved just the right way along her leg; the other was straighter, but it would do. He bound them in place with strips of toweling.

  “Better,” Ellen murmured. Her leg ached like a plow had hooked into it, but it wasn’t the searing pain she’d endured earlier. “How did you learn to do that?”

  “Spent some time as an army surgeon during the war.”

  Thank the Lord. She wouldn’t ask which army. Reb or Federal, she was grateful for the man’s skill.

  He straightened suddenly, reached for the decanter of port and tipped it into his mouth.

  “I’d offer you my glass,” she said, “but…oh, here.” She thrust the tumbler at him anyway. “You’ve earned it.”

  He smiled for the first time in what seemed like hours. He’d shaved since supper last night, she noticed. The dimple in his cheek reappeared.

  She watched him pour hot water from the kettle into her best vegetable bowl and drop in a piece of toweling. Clean, she hoped.

  He bent to smooth the wet cloth over her good leg, washing off the streaks of dried mud with a surprisingly light touch. “I don’t fancy cutting you out of your skirt and petticoat. Seems like a waste of serviceable garments. Got any ideas?”

  What an incredible topic of conversation! Still, it had been an unusual day, and it was still only ten o’clock, she judged, glancing at the sun outside the window.

  “If you could undo the fastenings at my waist, you could just pull my skirt and petticoat off over my head.”

  “Yeah, I thought of that.” Taking it slow and easy, he washed her broken limb from the ankle to the break, then started at her upper thigh and worked down as far as her knee. When he finished, he set the bowl of grimy water on the floor and leaned over her.

  “The skirt button’s at the back,” she said. “Petticoat has a ribbon tie.”

  “Usually does,” he answered.

  Ellen’s eyebrows lifted. She felt his hands reach under her waist, fumble the skirt button through the buttonhole and then untie the ribbon of her petticoat.

  He moved to the head of her bed. “Arms up,” he ordered.

  Ellen obliged, grateful that she didn’t need to move her throbbing leg to rid herself of her clothes. She felt both garments slide upward, and with her arms raised she managed to shimmy free of them. He tossed them on the floor with the washcloth and caught her gaze. “You want to remove your—”

  “Just my shirt,” she said quickly. “I’ll keep on my camisole and my drawers, what’s left of them.”

  She unbuttoned the blue cotton shirt and he helped her shrug out of it, his hands warm and sure. He was much more than a doctor, she guessed. He seemed to know a great deal about women’s clothes fastenings.

  At the moment, it was his experience as a doctor that she valued. His experience with women didn’t matter a whit.

  Chapter Four

  Dr. James Callahan gallantly tipped his black felt top hat at the pretty young woman he met on the board sidewalk. “Mrs. Kirkland.”

  “Dr. Callahan! I was just thinking about stopping in to see you. It’s about the baby.”

  A faraway look came into the elderly man’s gray eyes. The first baby he had ever delivered scared the bejeesus out of him. Not because of the blood and the bruised and swollen flesh—he’d seen plenty of that in medical school—but because then, in his twenty-third year, he saw clearly what loving someone meant. A woman bravely—and sometimes not so bravely, he learned as he grew older—endured the agony of labor, risked her life to present her husband with a gift more costly, more treasured than anything on God’s earth. His own sister, his niece Ellen’s mother, had died bearing a child. James had never forgotten it.

  “Nothing wrong with the baby, I hope?”

  Mrs. Kirkland dimpled. “Far from it. Thad is thriving. Actually, it’s my husband I am concerned about. He seems…different since the birth.”

  James understood instantly. A man hearing his wife’s screams of agony for a day and half the night, a man who didn’t stumble out to the barn and shoot himself, was changed forever by the experience. Sometimes James thought that’s what had started his sister’s husband with the drink. Ellen’s father had let spirits destroy his life. It had almost destroyed her, as well.

  “I wouldn’t worry, Mrs. Kirkland. Husbands often feel pretty shaken by birth, just as much as the new mother. Maybe he’s just realizing how precious you are to him.”

  Mrs. Kirkland seized his free hand. “Oh, thank you, Dr. Callahan. I think you are such a very wise man!” She squeezed his hand and pivoted away into Svensen’s Mercantile.

  Wise my ass. The love between a husband and wife had astounded him back then. He knew that no woman would ever feel that way about him. He’d always been painfully shy, and awkward around women. Different. Most men would rather play poker than spend their evenings reading Byron.

  Twenty-five years ago he’d been a callow tenderfoot fresh out from the East, practicing his first year of medicine and dumb as an ox when it came to talking to a female without a stethoscope in his hand.

