Banner O'Brien

by Linda Lael Miller

  He caught himself up in stern professionalism. What the hell was the matter with him? Last night he’d brutalized a brother he loved, and today he was actually thinking of forsaking people who depended on him.

  Adam glanced at King, who was beaming up at an attentive Banner, regaling her with accounts of his youth on the Columbia River, where his father had a ferryboat. His youth! Why, the kid was closer to Melissa’s age than Banner’s.

  Maybe I’ll stay for the Christmas party, he thought. But then Adam remembered the mountain and the promise he’d made. The reminder sobered him and gave him the impetus to leave Banner here with Jeff and this rounder—who obviously adored her.

  * * *

  Smiling to himself, Keith Corbin approached Adam’s new partner, who sat near the heat stove in the ward, her feet resting on its chrome railing, immersed in a dime novel.

  As the woman read, her cheeks turned a fetching apricot pink, and her green eyes darkened to a shade resembling that of summer clover. No wonder he’d come home and found his brothers bludgeoning each other in the snow the night before.

  “Hello,” he said, his eyes diplomatically averted from the novel. “I’m Keith.”

  She looked up at him with dazed eyes, smiled falteringly, and turned the book title-side down on her lap. Then her gaze caught at his clerical collar and she blushed. “H-Hello—”

  He laughed. “You’re Banner O’Brien, aren’t you? And no, I’m not a priest.”

  She laughed with him and made room by the stove as he found another chair and drew it close. “If you’re not a priest, what are you?” she asked, with a forthrightness that delighted him.

  “I’m an orchardist and—despite me dandy Irish Catholic family—a Methodist minister.”

  Banner stared at him, and a ray of rare winter sunshine flamed in her dark auburn hair. “Good heavens!”

  Keith grinned and took her hand in his, and she did not draw back from him. They talked as giant flakes of snow whispered past the windows, as Francelle came and went, as the gambler slept a healing sleep.

  Keith did not release Banner’s hand until he heard a distant door open and knew that Adam was home.

  Chapter Four

  “WERE YOU REALLY MEANING TO STRANGLE ME THE other day in the hospital ward?”

  Adam was fitting the buggy harness into place, his movements strong and sure, and his teeth flashed in a grin. “What do you think, O’Brien?” he countered.

  The stable was only dimly lit, due to the snow flurries that shrouded the sun, and it smelled of stored hay, grain, and old leather, among other things. Banner stood in the wide doorway and shrugged. “You definitely looked murderous.”

  “I definitely felt murderous. That was a dangerous situation, Shamrock, and you should have left when I told you to.”

  Banner looked down at her gray woolen dress, with its short overjacket and black corded trim, and smoothed the skirts. She hoped the garment was suitable for a visit to an Indian village. “I was afraid those men would hurt you,” she said as an aside.

  Adam left the horse and the rig to come and stand before her, searching her face. “What?”

  “I said I—”

  He stopped her by lifting his hands to her shoulders. “What am I going to do with you, O’Brien?” he asked in a soft, amused voice. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a grown man, and I can take care of myself.”

  Banner was stricken, as always, by his touch, by the sweetly alarming proximity of his body to hers. “Of course,” she replied in a mocking tone engineered to hide her reactions. “That must be why your lip is split and your eye is blackened.”

  Adam laughed. “You’ve seen Jeff. Did I really do so badly?”

  His mouth was too close to hers, entirely too close. She could almost feel the soft, searching warmth of his lips on her own, and his breath, like a stone cast into calm waters, sent tremulous ripples into the very depths of her spirit.

  Out of self-defense, Banner recalled Jeff’s swollen jaw and lacerated forehead, and the image generated the anger she needed to step back out of Adam’s spell.

  “Is that what you were going to do to me, before your mother interrupted?” she snapped.

  “You know the answer to that, O’Brien.”

  “Do I?”

  He turned back to the horse and gripped its harness, leading the animal toward the doorway where Banner stood. The small rig rattled after.

