Marry Me (9 page)

Without a word, Cole took the tray and removed it to the kitchen. He washed the cup and spoon, and then stepped onto the front porch to shake bread crumbs off the tray. Chickens pecked the ground around the crumbs. He’d already tossed feed to them, but they evidently liked the bread better. Shaking his head, he went back inside and laid the tray on the table.

Rhyne was still sitting up in bed when he returned. He counted it as a good sign that she wasn’t pointing the Winchester at him but didn’t fool himself into believing her disposition had improved in his absence. Fear was in the thread of tension he’d observed earlier. The slight tremor in her hands could have been explained by a host of conditions from delirium tremens to ague to exhaustion, but he didn’t think he was wrong to suppose Rhyne Abbot’s root cause was dread.

He imagined it was life experience that gave her the bravado to face him with her chin up and her jaw thrust forward. In her own way she was preparing for a punch, and in truth, she probably would have preferred one.

Her mind wasn’t the least muddy.

Cole put himself between the chair and the bed. “I need you to lie down,” he said. “Do you want help?” When she shook her head, he simply dropped into the chair and waited. She moved carefully, in obvious discomfort, gritting her teeth so no sound escaped her throat. His sister made more noise getting up from the table.

“There’s no hurry,” he told her after she was flat on her back. Last night he had been able to remove the litter poles and dress Rhyne in a clean shirt, but she was still lying on the bloodstained sheet that had carried her in. A fresh pillowcase had taken care of the tobacco juice. “How long have you chewed tobacco?”

The question startled Rhyne. She stopped staring at the ceiling and tilted her head in Cole’s direction. “About half my life. How did you know?”

“You choked on a chaw last night. You could have died. You don’t remember?” He wasn’t surprised when she shook her head. “Do you chew in earnest or for show?”

She smiled slightly at the question. “All the world’s a stage.”

He liked her answer. “You fooled a lot of people.”

Rhyne said nothing for a moment then offered quietly, in the manner of a confession, “Sometimes I fooled myself.”

Cole saw that she regretted the admission as soon as it crossed her lips. He didn’t doubt that it was the soporific effect of the laudanum that made her less guarded. “How do you feel about people in town learning the truth?”

Rhyne bit into her lower lip and turned her head away.

“You should prepare yourself,” Cole said. “You’re going to be a curiosity.”

“There’s nothing new about that.”

Cole thought he heard a faint catch in her voice. He was better prepared to face her anger than either her shame or her distress. “No one will know about the baby unless you want to tell.”

Rhyne remained quiet.

“No one will know about the baby’s father.”

“You don’t know about him, either.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t.” Cole waited to see if she would tell him now. “You can’t live out here with Judah.”

“He’s my father. I take care of him.”

The way she said it was not precisely a protest, Cole thought, but more of a statement of fact. “He’ll kill you some day. I think he meant to.”

She shook her head vehemently but still didn’t look at him. “No, you don’t understand. He didn’t. Wouldn’t. It was the baby he hated.”

Cole didn’t offer his opinion to the contrary. He’d seen Judah’s eyes when he called his daughter a whore, glimpsed the loathing that made him raise his girl as if she were his son. Perhaps it was Judah that Rhyne had fooled most successfully, not that he didn’t know she was female, just that she had been able to make him forget–right up until the moment he realized she was carrying a child. That had removed the scales from his eyes and unleashed his fury.

“We’ll leave it until later,” he said, getting to his feet. “I’d like to begin my examination.”

Cole accepted Rhyne’s permission as the absence of an objection. He took the thermometer out of the bag. “May I open your shirt? I want to take your temperature.” At her faint nod, he unfastened the first two buttons, slipped the material over her shoulder, and placed the thermometer under her arm. “It will take some time.” He withdrew his stethoscope. “Your heart now.”

“I thought you observed it was fine.”

“This just makes me thorough.” “I liked observation better.”

“Liar.” Cole placed the bell over her heart and listened. “Now your lungs.” He helped her on her side. “Can you cough for me?” She did, but it was painful and caused her to draw up her knees. “That’s enough. Just breathe in and out, deeply and slowly. Good. Like that.” He eased her onto her back. “I want to see the welts.” He saw her tense and waited it out before he folded down the sheet. “Do you want to lift your shirt or shall I?”

