Moonlight on My Mind (3 page)

He returned to proper focus with a black and white animal wrapped in his coat and cradled in his arms. “I’ll need to take him to my clinic and see what can be done in surgery. You might as well come along with me, Miss Baxter. That is, if you trust me.”

It was the closest he had come to acknowledging the odd history that bound them together. “I . . .” She hesitated, feeling the stares of a few curious Moraig residents on her, even though she couldn’t precisely see them. All she could see at this moment was this man towering over her, his arms full of beast and coat, a smear of blood wrapped around one wrist.

A memory snagged on the shards of her uncertainty, a groundswell of guilt and doubt that had begun at the funeral and chased her across all these miles. There had been blood on him the last time she had seen him too. A copious amount of it, vivid scarlet turned to rust. He had stood in his father’s study as if hewn from granite, covered in his brother’s blood. At the time, she had seen that blood and interpreted it as evidence of his guilt. But with eleven months of second-guessing behind her, she was no longer sure.

Now the old earl was dead, and the question of what came next was on everyone’s lips.

She had entertained no plan beyond finding Patrick Channing and convincing him to return home. This journey had been naught but impulse from the moment she’d boarded the wrong train, still shattered by her first close-up look at Patrick’s family since the infamous house party. Some of those in attendance had whispered the earl had died of a broken heart, and Julianne had shrunk against the bruised eyes and hollowed cheeks of Channing’s mother and small sisters. It was clear they were devastated, and not only because of the Earl of Haversham’s sudden death.

They needed Patrick, and they needed him whole.

And it was equally clear—as the inquest into the circumstances of his brother’s death lumbered to life in the wake of his father’s passing and the crowd’s whispers turned to certain conviction—that she was the only one who knew where he was.

“Quickly, please, Miss Baxter. An animal’s life may very well be at stake.”

Julianne stared at his bloodied sleeve. The facts didn’t match.
He
didn’t match. That, more than anything else, cemented her decision, sane or not. “I will come with you.”

She lifted her skirts, not even caring that she was probably exposing a good bit of ankle to the gawking townspeople. Perhaps, if she was lucky, that bit of stocking might distract them from the disaster of her hair, and discourage any speculation regarding why she was conversing—without a proper chaperone—with a man believed capable of murder.

“It’s a half-mile walk.” Channing’s gaze roved downward and settled on the exposed heel of one of her boots. “Try not to twist something en route, Miss Baxter. Because I assure you, I’d rather carry the dog.”

Chapter 2

J
ulianne. Bloody. Baxter.

She was here. In Moraig. About as far as a body could go in Britain and not plunge into the Atlantic. Which was really where he’d like to toss her, those tottering heels and fetching red curls be damned.

He still couldn’t believe she was following him home. It was a foolish risk for a woman to take, particularly after the terrible crime she herself had accused him of. It was an even more foolish risk for him to invite her. But surely it was better than leaving the impetuous chit standing in the street. It would have taken all of thirty seconds for her to start poking about the afternoon crowd at the Blue Gander public house, asking questions, spilling secrets. No one in Moraig knew of the circumstances of his past, not even his best friends. Until he knew what his future might hold, he preferred to keep it that way.

Patrick knew there were those in England who still bayed like hounds on the trail of a fox, demanding his blood and justice. He assumed Miss Baxter was of the same mind as his detractors, especially given the nature of their last encounter. Several of his own relatives had called for an inquest into his brother’s death, no matter his father’s firm insistence it was naught but a terrible accident. The most recent correspondence he had received from his father had been a month or more ago, and unless today’s letter carried some vital new information, it was not yet time for Patrick to return.

Miss Baxter’s unexpected appearance, however, might just force his hand.

With the unconscious dog in his arms and those disturbing thoughts in his head, Patrick kicked open the door to his derelict house-turned-clinic. He hadn’t needed to kick the door, of course. The latch didn’t catch properly, just one of a hundred things that needed fixing about the tumbledown place where he laid his head and stitched up the odd farm animal. He could bump it open with his hip, and frequently did so when his arms were full. But the extreme physical reaction and the satisfying thud of his boot against the wood improved his black mood.

Better still, it made the woman trailing beside him jump like a bird flushed from the heather, and
that
made him glad, for no other reason than it gave him a brief upper hand in this situation bound for nowhere good.

As he stepped inside, a ball of yellow fur came hurtling down the steps and wrapped itself around Patrick’s legs. Excited barking filled the air.

“Down, Gemmy.” He skirted the exuberant and slightly off-balance antics of his pet, the very first animal he had treated upon arriving in Moraig. “Sit,” he told the dog.

Gemmy stood.

His tail beat a furious rhythm in the air, and his pink tongue lolled happily. Miss Baxter removed her gloves, then crouched to rub the terrier’s ears. “Who is this ill-behaved beast?”