  “If you must know,” he said dryly, through the curtain of briskly falling snow, “I intended to turn you across my knee.”

  Banner was insulted, and it was this that made her tremble, rather than the crisp December weather. “In that case, I’m very glad your mother came in when she did. I would have had to have you arrested.”

  Adam laughed, caught hold of her arm, and propelled her toward her side of the buggy. “Arrested, is it? The marshal would have chuckled over that for days, O’Brien.” He lifted her easily into the seat and planted her on it with a thump. Then he just stood there, the snow making a striking contrast to his dark hair, his blue eyes bright with enjoyment. “Arrested,” he repeated after a long interval. Then he shook his head, rounded the buggy, and got in to adjust the lap rug and take up the reins.

  Banner squared her shoulders and folded her gloved hands, looking straight ahead. She remembered the day Sean was arrested. How could she forget when she’d been the one to summon the police, the one to accept their reward?

  Hearing the dreadful things he’d shouted, across the years, she trembled.

  Adam cast one quick look in her direction, but then he brought down the reins with a crisp motion of his hands and the buggy was moving.

  Instead of taking the road that would lead down to Port Hastings, Adam guided the animal around the stables and into a tree-lined clearing beyond.

  The snow was deep there and undisturbed, except for the tracks of an occasional deer, but the horse trudged through it without apparent difficulty, its breath forming scalloped cones in the air.

  “How far is it to the camp?” Banner asked, in an attempt to make sane conversation.

  “Six or seven miles, I guess,” replied Adam, without looking at her. The amusement was gone from his features, leaving behind a quiet puzzlement.

  They passed through the clearing and into a dense stand of Douglas fir. Skeletal blackberry vines clawed at the spokes of the wheels and the bonnet of the buggy itself.

  Spotting an oblong basket hanging in the boughs of a tall pine tree, Banner again broke the silence.

  “What is that?”

  Adam flung one look at the basket and scowled. “That,” he informed her flatly, “is the final resting place of an Indian child.”

  Banner shivered and drew her cloak more tightly around her. “But the animals might—”

  “No animal could reach it, O’Brien. Too high.”

  Banner swallowed, closed her eyes for a moment. “Do the Klallum dispose of adults that way, too?”

  Adam frowned. “Sometimes. Most often they put them adrift in canoes, on the sound. There is usually another canoe on top, upside down, of course, and they attach clam shells and things to that, hoping that the racket will scare away tamanous.”

  “An evil spirit?”

  He nodded. “In this case, yes. Actually, a tamanous can be a good spirit, too, or an indifferent one, for that matter. The term encompasses their whole religion.”

  Banner suddenly felt indignant. “Why can’t they just bury their dead, like everyone else?”

  Adam gave her a look that was not wholly friendly. “They consider that a barbaric custom,” he said. “Indians like to stay between the grass and the sky, and I can’t say I blame them.”

  Subdued, Banner looked down at her hands, which rested atop the furry lap rug. “We’re not so different, I guess—we Irish—with our banshee and our little people.”

  Adam startled her with an appreciative laugh. “So ye believe in the wee mischiefmakers, then?” he teased in a remarkably authen
tic brogue.

  The basket in the tree, the canoe-graves, the tamanous—all of it was instantly in perspective, and Banner was comforted, cheered. With this man beside her, she was safe from all specters, real or imagined, and there was peace in the knowledge.

  The laughter lingered in Adam’s eyes as he drew the buggy to a stop beneath a storm-stirred, hidden sky and turned to face her. “O’Brien,” he said, and then he kissed her.

  Banner trembled under the sweet assault but was powerless to resist. Beneath the lap rug, Adam’s hand kneaded her waist, rose to slide along her rib cage and then caress the outer rounding of her breast.

  This time, there were no thoughts of Sean Malloy, no comparisons. There was only the wind and the cold and the fire within her that would not be cooled by any earthly element.

  But suddenly Adam drew back, swearing under his breath, and he did not meet Banner’s eyes as he took up the reins again and urged the horse forward, causing the buggy to lurch.

