Open Country

by Warner, Kaki

  He whirled, a scowl on his face.

  “What do you say to that, Charlie?” Hank challenged.

  The boy glared at him, his mouth pressed in a tight, grim line.

  Molly fought the urge to rush to his defense, sensing he wouldn’t appreciate her interference. Instead, she sent Hank a warning look.

  He responded by loosening another snowball.

  Charlie ducked, but it still caught his shoulder, showering his face with snow. Furiously, he wiped it off. “You better stop that,” he yelled.

  “Says who?” Hank fired again.

  Charlie threw an arm over his face as the snowball smacked against the post beside him.

  Needing to do something to help the boy, Molly quickly grabbed a handful of snow and thrust it into his hand. “Actions speak louder than words.”

  Charlie threw. The snowball went wide, but before it landed, Molly had another waiting. Within moments, amid laughter and shrieks, the fight was on, with only Charlie taking it as anything other than a game. He seemed oblivious to the snowballs plopping all around him, but retaliated with a single-minded determination. Soon he was down the steps and into the yard, scooping snow with both hands, firing a constant barrage as he crossed to where Penny and Hank huddled. By the time he’d reached them, he was covered with snow and grinning as he hadn’t in months.

  “Get him, Charlie!” Penny shouted, loyally switching sides in favor of her big brother.

  With a whoop, Ben scrambled out from behind his hill and joined the attack, while Brady stood safely out of range shouting encouragement.

  Laughing, Hank fell backward, all but disappearing under a cloud of snow as Charlie and Ben breached the wall and landed on top of him. With a squeal that could have ruptured eardrums, Penny leaped into the fray.

  “Molly, help me,” Hank called, his voice muffled by thrashing children and flying snow. “They’re hurting me.”

  Laughter instantly forgotten, Molly shot down the steps. “Brady, get the children!” she cried, slipping and sliding through the snow to get to Hank. “Penny! Charlie! Get off! Now!” Dragging the children from the heap, she flung them toward Brady, who stood laughing over his brother. By the time she got Hank uncovered, she was panting with exertion and fear.

  If he reinjured that arm, she might not be able to save it a second time. She might never be able to restore circulation, or the damage to the torn tissue might be so severe she would have no choice but to amputate. Why had she relied so long on wrapped splints, rather than putting on a hard plaster cast?

  “Be still, Hank,” she said, trying to keep her voice from betraying her alarm as she ran shaking hands over his arm. But with the heavy jacket and the bandages, she couldn’t tell if he had rebroken it. “Where does it hurt? Here? Here? Can you move your fingers? Oh, I knew I should have put on the hard cast. Why did I—”

  “Molly, Molly,” Hank choked out, his voice vibrating with laughter. “Calm down. I’m all right. They didn’t hurt me.”

  “We didn’t hurt him, Aunt Molly,” Penny defended. “Did we, Charlie?”

  Molly froze as the words penetrated. She reared back to find Hank grinning up at her.

  “See? I’m fine.” He lifted his bandaged arm and wiggled the tips of his fingers to prove it. Drawing back her fist, she punched him on the shoulder. Then burst into tears.

  “Come on, kids,” Brady said, hastily. “Let’s see if Consuelo will fix you some warm milk.”

  “With chocolate in it?” Penny shouted.

  “Chocolate and green beans,” Brady teased.

  “Beans,” Ben crowed.

  Shrieking in delighted disgust, the younger children clambered over Brady as he picked up Abigail and headed toward the house, Charlie following more sedately behind.

  As soon as they were out of earshot, Molly rounded on Hank, who was still stretched in the snow. “How could you do such a thing? Don’t you know how hard I worked to save your arm—to save you, you big lout. How could you tease me that way?”

  “Now, Molly.” Hank tried to put his good arm around her.

  She threw it off and swiped tears from her cheeks, furious with him for frightening her so badly, and furious with herself for overreacting. But after a week of constant worry and sleepless nights, she was in no mood for cruel jests.