“The mail coach’s first victim,” Patrick said dryly.

The dog’s eyes all but closed on a satisfied groan as Miss Baxter’s bare fingers worked some kind of female magic on him. Patrick stared in perplexed irritation. Gemmy had always struck him as a loyal dog, a
man’s
dog. He liked to scratch himself exuberantly with his one remaining hind leg, and lick the area where his bollocks had been. He generally stayed on Patrick’s heel unless there was a chicken or rabbit in close proximity.

But now this “man’s” dog flung himself down worshipfully and presented the decidedly unmannish Miss Baxter with three limbs aloft and a belly to rub, which she proceeded to do with a familiarity that surprised him.

Though she bordered on slatternly this moment, with her hair falling down and her dress wrinkled beyond repair, Miss Baxter seemed a fussy sort of person, more concerned about the cut of her clothes and the curl of her hair than any reasonable person ought to be. To see her remove her gloves to pet not just a dog, but a three-legged mongrel, struck him as slightly absurd.

“How many mail coach victims have there been?” she asked, her voice tight.

“Four since the New Year. Mr. Jeffers is always running late, and the townspeople refuse to put their dogs on a lead. ’Tis bound to result in the odd collision.”

“I see you make a hobby out of lopping off their limbs.”

The reminder sent Patrick cursing under his breath. He had almost forgotten the bundle he carried, so disarming was the sight of Miss Baxter crouching in his dusty foyer. He strode down the narrow hallway that led to the kitchen. A plaintive bleating came from the part of the house that had once served as the front parlor, but though it was almost time for the orphaned lamb’s bottle, he ignored it for the moment.

He settled the newest patient down on the kitchen table and carefully unwrapped his coat from the injured dog’s body. Another jacket, ruined. This business was sending him to the poorhouse, sure enough.

Miss Baxter’s heels clicked on the weathered floorboards behind him. “Do you live here all alone? Honestly, you are the son of an earl. You could afford a domestic servant or two.”

Patrick didn’t answer. No sense telling her he refused to accept a single sovereign from his father while he languished in this self-imposed exile. No doubt Miss Baxter had never turned down a farthing in her sweet, pampered life.

He forced his gaze to remain on the mess of the dog’s leg instead of pulling to her. It was not an easy battle, because the sight of her was like a brightly colored lure, flashing end over end in turbulent water.

A lid clanged loudly somewhere behind him. “Do you even cook in here at all?” she mused. “These pans appear unused.”

Irritation yanked at the edges of his temper.
By the devil
, would she not shut up?

“The kettle works.” In fact, he kept it heated and at the ready, but his answer seemed to do little to deflect her prying. He swallowed his frustration over the feminine invasion and began a more thorough exam of his newest patient. The dog he had carried from Main Street was still unconscious, which concerned him. While there was no obvious damage he could see other than the mangled limb, the animal’s sluggish return to wakefulness suggested it might have sustained an injury to its head in addition to its leg.

But its continued state of unconsciousness might also present an opportunity. If he moved quickly, he could take off the crushed leg without the animal waking. But quickly was a bit of a stretch, given his lack of an assistant.

He glanced dubiously at Miss Baxter, who had moved on to the side counter and was running a bare, elegant finger over his clean, washed tools. No, she would be no help. Quite the opposite. James MacKenzie, his friend and former roommate, had once helped Patrick with these more challenging procedures, but the man was probably sitting down to supper in his new house across town, wallowing in what appeared to be a healthy dose of marital bliss.

There was no one here but the infinitely nosey Miss Baxter.

“I thought you were taking the dog to surgery.” She held up a long-handled implement with a vise clamp on the end. She raised it for a closer examination, squinting at it like a seventy-year-old woman who had lost her quizzing glass. She turned it left and then right, her lips pursed in study. “This is your kitchen,” she continued. “Surely you don’t see patients in
here
.”

Patrick considered telling her he used the thing to castrate calves. Decided better of it.

After all, she might decide to use it on him.

Instead, he reached for the surgical instruments he kept in the nearby cupboard, right next to his meager tin of tea leaves and the shaker of salt. “One table’s as good as another. I am not a particular man.”

“Clearly.” She laid the emasculator down on the far end of the table and came closer. Her eyes widened as she saw what was in his hand. “What is
that
?”

Patrick ignored her question, though that was not precisely the same thing as ignoring her. He hefted the bone saw—a monstrous, well-oiled thing with teeth the size of a man’s fingernail—on the table, and enjoyed the quick blanching of Miss Baxter’s already milky white skin as he placed it beside the unconscious dog.

For the first time since he laid eyes on her, he was tempted to smile. She believed him a killer, after all. He might even be—he wasn’t completely sure of himself, or the tragic events that had destroyed his family and reshaped his future into a frail, furtive thing.

And that meant the next few minutes should prove entertaining, if nothing else.