  Banner was too proud to ask what was wrong. What, after all, did one say under such circumstances? Pardon me, sir, but why didn’t you make love to me on the seat of your buggy?

  Feeling both dejected and wildly embarrassed, she took a new interest in the surrounding countryside.

  “I’m sorry,” Adam said after they’d traveled some distance.

  Banner still could not look at him. “For what?” she asked, giving the words a levity that she hoped would disguise her interest in his answer.

  He was stubbornly silent.

  And it was then, of all times, that Banner realized the pitiful entirety of her problem.

  She loved Adam Corbin.

  For a time she tried to deny it. She hadn’t known him long enough. It was unreasonable. It was impossible; it was hopeless. She’d been hurt too badly in love to wander witlessly into its net again—hadn’t she?

  The buggy shifted and rolled onward, and Banner grew quietly desperate with the need to escape it, to escape the way gravity kept thrusting this man’s rock-hard frame against her own.

  Tears smarted in her eyes, and she turned her head away so that Adam would not see them. The forest passed in a fragrant green and white blur.

  Presently the rig came to another stop, and Banner was jolted out of her reflective misery by a pungent stench composed predominantly of fish oil and human waste.

  She wrinkled her nose.

  Adam arched one eyebrow and indicated the Indian village below the ridge on which they sat. “Pleasant, isn’t it?” he drawled. “Would you like to wait here?”

  Nausea welled, scalding, into Banner’s throat, but she shook her head. Bad smells were something one got used to, and for all her revulsion, she was wildly curious about the Klallum village and its people.

  From their vantage point she could see a series of long wooden buildings constructed of unpainted cedar or pine. Between them, quick red children frolicked in the snow. Squaws in buckskin shifts or ill-fitting discards from the wardrobes of white women tended fires, wove baskets, and dug for clams along the shore beyond the camp.

  The braves sat in circles, talking and engaging in what appeared to be games of chance.

  Banner looked again at the lodges, feeling a little disappointed that there were no teepees.

  Adam secured the buggy’s brake and jumped to the ground, his bag in one hand. “Come on, O’Brien,” he said, walking away.

  Banner scrambled after him with such haste that, had he not caught her arm and steadied her, she would probably have rolled down the slanting face of the ridge in a ball of gray woolen and ruffled muslin petticoats.

  The tribe was aware of them now, and the children came forward first, dancing around Adam as though he were a piper and shouting questions in a mixture of English and Chinook, the jargon that had begun as a method of intertribal communication, long before the advent of the whites.

  A small boy caught at Adam’s hand, his dark eyes shining. “Kloochman?” he cried eagerly, indicating Banner. “Big Doctor’s kloochman?”

  Adam laughed and shook his head.

  “What was he saying?” demanded Banner, in a whisper.

  Adam looked at her with mischief and something resembling tenderness. “Never mind, O’Brien. I’ll explain it later.”

  “Ub-ran!” shouted the child in triumph.

  “What is an ub-ran?” Banner insisted, as the braves and squaws began to gravitate toward them in unnerving numbers.

  “It’s you, Shamrock,” he replied. “The boy was trying to say ‘O’Brien.’”

  Feeling foolish, Banner eyed the horde of approaching Indians. “Are they dangerous?”

  “Only if you accept a luncheon invitation.”

  “They’re not cannibals!” cried Banner, who wasn’t so sure.

  Adam chuckled. “No, but they’re terrible cooks. Step it up, Ub-ran. The glamorous practice of frontier medicine awaits.”

  The masses had reached them, and a man Banner would have sworn she’d met or seen before stepped forward and caught at her cloak with a semi-clean hand. “Kloochman?” he beamed, peering up into Adam’s face as he spoke.

  Adam laughed again, this time throwing back his head in the force of his amusement, and the sound pleased the savage, as did his reply. “God forbid!”

  Banner was not to be put off again. “What is a kloochman?” she whispered tersely.

  “A wife,” replied Adam, without so much as glancing at her.

