Coming Up Roses (9 page)
* * *
Thunder cracked across the sky, and an instant later, a flash of lightning illuminated the room. Zach stared at the ceiling, uncertain where he was. It was a funny thing about ceilings; they all looked the same until you woke up to see an unfamiliar one.
There was a storm raising hell outside. He knew that much. But he didn't think the sounds were what woke him.
He blinked and lay still, absorbing the feel of the room. Slowly his senses sharpened, and he realized what had disturbed him. Warmth was pressed against his side. Trembling warmth.
Zach tensed and tucked in his chin to look. A small hand was clenched in his chest hair. Attached to the hand was a thin, flannel-draped little arm. What the hell? He squinted to see better, and saw that a head of tangled, dark hair was buried in his armpit. Miranda.
It all flooded back to him. The well. The snakes. He was in Kate Blakely's house. And damned if he wasn't still alive. Zach started to move, and pain exploded in his legs. He went limp against the mattress. It felt as if a horse had run back and forth over the top of him.
Thunder cracked again, and Miranda flinched. Zach heard Nosy whine. He lifted his head once more and strained to see, finally making out the dog, who stood beside the bed, nudging the child's back. Still a bit befuddled, Zach took a second to realize that Miranda was terrified by the thunder and that Nosy was trying to soothe her. It took him another couple of seconds to assimilate the fact that, for reasons beyond him, Miranda had sought him out for comfort, instead of going to her mother.
About a half minute after coming to that conclusion, Zach registered the crisp feel of ironed linen against his bare skin. He wasn't dressed for entertaining ladies.
He considered sending Miranda on her way, but three things forestalled him. One was that he didn't want to part with any of his chest hair, and from the way she was holding on, he didn't think he could pry her loose without losing a fistful. The second was that he barely had the strength to move, let alone to make someone else. And third, the child was clearly afraid. Zach didn't have the heart to shove her away.
Instead, he let his head fall back to the pillow and fumbled with the sheet to make sure it was tucked between their bodies. The instant he curled his arm around her, Miranda burrowed closer, her bony little knees scrambling for purchase, her hand tugging sharply on his chest hair. Zach winced but allowed her to settle in, a little self-conscious because of where she had chosen to duck her head. He had never slept with someone's face pressed just below his armpit. But he decided that if it didn't bother her, it didn't him.
Thunder ripped across the sky once more, but this time the child didn't react. Zach stared at the ceiling, more than a little humbled that she had come to trust him, a virtual stranger, so completely. He recalled their nightmarish ascent from the well. Not really a stranger, he guessed. Not after coming through something like that together.
Which was probably why she had come to him. He had been her savior once, and now she felt threatened again by the storm. Even as weak as he was, he probably seemed as large and untouchable as a mountain to her.
Zach curled a hand around her side and marveled at the fragile network of her ribs beneath his fingertips. Just like her ma, no bigger than a minute.
Smiling, he went back to sleep on that thought.
* * *
A loud crack of thunder woke Kate with a start. Groggy, she reached to put a comforting arm around her daughter and found only an empty bed beside her. She opened her eyes and sat up. Both Nosy and Miranda were gone.
Alarmed, Kate slid from bed. As she reached for her wrapper, lightning slashed across the sky and filled the room with a bolt of eerie, blue-white light. She shoved her arms into the sleeves of her wrapper and ran from the bedroom.
She knew from experience that Miranda wouldn't respond to her call if she was frightened, which she undoubtedly was with a storm raging. Kate hurried along the short corridor. When she reached the landing, another clap of thunder shook the house. She gave an involuntary start and gripped the banister.
Dear God, where was Miranda? She would be terrified. Battling her own demons, Kate descended the stairs, her skin prickling and clammy. She had to find her daughter.
After searching the entire house, Kate began to grow frantic. She had checked all Miranda's hiding places, and the child was nowhere to be found. Kate returned upstairs and looked one more time beneath each of the beds.
Then she went back down to stand in the foyer, determined not to panic. Miranda would never venture outside during a storm. Never. She had to be inside the house somewhere.
Thinking she might double-check the kitchen, Kate retraced her steps along the downstairs hall. As she passed the sickroom, she noticed that the door was ajar. Kate reached to close it, then remembered how Miranda had stopped outside this door the evening of Ryan's visit. Surely she wouldn't be in there. Not fearing men as she did.
Still, it was worth a look.
Kate pushed the door all the way open and stepped inside. Her daughter lay cradled against Zachariah McGovern's side. Scarcely able to believe her eyes, she moved closer and saw the way Miranda clung to their neighbor, even in her sleep. Oddly enough, it looked as if McGovern had turned slightly to accommodate her, his powerfully muscled arm bent to hold her.
Kate approached the bed, her intent to pick up her daughter and leave. But before she did, she noticed how Miranda's hand clutched McGovern's chest hair. It would take some tricky maneuvering to pry those tightly clenched little fingers loose. On McGovern's other side lay Nosy, his head on the spare pillow, belly up, paws dangling, his long tongue lolling limply over his teeth.
Between claps of thunder, the deep rasp of a snore made Kate start. She couldn't tell if it had come from man or beast, and then decided maybe from both. During another lull, she heard two distinct snores and Miranda's even breathing. A peaceful threesome, all sound asleep.
Kate pressed her hands against her waist, longing to snatch her daughter away from Zachariah McGovern, to hold her. But she knew her protective feelings were unfounded. The man had nearly forfeited his life to save Miranda's. Surely Kate could entrust her child into his care for the duration of the night. What point was there in waking any of them?