S
urely he wasn’t going to do it
here
, on the rough-hewn kitchen table where he took his meals. The very thought of it was enough to make bile sting the back of Julianne’s throat. But as he fetched a needle and a length of thread and placed them alongside the torturous implement, it became obvious that he very much was.

“You might want to step away,” he advised grimly, rolling up his shirtsleeves. “This next part’s a bit tricky.”

Julianne swallowed as he picked up the saw. She scrambled back, chased by the rasping sound of metal meeting flesh, only to have one heel twist out from under her on the uneven wooden planks of the farmhouse floor. She fell backward and lay a stunned moment on her back, listening to the heart-stuttering sounds of the saw at work and the fainter but no less insistent bleating of the lamb from somewhere in the depths of the house.

By the stars.
It was a house of terrors.

The room spun around those two incongruous sounds.

As she tried to push herself to sitting, her bare hands made contact with a degree of grit and grime that made the floor of the coach seem pristine by comparison. She lifted one hand and peered at her palm in horror. It was dotted with bits of straw and sawdust and smeared with something that looked—and smelled—suspiciously like manure.

“Are you hurt?” Mr. Channing’s voice reached down at her.

She breathed in through her nose as the saw scraped on. “No.” Not physically, anyway. There was a bit of damage to her pride, she supposed. And her dress.

She supposed she ought to burn it now.

“Well, remove your boots. You’re in a farmhouse, not a blasted ballroom. The floor’s too treacherous for those ridiculous heels, and I can’t be helping you up every time you pitch over.”

Julianne rubbed her palm against the hopeless cause of her skirts, and then reached down to unbuckle her boots, all the while trying to seal her ears against the sounds of surgery from the table above. It occurred to her, as she worked the first boot off her foot, she was losing items of clothing with frightening rapidity around this man. She had no idea where her gloves had gotten off to, and her bonnet was still lolling about the floor of the coach. She smoothed a hand over her delicate silk stockings and contemplated removing them too. They had cost a week’s pin money on Bond Street. Although, truly, the thought of placing those far-too-expensive stockings on the filthy floor seemed a small price to pay for the distraction from the grisly process above.

As she lined her boots up carefully on the least offensive patch of floor she could find, an inhuman moan pushed its way over the edge of the table. A muffled curse and clattering from the table above suggested that whatever else Patrick Channing was doing, he now had a new problem to contend with.

“Miss Baxter!” he barked, showing more passion in those two words than she had heard in an entire half hour’s conversation. “I require your assistance. Quick as you can.”

Julianne sprang up as if launched from a jack-in-the-box, pushed by the urgency in his voice. She flew across the floor—and truly, it
was
easier to move without the bother of those heels. And then she was standing beside him and trying very, very hard not to be sick at the sight spread out on the table like a Sunday dinner gone wrong.

The black and white dog lay prone on the table, its remaining limbs paddling slowly. Its mouth opened and closed in a grimace of pain, but it did not appear to be completely awake. There was blood everywhere—on the table, on the saw, on the man.

A thin sheen of perspiration dotted Patrick’s forehead. “He’s showing signs of returning to consciousness. I need you to hold his muzzle down on the table, in case he comes fully awake.”

“Me?” she squeaked, sure he must be joking.

“Quickly, please. I don’t have time to argue.”

A high keening sound from the dog sent her scrambling forward, no matter her misgivings. She leaned over the table and wrapped her hands around the dog’s yawning muzzle, the sight of its sharp teeth tightening the knot of terror in her stomach. “In this manner?”

He nodded, his hands pressed over the gaping wound along the animal’s rear flank. “Aye,” he said. “Hold steady.”

The dog thrashed its head, and her fingers slipped dangerously close to its teeth. “I . . . I can’t.”

He lifted his eyes, and she felt his gaze like an iron brand. “You can, Miss Baxter. You must. Count to ten, if you need a distraction, but stop distracting
me
.”

Julianne’s hands shook against the animal’s muzzle, but she renewed her grip. She began to count off the seconds in a firm, unwavering voice she barely recognized as her own. “One, two, three.”

She could scarcely believe she was doing this.

“Four, five.”

What if the dog bit her?

“Six, seven, eight.”

What if the animal was mad, on top of being injured?

“Nine, ten.”

What if . . .

It occurred to her the animal had stopped moving. Relief nudged the terror aside. She loosened her hold, but did not pull her hands away.

“Pinch the skin between his front toes, if you please.”

Julianne looked up. Patrick was threading a needle now—when had she started to think of him as Patrick, instead of a more appropriate form of address? Probably somewhere around the time she had started to shed her clothing. “You want me to pinch him?” she asked, confused. “He’s just gone off to sleep again!”

“It will test his reaction to pain, Miss Baxter. A good, sharp pinch. Use your nails. I want to be sure he’s unconscious before I begin to suture the wound.”