  “I’m sorry, Molly. I thought you knew I was joking.”

  “You’re hateful. See if I ever worry about you again.” She started to rise.

  He pulled her back down. “Molly, don’t.”

  “Don’t what? Worry about you? Be upset that all my work and effort and constant attendance on you could have been for nothing?”

  His gloved hand moved to her shoulder, then around and under the scarf over her head. It was cold and wet against the back of her neck.

  “Stop that!” She tried to shrug it off.

  “Shh.” He pulled her head down toward his. “I didn’t mean to worry you.”

  “Well, you did, and I don’t appreciate it. If you ever do that a—”

  He kissed her.

  His lips were icy. His tongue was hot.

  Molly was too shocked to react.

  She had been kissed before. Fumbling sickroom kisses from men desperate to feel something other than pain and sickness and encroaching death. Grateful good-bye kisses from men recovered enough to walk away and die another day.

  But they were nothing like Hank’s kiss.

  Whatever indefinable and invisible connection existed between them, it flared tenfold the moment his mouth touched hers. Like a shock of energy, it moved through her, tingling along her nerves, vibrating under her skin.

  It was just a kiss.

  But oh . . .

  When he finally released her, she drew back, feeling shivery and breathless and so confused she couldn’t think. “Why did you do that?” she asked in a shaky voice.

  His smile was slow and sweet. “Can’t a man kiss his wife?”

  His wife.

  How lovely that sounded.

  Heart twisting in her chest, she looked down at him . . . the man she had wronged and had lied to . . . the man who made her heart race simply by being in the same room with her. She saw laughter in his dark eyes, affection in his smile . . . and guilt almost choked her.

  “Is this your idea of courting?” she snapped, desperate to distance herself from the feelings churning inside her. “Scaring a woman half to death and making her cry, then kissing her as if nothing is wrong?”

  His smile faded. “Is something wrong?”

  Of course something was wrong. Everything was wrong. What she was doing—what she was feeling—what she wanted from this man was wrong. She knew that.

  But her heart didn’t.

  It hammered in her chest and sent blood shushing past her ear, whispering of temptation, second chances, a way to make up for all the lost, lonely years she’d spent at her father’s side. For just this one moment she could be like other women, feel what they felt, know what they knew.

  “Molly?” He had risen up on his right elbow and was studying her in that intense way he had. “You don’t want to kiss me?” he asked.

  Dare she? Dare she not? She stared back at him, wanting . . . wishing . . . until guilt melted into something hot and urgent and undeniable, and all the doubts fell away. Breathless from the pounding of her heart and her own boldness, she bent closer. “As a matter of fact . . .” she whispered and pressed her lips to his.

  JESSICA LOOKED PAST BRADY AS HE CAME UP THE STEPS WITH

  Penny under one arm, Abigail under the other, and Ben wrapped around his leg. Charlie hung back, no longer laughing but not as sullen either. “Oh, look,” she said, smiling at the couple kissing in the snow.

  After unloading the children and shooing them into the house, Brady turned back to see his brother helping Molly to her feet. “I know. I hope he knows what he’s doing.”

  Rearing back in surprise, Jessica searched his face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

&nbs
p; “I’m not sure. It’s just . . . something feels off.”

  “They’re newly wedded,” Jessica defended. “In addition, Hank has suffered a grievous injury, so of course, something is off. Heavens, I’m amazed Molly will even let him touch her at all in view of the fact he doesn’t even remember her. I certainly wouldn’t were I in her place.”

  Smiling, Brady tucked a curl back under her scarf. “I’d never forget you.”

  “Apparently you did for a year, when you sent me back to England after the ranch burned.”

  “The worst year of my life. And I didn’t forget you. Not for a second.”

  “Of course not.” Leaning up, she kissed his cold cheek, then led him into the house. “Now stop worrying about your brother and tend to your own knitting.”

  “I don’t knit.”

  “Oh?” She sent him a look over her shoulder. “Then come upstairs and I’ll teach you.”

  “IT’S HEALING WELL.”