It gave Rhyne some small comfort that he asked. “I’ll do it.” Closing her eyes, she scrabbled at the fabric with her fingers until the flat of her abdomen was exposed.

“I’m going to swab them with a tincture of mercury and salicylate that I asked Chet Caldwell at the pharmacy to prepare for me when I came to Reidsville. It will be wet and a little cold.” He prepared a cotton pad with the tincture and swept it lightly over each of her wales. She shivered slightly but otherwise didn’t move. “I have to remove the wadding between your legs.” He did this quickly, examining it for blood. There was very little evidence that she’d bled after the last change, but he replaced it with a clean cotton cloth anyway. “I think we can put you in a pair of drawers now.”

Rhyne nodded. She kept her eyes closed and threw up barriers one after another to keep humiliation from tearing out her soul.

“I have a pair here,” Cole said. “I found them in a trunk in the root cellar. I aired them out on the back stoop.”

“Just my regular drawers,” she said.

“You only have a union suit,” he said, lifting one of her legs. “I don’t want to cut another one off of you if there are complications.”

She didn’t ask about complications. She didn’t speak at all, accepting this was another argument she had no strength for. Although she had never had a doll, she knew what they were and how young girls cared for them. Now she allowed herself to be cared for in exactly that manner, lying back without dignity or complaint, dressed in lace-trimmed undergarments that made her feel extraordinarily vulnerable.

Rhyne imagined she should have felt some relief when he finally pushed them over her hips and drew the strings taut at her waist, but she only felt exposed, more naked now than when she’d had nothing on.

“Are you all right? Have I pulled them too tight?”

She batted his hand away then laid her forearm over her eyes. The thermometer slipped under the sleeve of her shirt, and she had to lie still while he probed under the chambray.

Cole read the thermometer. “Almost returned to normal.”

If only that were true, Rhyne thought. She tugged on her shirt, fixing it over her shoulder and smoothing the fabric across her belly. She allowed Cole to pull the sheet over her, mostly because she couldn’t stop him from helping her. She wanted to wail.

“When are you going to let me get up and get on with my business?”

“Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”

“I can’t stay in bed all day.”

“If you get up now you won’t be able to stay out of it for the next three days.” It was an exaggeration but not much of one. “You need to rest. You’re strong, healthy, there’s no reason you can’t move around tomorrow. Nothing strenuous, though.”

She lifted her forearm and glared at him.

“Will’s sending out someone to help with the place.”

“Who?”

“Johnny Winslow was his first choice. Ned Beaumont was the runner-up.”

Rhyne groaned. “Not Ned. He’ll get half the work done in twice the time. I can’t afford him.”

“Then hope that Johnny shows up.”

Rhyne supposed that was all she could do. “You’re not going to sit in here all day, are you?”

Cole shook his head. “Not if you tell me what’s to be done.”

“I meant that you could go in the other room, maybe get some sleep. You look haggard.”

Remembering Will’s comment about Rhyne finding no favor in his fine patrician looks, Cole’s mouth twisted in a wry smile as he bent to retrieve his notebook and pencil. He recorded Rhyne’s temperature and then turned the page. “Give me your chore list,” he said. “First to last.”

Rhyne found that obeying the doctor’s edicts was downright disagreeable, but she didn’t really doubt that he understood her limits better than she did. She only had to recall how she’d slept the morning away after giving him the list. Cole Monroe had been forced to shake her awake when he brought her lunch: more bread and broth, and to prove that he wasn’t trying to starve her, a soft-cooked egg.

Lying in bed, she could hear him chopping wood. Try as she might, there was no angle from the bed that allowed her to see more than limber pine and blue sky through the window. Rhyne took her sense of his activity by listening to it. He didn’t know how to swing an ax or efficiently set and stack the wood. She found herself holding her breath at times, quite literally waiting for the ax to fall. Sometimes the wood would split; sometimes Dr. Monroe would swear. He couldn’t find his rhythm, so he did a great deal of swearing.

