“. . . just don’t press against the large burn on his right side,” she said, and Eric realized she’d answered his question while he’d envisioned their future.
He would have to take care of Steven before he could claim Letty’s full attention, and he was selfish enough to want the woman he loved to concentrate on him, and him alone, when he asked her to become his wife.
“Of course I’ll be careful, Letty. Aren’t I careful, children?”
“Yes, Mr. Eric.” The voices sounded as one, but the giggles that followed ruined the charming effect.
He reached into the buggy and gathered Steven to his chest. For a moment, he just held the boy, relishing his even breaths, his steady heartbeat, his renewed life. He was glad he would never again live through the night when Steven nearly died.
“I’m so glad you’re healing, son,” he said. “So very glad.”
As he went back to Steven’s room, Eric felt Letty follow him with her gaze. He didn’t pause to look at her. He knew that if he did, he might lose sight of Steven’s need for bed rest and leave the boy to manage on the front room settee. Then he’d sweep the pretty doctor straight to Silver Creek Church.
Letty paused on the porch before entering Eric’s home. The memories of her last visit here were, at the very least, daunting. She squared her shoulders and stepped up to the threshold, but before she went any farther, the arrival of a horse and buggy caught her attention.
Dismay made Letty’s already wobbly composure falter. Emmaline Whitehall descended from the conveyance with a brown paper–wrapped parcel in hand. “Dr. Morgan! A moment of your time, if you please.”
Letty hoisted her chin upward. “Of course.”
“I heard about the boy. How you saved his life.” A patch of red stained each of Emmaline’s hollow cheeks. “Here,” she said, thrusting the package at Letty. “I thought you might give him this to pass the time. You likely have all you can do to keep the lad in bed, and I hoped to help.”
Letty caressed the rough wrapping, her gaze on the schoolmarm’s flustered features. Emmaline had brought more than a gift for Steven; her white flag of peace had come wrapped in brown paper. “Thank you so much. I can use all the help anyone cares to offer.”
The older woman took a step back from Letty and then studied the ranch house. A suspicious shine glossed her eyes, and she nodded. “You’ll do,” she said. Then she hurried to her buggy without acknowledging Letty’s good-bye.
Letty’s eyelids prickled with emotion, and she hugged Steven’s gift to her heart. One more person had acknowledged her adequacy. Randy, the Stones, Elsa Richards and her brood, and now Emmaline had accepted her. It wasn’t enough to change her mind about her future, but their acceptance offered comfort she would carry with her to her new home. Wherever that chanced to be.
Buoyed by her personal triumph, Letty followed Eric and Steven. She found them in the boy’s room, preparing the patient for a much-needed rest. Caroline, Amelia, Suzannah, and baby Willy were justifiably reluctant to leave their brother’s side.
“Here,” she said, giving Steven Emmaline’s gift. “Miss Whitehall brought this for you. She thought you might enjoy it.”
The boy ripped off the covering and found an illustrated copy of Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales. “An appropriate gift from a librarian, wouldn’t you say?” Letty asked as she put away the sickroom supplies she’d brought.
While the children studied the pictures in Steven’s new book, Eric admired Letty’s movements. Efficient as always, she soon had the room arranged to her purposes. She smoothed the boy’s hair off his brow, plumped up a pillow behind him, and asked how he felt.
“ ’M burnin’, Dr. Miss. Feels like ants is crawlin’ on my burns. Hurts more’n I can tell.”
“Yes, well, Steven, I understand,” she said. “But it’s best if you say that you feel as though ants are crawling on your burns.” She caught Eric’s smile and added, “Don’t you dare laugh. Something must be done about their language.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, solemn as an undertaker.
With dignity, she returned to her patient. “Since you’re right by it,” she said to Eric as she helped Steven sip fresh water, “please take the vial of Hypericum from my bag. The injured nerves are causing him pain, and he needs relief to rest.”
Eric obeyed, glad to have her in his home again. She dropped three pellets under Steven’s tongue, made him comfortable, and shooed the others off to play. She took the baby from Caroline and, crooning, carried him to his bed. After changing the little one’s diapers, she settled him in for a nap.
Eric saw his opportunity. “I need to speak with you,” he said. “Privately, so I waited until you’d seen to the children. Please come with me to the front room.”
Apprehension filled her eyes. She squared her shoulders and shot her chin up. “Of course,” she said in a wobbly voice.
Eric led her to the settee, yet he remained standing. Questions flew from her eyes, and the moment was his. He tried to remember what he’d planned to say, but nothing eloquent came to him.