  He had known this about himself for more than two decades. No sane woman would love him, would suffer and sacrifice for him the way he saw the wives of Willow Flat do for their men. All his life he’d been too awed by women to ever speak to one in anything other than a professional situation. Now he was forty-eight years old.

  But Lord knew if a man
never said good-morning to a lady, that man never got invited to afternoon tea. He got plenty of invites to down a slug or two of red-eye at the Wagon Wheel Saloon, but lately he felt a nagging hunger for something more. Something soft that smelled good. That smelled like lavender.

  He’d waited all these years for Iona Everett, and time was growing short. If he didn’t do something about it damn quick, he’d die a bachelor.

  Near noon, Ellen heard Mr. Flint tramp up the stairs to her room, a tray with two plates of scrambled eggs and two mugs of coffee in his hands. The sun’s rays beat at the bedroom window. Already the room was stifling; today would be a real scorcher.

  She watched the man squeeze himself into her rocking chair and roll back and forth, nursing his coffee while she ate her breakfast. When she had eaten nearly all the eggs, she reached for her own mug on the bedside table and gulped down a large swallow.

  Well! The man made excellent coffee, the best she’d ever tasted.

  They sipped their coffee in silence until Mr. Flint set his mug on the plank floor, unfolded his long legs and ambled to the window. Without speaking, he drew the blue muslin curtains shut.

  “What are you doing?” Her voice came out sharper than she intended.

  “Hot in here. Be cooler if you block the sun.”

  “Oh.” Of course. She was always up and out in the barn shortly after sunup, and she didn’t come back upstairs until after dark. She couldn’t remember when the last noontime had found her still in bed.

  She turned her coffee mug around and around in her hands. “How long will I be laid up like this?”

  His dark eyes met hers, an unnerving glint of amusement in their depths. “Long enough. Longer than you’re going to like. Your bone has to knit before you put any weight on it.”

  Her fork clunked onto the plate. “How long?” she repeated.

  He settled his rangy form back into the rocker, stretched out his legs and crossed his boots at the ankle. “I’d say you need a hired hand for the next few weeks.”

  Ellen choked on her coffee. “Weeks! I can’t stay bedridden that long. My vegetables will shrivel up in this heat. The cow will go dry. The hens…” She had to keep the farm going, but he’d never understand her desperate need to do so.

  He gave her a speculative look. “You want your leg to heal crooked? Have a limp the rest of your life?”

  “Well, no.” A sudden curiosity seized her. “Is that what happened to your leg?”

  He said nothing.

  “Mr. Flint? I asked you a question.”

  “I heard you. Could be I’m not going to answer it.”

  Irritation tightened her jaw. “And why is that?”

  “Because it’s none of your business,” he said quietly.

  Ellen bit her lip. “You’re right, of course. I shouldn’t have asked.” But lordy-Lord, she couldn’t lie here being an invalid, even for a few days. How would she water the vegetables and bake bread and churn butter and…all the other things that demanded her attention?

  She set the mug aside and knotted her fingers together. “I can’t pay you wages.”

  Mr. Flint’s gaze met hers, his eyes hard as sapphires. “Didn’t ask for any. I was thinking about meals and a place to sleep in your barn.”

  “Oh, no, I don’t think—” The memory of the last wayfaring man she’d hired still made her stomach churn. But how would she manage without help?

  “For how long?” She made her tone as crisp as she could.

  The oddest look flitted across his face, instantly replaced by a carefully impassive expression. “Let’s say for as long as it takes.”

  As long as it takes? Something about the way he said that made her uneasy. “I can ask the Gundersen boy to help out. He’s chopped wood for me in the winter and last summer he helped bring in the hay.”

  “I’ll be better than the Gundersen boy.” Mr. Flint said it without apparent pride, just stated it as if he were saying, “Today is Tuesday.”

  “Besides,” he added, “I want to stay.”

  Ellen opened her mouth without thinking. “Why?”

  The rocking motion stopped abruptly. “You’re one nosy woman, Miz O’Brian.” He looked at her for a long minute, his eyes so stony she caught her breath.

  “I know,” she said with a sigh. “I guess it comes from being alone. I question everything. It is nosy, but I need to be, well, careful. I don’t much trust men, ever since Dan…”

  “Yeah.” He nodded once, downed the last of his coffee and set the mug on the floor beside him.

  Ellen studied his face. He hid his feelings cleverly. Dollars to doughnuts there was something he wasn’t telling her.

  “Mr. Flint, you have not answered either of my questions.”

  “You’re right.” He rose, scooped his coffee mug off the floor, stacked her empty plate on his. “Maybe I’m tired of traveling. Maybe I want to stop somewhere and rest awhile.”

  He didn’t look at her when he spoke.