  Molly ran her fingertips gently over the ridge of puffy skin where the incision was. “I hope removing the stitches didn’t hurt too much.”

  “I hardly felt it.”

  It was late evening. Everyone else had retired for the night. They were in the tiled bath between their rooms, Hank seated on the edge of the wooden tub, while she sat on a stool by the sink, soaking gauze strips in a bowl of plaster of paris. After that scare earlier, she was determined to get the arm protected before it could be reinjured.

  “The nerves near the surface are probably damaged,” she said. “It might be numb for quite some time. Maybe forever.” Realizing that she still stroked his arm, she dropped her hand back to her lap. “You’ll have an ugly scar, I’m afraid.”

  “I still have an arm. Did I thank you?”

  “You lived. That’s thanks enough.” Avoiding his gaze, she dug dried plaster from beneath her thumbnail. “Not all my patients do, you know.”

  “Not from lack of trying, I’d guess.”

  She shrugged. “A lack of skill, perhaps. Or knowledge. Or courage. But no, not from lack of trying.” After brushing flakes of plaster from her skirt, she folded her hands in her lap and put on a smile. “You’ll have to remove your shirt. Or we can cut the sleeve, if you prefer.”

  He removed his shirt.

  She almost sighed. So entranced was she by that perfectly sculpted torso it was a moment before she noticed the wrappings around his ribs were gone. “When did you remove the bandages?”

  “Last night.”

  “Why?”

  “So I could breathe.”

  Without the thick wrappings, his musculature showed in starkly delineated slabs across his chest and down his abdomen. She took a moment to observe how they flexed and relaxed with each breath he took. An inspiring sight. And even though there was a new gauntness to him and the loose waistband of his trousers indicated he had lost weight during his ordeal, he was still the most powerfully built man she had ever attended. Most of the men she had nursed had been on the brink of starvation. Or death. But Hank was so vibrantly alive, he seemed to fill the room with his energy.

  Realizing that he was noticing her noticing him, she adopted an expression of mild irritation. “If I wrap them more loosely, will you let me rebandage? It’s important to keep the cracked ribs protected until they heal.”

  He didn’t respond.

  She sighed and glanced up at him through her lashes. “You’ll just take them off again, won’t you?”

  He didn’t speak, but the answer danced in his eyes.

  “Then no more wrestling with the children,” she ordered in her nurse’s voice. “Or riding horses, or playing in the snow, or doing anything that would jostle your ribs or your arm or risk a fall. Do you understand?”

  He smiled.

  “I’m serious, Hank.”

  “I can see that.”

  “So?”

  He blinked innocently. “So?”

  “So, will you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  She wanted to punch his arm again. Instead, she bent closer to study his ribs. The bruises had faded to a yellowish green. The abrasions and lacerations were healing nicely. Where he was uninjured, his skin was the color of clover honey and felt warm and solid beneath her hand.

  Realizing she was stroking him again, she abruptly sat back. “Well,” she said lamely, feeling his gaze on her once more. “Since you’ll just remove them, I won’t rebandage. But promise me you’ll be careful.”

  When he didn’t answer, she looked up. The laughter was gone, replaced by that intense probing stare. “You worry too much, Molly,” he said with a small, crooked smile.

  She truly did almost punch him that time. “How can I not worry? Do you know how close you came to dying? How frightened I—your brother—all of us were?” Realizing her outburst had revealed more than she was willing to admit, even to herself, she fussed with the gauze strips. “Just be careful. That’s all I’m asking.”

  “I will.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She didn’t have to look up to realize he was laughing at her again. But this time, rather than rising to the bait, she attended to the task at hand.

  Positioning his arm on a folded towel along the edge of the sink, she wrapped a thick cotton pad around his arm from his bicep to the second knuckle of his hand, then began laying the plaster-coated strips over it.

  “You don’t like it, do you?” he said after several minutes had passed. She glanced up to find his expression curious rather than teasing. “Like what?”

  “Doctoring. I can see it bothers you. So why do you do it?”