None at all. Except that Miranda's abandonment left Kate to weather the storm alone. Thunder rolled across the sky again, and Kate flinched. Ridiculous. She was a grown woman. This wasn't the first storm she had endured alone, and it wouldn't be the last. She drew the folded blanket up from the foot of the bed and laid it over her daughter. Then she backed from the bedroom, leaving the door ajar in case Miranda called for her.
Even with a storm shaking the house, the parlor would be within hollering distance, Kate decided. The horsehair settee would serve her well enough as a bed. As she stepped into the dark room, the wind caught an outside shutter and slapped it up against the side of the house. Then lightning flashed.
A pulsing flare of blue-white light came through the window and cast a magnified shadow of the coat tree onto the wall beside Kate. She glimpsed a looming silhouette with reaching arms. The specter gave her such a start that her feet came clear off the floor. She grabbed her throat and whirled, so frightened she couldn't scream.
Joseph
.
Even as she thought it, Kate saw that the shadow wasn't a man's. Going limp, she backed against the adjoining wall and closed her eyes.
Foolish. Kate struggled to breathe. Thunder clapped again, wind moaned around the house, and her damp skin turned icy. She began to shiver and clenched her teeth to stop their chattering.
"Ma!"
Kate opened her eyes and strained to hear. The call was distant and ethereal. Real or imagined? Though she knew it might be only the fluting of the wind, Kate ran from the parlor.
"Maaaaaa!"
The storm momentarily lulled, and the foyer went black. Kate planted a hand on the wall and froze to listen to the sudden silence. She nearly screamed when thunder clapped directly above the house. She felt the vibration shudder through the floor.
Then she thought she heard Miranda calling her again. On quivering legs, Kate crept through the darkness to the sickroom. Miranda still lay sound asleep, shielded by Zachariah McGovern's large, muscular body.
"Maaaaaa…"
Kate covered her ears and squeezed her eyes closed, tortured by the sound, praying it would stop. She hurried back to the parlor, found a pitch-black corner, and sank to the floor in a protective huddle. Carried along by the moaning wind, the child's desperate cry came to Kate again. Not Miranda, yet not imagined, a memory of her daughter's voice that came from deep within the black layers of her own mind. Never to be forgotten, never to be escaped, it would haunt her during violent storms for the rest of her life.
T
he sun was well up the next time Zach opened his eyes. His first awareness was of the starched white pillowcase beneath his cheek. Then he felt Miranda's small body pressed against his own. He blinked and focused on her. She lay quietly in the bend of his arm, her head leaned back so she could study his face.
Befuddled with sleep, Zach stared into her big brown eyes for a moment, then let his gaze trail slowly over her delicately made features. To his recollection, he had never seen such perfection. Finely arched sable brows capped her expressive eyes, their darkness striking a sharp contrast to her alabaster skin. On the tip of her turned-up nose was a smattering of freckles the color of brown sugar. Her mouth was etched in a delicate rose pink, the upper lip defined in two perfect peaks, the lower full.
She returned his regard with an unblinking intensity that soon made Zach begin to feel self-conscious. He wasn't surprised when she touched a finger to his jaw.
In a voice gone gravelly from disuse, he said, "That's a scar. A long time ago, I got burned real bad in a fire."
Miranda lifted her hand and placed it squarely before Zach's nose. He moved his head back and saw she had similar scars on her palm and between her fingers. Their angry red color indicated that the burns had occurred recently, probably within the last several months, and had been severe. Though not as it had at first, the newly healed tissue probably still pained her, for it took a long while for the nerves exposed by a burn to heal. Even now, seven years after the fire, Zach's cheek and neck were more sensitive to the sun than the rest of him.
His heart caught at the thought of such a little thing enduring the kind of agony she obviously had.
Since she apparently wanted to share her experience with him, but seemed too shy to speak, he said, "It looks like you were hurt in a fire, too. How did that happen?"
At the question, she went rigid. Before he registered that he had upset her, she scrambled off the bed and fled the room.
Only seconds later, Kate Blakely appeared in the doorway. Zach was shocked at the way she looked. In a dress of dark charcoal with a high neckline, her sable hair skimmed back from her pale face and caught in a coil of braid atop her head, she was as severe and colorless as a daguerreotype done in varying shades of gray. Beneath her large eyes, ashen shadows of exhaustion followed the contours of her fragile cheekbones.
"You're awake," she said, and promptly made fists in her gray apron.
Zach started to push up on an elbow, then remembered how his legs had hurt last night when he moved. He rubbed his jaw, expecting to feel inch-long whiskers. With one side of his face mostly scar tissue and devoid of hair, he made a pretty awful sight if he didn't shave every morning. To his surprise, those places on his face that could still sprout beard felt as smooth as a baby's behind.
He swallowed to get his voice and asked, "How long have I been out?"
She took a hesitant step into the room, her nervous hands still worrying the apron. "A long time. Well over a week."
"A week!" The words came out in a croak. Again, Zach tried to swallow.
"Would you like some water?"
She stepped briskly to the low table by the bed and lifted a willow-patterned pitcher. He watched as she filled a glass and turned toward him. When their eyes met, she hesitated, as if she weren't quite certain how to proceed.
That made two of them.
Zach jerked the sheet up over his chest, suddenly conscious of his nudity beneath the linen. In his misspent youth, he hadn't minded when he had awakened in similar circumstances, naked and abed with a strange woman in the room. But this was different. As was Kate Blakely.
"Where are my britches?"
Zach hadn't meant for that to come out like an accusation, but it sounded that way. He couldn't help it. All kinds of pictures were floating through his head. If he had been out for over a week, who had been taking care of him?
He had a sick feeling he knew. And all he could think was that he wanted his pants, yesterday if she could arrange it.
She cast a startled glance toward the door. "They're in the kitchen."
His voice still gravelly, Zach said. "Would you mind getting them for me?"