  Banner stiffened, but even her outraged pride could not have coerced her to leave the questionable safety of Dr. Corbin’s side. “May I say that I find the idea of being your wife just as reprehensible as you do?” she responded with biting dignity.

  Adam chuckled and shook his head and immediately became embroiled in an incomprehensible exchange with the Indian—Banner now remembered him as the man who had driven away the children that were tormenting the small Chinaman in Port Hastings—and she found herself wishing that she understood Chinook rather than just its history.

  To distract herself, Banner looked upon the children, many of whom were nearly naked in that bitter cold, and shivered. As they were propelled toward the center of the village in a red swell of humanity, she ventured, “How do they bear going almost without clothing in this weather?”

  “They’ve had centuries of practice,” responded Adam. “And if you can’t speak decent Chinook, kindly keep your very lovely mouth shut. It is impolite to converse in a language your hosts do not understand.”

  “You did.”

  “When?”

  “Just a moment ago. You said ‘God forbid’ and the man understood!”

  “He doesn’t know the half of it. Be quiet, Shamrock, or I’ll trade you for two goats and a berry basket.”

  Banner blushed and bit her lower lip, temporarily defeated.

  As they approached the doorway of one of the lodges, which had only a bearskin curtain to keep out the cold wind, a younger man approached, authoritative in his buckskins and braids, and spoke to Adam in swift, quelling Chinook.

  Adam listened soberly and answered in kind. Again the word for “wife” was mentioned, again Adam vigorously denied the assertion.

  The Indian gave Banner a speculative look, his dark eyes lingering long at her fiery hair, and spoke again.

  Adam turned to her and grinned. “I’ve just been offered four dried salmon and a cedar canoe for you,” he said. “What’s your counter offer?”

  Banner reddened and drew nearer to Adam, even though she was certain, now, that she hated him. “I beg your pardon?”

  “What will you give me to keep you?”

  “Bastard,” replied Banner.

  Battling to suppress his amusement, Adam turned his blue gaze back to the Indian and spoke words of apologetic tone.

  The brave looked disappointed and stomped away.

  But the other tribesmen were eager to talk with Adam, and they drew him inside the lodge, leaving Banner to stand, befuddled, among the women.

  Quickly enough t
hey surrounded her, touching her clothes, smiling gapped smiles, showing her the baskets of which they were justifiably proud.

  Banner felt herself warming to them for, after all, they were Jenny’s people and their culture was an ancient one, deserving of respect.

  After a time, though, Banner began to grow impatient. There was much laughter, inside the log walls of the lodge, and Adam did not come out.

  Why were they here, if not to treat patients?

  Her medical bag heavy in one hand, Banner wandered toward a stone hut near the water. “What’s this?”

  Several of the women offered answers, but only one was in English.

  “My people use to drive out sickness—bad tamanous” offered an older woman who wore an outsized brown sateen dress and a patched paisley shawl.

  The tamanous again. Banner shivered and went to the hut’s arched doorway to peer inside.

  The voice at her side startled her. “They heat stones and drop them into cold water inside the hut,” Adam said. “And when the patient has been properly cooked by the steam, they carry him down to the shore and drop him into the sound.”

  Banner was horrified, though she did feel a measure of relief that Adam was no longer secreted away in that masculine stronghold, the lodge. “Saints in heaven!”

  Adam looked at the hut as though he’d like to tear it apart, stone by heavy, rounded stone. “They rarely use it unless there’s an outbreak of smallpox. Shall we go, Shamrock?”

  The idea was appealing, even though visiting the Klallum camp had been a memorable adventure. “No one is sick?”

  He smiled and reached out to catch her hand in his, and the innocent contact gave Banner a certain sweet, piercing pleasure. “No one is sick,” he confirmed, and then they were on the way back to the horse and buggy that awaited them on the ridge.

  “Did they really offer you fish and a boat for me?” she asked when they were on their way again.

  Adam grinned. “Yes. The bargaining got pretty interesting inside the lodge, as a matter of fact.”