  Maybe. And maybe I’m the Queen of Sheba. Ellen smoothed out the sheet covering her lower torso.

  “Anyway, Miz O’Brian, might be smart to say thanks, and wait till you’re on your feet again. Right now you’re in no position to run me off.”

  Ellen blinked. Was that a threat? She listened to the irregular rhythm of his footsteps going down the stairs. He was right about one thing: she did not want her leg to heal crooked.

  It would make it even harder to hold on to the farm for when Dan returned. And if she had the child her heart yearned for, how would she tend it if she was crippled? It would be impossible to chase after a toddler if she couldn’t walk right.

  Ellen closed her eyes against the pain of her longing. It was foolish to hope for a child when her husband might be dead.

  Downstairs, dishes clattered. The hand pump squeaked and water trickled into the sink. The back door opened, shut, then opened again. Later a rhythmic thonk-thonk carried on the still air, like an ax biting into a tree. She let the noises wash over her.

  When she woke the sky was a milky lavender. Almost twilight. The curtains had been pushed back and the sash raised to catch the breeze. The soft squawks of her chickens drifted up from the yard. Bullfrogs croaked down by the creek, and the still, warm air smelled of dust.

  She loved this place with its earthy smells, the warm, peaceful evenings and the mornings alive with inquisitive finches chattering in her apple trees. Her life moved forward in an ordered sequence of events, guided by the rising and setting of the sun. It was predictable. Safe.

  It didn’t matter that chores filled every hour between dawn and dark. The cow needed to be milked, the horse fed and the stall mucked out. The vegetables weeded, apples picked and cooked into applesauce… Oh, Lord, the drudgery never ended. Sometimes she felt as if she were suffocating.

  But it would be worth it in the end. Dan would be so pleased when he returned, so proud of her. Something unforeseen must have happened to him that day he left for town. An accident, perhaps. Whatever it was, when he came home he’d find the farm prospering and his wife waiting with welcoming arms.

  With a wrench she turned her mind away from Dan. She wouldn’t allow herself to brood. She’d think about how peaceful it was just lying here in her bed, listening to the quiet noises she never had time to stop and enjoy—twittering finches in the pepper tree, Florence lowing across the meadow.

  No sound came from downstairs. Maybe Mr. Flint had absconded with her horse and her cow, after all?

  Don’t be an idiot. If that rambling man had wanted either, he would have taken them this morning and not returned. True, he did take the horse, but he’d brought him back. Even so, it was hard to trust him. Even if he could set a broken leg.

  By late afternoon Jess still tramped the perimeter of Ellen’s farm. His shadow lengthened, but he had to learn the lay of the land. Stopping under the same spreading oak he’d climbed earlier, he knelt, unfolded a rumpled sheet of brown grocer’s paper and wrestled a pencil stub out of his je
ans pocket.

  “Here, and here,” he muttered. He marked the points with an X on the makeshift map, then sketched in the barn, the house, the creek and the pasture beyond it, the apple trees at the back of the property, even the tree under which he sat. Chewing the tip of the pencil, he studied the layout, then bent to draw a grid over the landmarks. Each square represented maybe five long strides. He’d start at the upper left boundary and methodically work his way across and then down. He’d cover every goddam inch of this ground before husband Dan came home.

  By suppertime, Jess had milked Florence and locked the hens in their shelter. For the evening meal he boiled up an armload of sweet corn he’d picked, and heated a can of beans from her pantry. He dished up two plates, piling his own high with ears of corn, and clumped upstairs to Ellen’s bedside.

  He also carried with him the oak limb he’d cut and shaped this afternoon. By God, he was more nervous about what she’d think of that bit of wood than about his cooking.

  Ellen heard him coming up the stairs, a clump and a pause, clump and pause. Balancing two steaming plates in his hands, he walked to the chiffonier and set them down next to the water basin.

  “Got something for you,” he said in a gravelly voice.

  “Supper, so I see. That is good of you, Mr. Flint.”

  “Something besides supper.” He unhooked an odd-shaped length of tree limb from his forearm and presented it for her inspection. “It’s a crutch. I made it this afternoon.”

  Ellen stared at it. The wood had been cleverly shaped using the natural curve of the limb to fashion an underarm prop, padded with one of her clean dish towels. Her throat tightened.

  She appreciated his gesture more than she could say.

  She tried to smile, but her lips were trembly. “How very kind of you, Mr. Flint.”

  “It’s a necessity, the way I see it. You need a way to get around, even if it’s only as far as your wardrobe and the commode. Which, I assume, is under the bed?”

  Her face flushed with heat. “It is.” Surely they should not speak of such an intimate matter as her commode? It made her feel uneasy, as if he knew things about her she wished he didn’t.