  “For Papa.” She smiled to hide the surge of painful memories. “If he needed me enough, he wouldn’t send me away.” She gently pressed out the wrinkles on one gauze strip then reached for another. “But you’re right. I don’t like the suffering.”

  “Part of the healing process, I’d think.”

  “Perhaps. But when you’re thirteen, it’s difficult to separate the two.”

  “Thirteen? That’s pretty young.”

  He sounded indignant, and that surprised her. No one had ever commented before on the appropriateness of her tending the wounded or sick. But now that she thought about it, it was a bit much to expect of an adolescent girl. But then, she had never protested, had she?

  Out of loyalty to Papa, she tried to explain. “After Mama died and my sister moved with her husband to Savannah, it was just Papa and I. He traveled a great deal, studying under different surgeons. I didn’t want to be left behind, so I went with him.”

  “Still. You were a kid. Too young to deal with all that.”

  “Apparently so,” she agreed with a rueful smile. “The first time Papa asked me to dispose of an amputated limb, I thought it moved, and it scared me so badly I tossed it on the floor and fled shrieking. Papa was furious.”

  When he didn’t respond, she glanced at him, expecting him to see the humor in the situation, however macabre.

  Instead, he was glowering at her with such a ferocious expression she drew back, almost knocking the bowl of plaster of paris off her lap.

  “How could he do that to you?”

  “He didn’t mean to upset me,” she quickly defended. “He just didn’t . . . think. Papa was like that.”

  “He was your father. He should have protected you from all that, rather than dragging you into the middle of it.”

  Molly looked away, both pleased and confused by the strength of his reaction. No one had ever stood up for her before. Or questioned Papa’s treatment of her. As a child, even when she’d felt almost crushed by the responsibility of tending the wounded or ill, she had never doubted Papa’s right to put the task before her, only her ability to carry it out. It was strange that Hank would be the first to see it from the child’s point of view. Strange and . . . nice.

  “Okra.”

  It took her a moment to figure that out, then she smiled. “Back to that are we?” she asked, cutting
more strips and dropping them into the bowl. “Too slimy.”

  He chuckled, a lovely, welcome sound. “Not the way Iantha makes it. How about collards?”

  “They’re edible with bacon and vinegar, but not my favorite.”

  “I like beef.”

  “I know.” She didn’t add that it wasn’t experience that told her that, but his brother. “I prefer chicken.”

  “With potatoes?”

  “Rice.”

  “I’m getting hungry.”

  His voice was a low rumble that bounced off the tile walls and swirled around the small room like a gentle whirlwind of sound. No other noise intruded. It was as if the world had narrowed to these four walls and her and Hank. There was an intimacy to it that made her want to edge closer and touch his hair or run a fingertip down his bristly cheek. Perhaps she was becoming ill.

  “He’d be proud of you, I think,” he said, jarring her back to reality.

  “Papa?” She covered her discomfiture with a nervous laugh. “Have you seen your arm?”

  “It’s there and it works. What would he have done differently?”

  She thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “Not differently. Better.”

  “Would he have talked to me and slept on the cot next to mine and told me not to give up?”

  She laughed self-consciously. “You heard? I didn’t know you were awake.”

  “I wasn’t very often. Most of the time I felt like I was dying, like I was buried alive. Then I would hear your voice and I’d know I wasn’t. Would your father have done that?”

  Feeling that rush of pleasure again, she smoothed the strips over his arm, not sure how to respond. Expressions of gratitude always made her uncomfortable; she was never convinced she deserved them. And Hank’s had her almost in a dither. How deflating. She had always thought dithering beneath her.

  “Papa wasn’t much of a pillow fluffer,” she admitted with an embarrassed smile. Then quickly changing the subject, she said, “Thank you for getting Charlie to join in today. He hasn’t laughed like that in a long time.”

  Hank didn’t respond.

  “He’s lost a great deal for one so young,” she went on. “His father, mother, grandfather. I’ve not been much help to him, I fear. I can’t seem to—”