Lynna Banning - Loner's Lady

“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.

D r. 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.”