Rhyne didn’t mind the swearing. It made him ordinary in a comfortable sort of way, reminded her that he was flesh and blood and bone. He hadn’t seemed so regular the first time she’d had him in her rifle sight. On that occasion, coming through the trees on horseback, he’d put her in mind of a warrior king. She’d only seen drawings of men like Alexander, Charlemagne, and Marc Antony in her father’s books, but Cole Monroe was one of their ilk: proud, straight, and tall, with features struck from marble with tools only the gods could have used.

She’d pulled her shot on purpose, sending it just wide of his perfectly cast ear. Rhyne recalled that he hadn’t been able to stay in the seat of his startled mount, but perhaps not even warrior kings could manage a beast like Becken. The stallion was known to be the most powerful–and the most skittish–animal in Joe Redmond’s livery, and Rhyne believed Joe had sense enough not to send Becken out with a greenhorn. If nothing else, respect for the horse should have stopped him.

Rhyne knew now that by giving Joe the benefit of the doubt, she’d allowed herself to set Cole Monroe firmly in the pages of Judah’s history books. There was comfort in that, too, or at least there was safety. If he wasn’t real, then neither was the danger.

It had been foolish, she supposed, to believe the doctor wouldn’t come calling again. If she’d known that Sheriff Cooper was behind it, she would have been prepared. Most likely, she would have made herself scarce so that even that no-account Beatty boy couldn’t have found her. Instead, she’d walked directly into the trap the sheriff set for her and put herself at the mercy of the warrior.

Rhyne remembered lying in the scrub grass, helpless to defend herself when Cole Monroe knelt at her side. Sunlight at his back cast his face in shadow but didn’t obscure the strong definition of his features. They were still visible, even through the haze of her pain. His jaw, square and vaguely aggressive, was set so tightly that a muscle worked in his lean cheek, and each time he drew a breath there was a slight flaring of his nostrils, just enough to make her think of dragons and dragon slayers and wonder which he was. She recalled that moment when his hat fell back and sunshine glinted off his dark copper hair. She’d had the fanciful impression of a halo of fire, an impression that wasn’t dispelled by the flash and fury she saw in his eyes.

She listened to the ax fall again and smiled faintly at the muttered curse that followed. Since it seemed unlikely that he’d exhaust his repertoire of cuss words, Rhyne figured Cole Monroe would have to learn to hit his target squarely before he cut himself off at the knees.

Cole set down the ax and paused to shake out the kink in his right shoulder. He massaged his upper arm, rolling the shoulder one way then reversing the motion. He felt the strain on muscles he’d forgotten how to use. It wasn’t unpleasant, but then he knew the deep ache wouldn’t begin for hours. He had no objection to physical labor and no bias toward those that engaged in it for their livelihood. Most people didn’t appreciate the hard work that hospital doctoring entailed: lifting and transporting patients; standing for hours in surgery; walking the wards in an endless loop; climbing stairs two at time and upward of thirty times a day. There were orderlies to assist, but it was Cole’s experience that they had a gift for being elsewhere when they were needed most. Some doctors would rather spend their time following an orderly’s trail rather than move patients or attend to their most basic needs, but Cole was rarely one of them.

Still, chopping wood was strenuous in an altogether different manner than he was accustomed to. It didn’t help that he wasn’t very good at it. Raising the brim of his hat, he swiped at his brow with his forearm and looked off in the direction he expected help to appear. He scanned the crest of the ridge and saw nothing that made him think he could pass off this chore onto someone else.

He was on the point of picking up the ax when he heard Rhyne cry out, and he was already turning when the hard thump and clatter reached his ears. Cole took off on a run, covering the ground to the cabin in short order.

He had a picture in his mind of what he could expect when he reached Rhyne’s room, but there was no satisfaction in being right. She was lying on her side on the floor, her feet tangled in the sheet that she’d dragged from the bed. The washstand was overturned beside her, and he judged by its position that it had missed her by the narrowest of margins. That explained the thump. He attributed the clatter to the basin and pitcher that were lying just out of her reach. Water had spilled from both, forming a pool that was slowly moving toward Rhyne’s head. One sleeve of her shirt was already damp.

“I told you not to get out of bed.” He didn’t try to mask his annoyance. “Don’t be surprised if I shoot you first. I can get to your rifle a lot quicker than you can.”