“You were right,” he finally burst out, and he cringed at his clumsiness.
“How so?”
He sat at her side and took her hand. “This isn’t easy, Letty. Please bear with me. When we spoke about Martina, you said I bore no guilt in her death, and in the strictest sense, you were right. After my family fell apart, I tried to control the world around me to try to make the outcome of any event sure. But I couldn’t force a doctor on Martina, just as I couldn’t force Slosh to be the father the children needed. I couldn’t even close the brothels and clean up the town.”
In her eyes he read sadness, sadness he’d caused. “I realize now that I could no more force you to betray your conscience than I could force the town to accept your commitment to helping the girls. Folks have to find the merit in your actions on their own. Just as I did.”
Their nearness turned into a torture of the sweetest sort. Eric longed to hold her, kiss her, make her promise she’d marry him, but he had more to say, none of it easy. A maddening whiff of violets teased him, and he rubbed his thumb across her palm. Letty’s shiver gave him the courage he needed to go on.
“All this became clear when I tried to take the blame for Steven’s accident simply because I’d gone to the ball. The mayor came second in accusing me of negligence, but then you called me a hero, and negligence isn’t heroic. The more I thought, the more I saw how I’d tried to control my world, to control even you. I was wrong.”
Letty dropped his hand and curved her palm around his jaw. “Oh, Eric, don’t paint me so honorably,” she said. “When I saw Steven burning on the ground, I froze and my prided self-sufficiency vanished. God used that moment to show me my headstrong ways. Instead of depending on Him, I’d often say I did but then ran off to act as I pleased without waiting for His guidance.”
She stood and began to pace. “It’s no wonder I felt lonely for so long. The Father would grant me the help I’d asked for, but if it came in a form I didn’t particularly like, why, then I rejected it as an attempt to thwart my obedience to His calling.”
“But—”
“Please let me finish. This isn’t easy for me, either.”
She stopped wearing a path on Eric’s rug, but she kept her back to him. He stood, needing to bridge the distance, but her words brought him up short.
“You were quite right in warning me,” she said, and he knew how much the admission had to cost her. “Although my intentions were good, my actions often placed me at the center of a storm. I never considered that the Lord might have been using you to speak to me, to caution me against my tendency to follow my will or my emotions instead of accepting wise counsel.”
She looked over her shoulder. “Yes, from even you.”
Her rueful smile beckoned him, and he went to her side.
She hadn’t finished, however, but wrung her hands and took a deep breath. “Now,” she said, “the very folk I cam
e to care for, the expectant mothers, their children, the poor in town, the most vulnerable of all, are either forbidden or unwilling to come see me. I have indeed endangered their well-being.”
Eric took hold of her fidgety hands. “I remember you telling me once that I judged myself too harshly,” he said. “I’ve learned I did exactly that, and also blinded myself to God’s precious forgiveness. Now I try to remember Jesus’ sacrifice each time the darkness returns. I can’t bear to see you suffer the same way I did.”
Letty shook her head. “The difference, Eric, is that I am guilty. I’m as headstrong as you said I was. Whenever I decided to follow my heart, I’d put on blinders. I shouldn’t have taken on the entire town like that. All I did was put myself out of work and risk the lives of others.”
Eric slipped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. At first she resisted, then with a sigh, she allowed the intimacy.
“Don’t change, Letitia Morgan,” he whispered into the hair at her temple. “People like you, those who listen to their hearts, who hear God’s call upon them, are the ones who bring about change.”
The contact must have moved her as much as it did him, for another tremor ran through her. “Come,” he said. “There’s something I want to show you. Something you must see.”
Letty wondered what he was up to now, but his expression gave nothing away. He led her down the hall and stopped at the first door. Baby Karl’s room.
“Eric, no. You don’t have to—”
He placed a finger on her lips. The contact was sweet, yet it sent heat through her veins.
“Hush,” he said, nudging her into the room. She closed her eyes but stumbled over her feet in her reluctance to again experience the anguish inside.
He walked around from behind her and chuckled. Letty kept her eyes closed tight. With a finger at her chin, he lifted her face. “Open your eyes, little bird. I brought you here so you could see something, not so you could shut out what I’m trying to say.”
Letty cracked her lids a tiny bit. Then her eyes flew open. The last time she’d seen the room, the shutters had been latched, allowing scant light to filter through the curtains.
She turned her head one way then the other. She couldn’t stop a surprised “Oh!”
The windows were open, and crisp, white curtains wafted in and out on the spring breeze. Where dust had covered the furniture, today the wood boasted a liberal application of lemon oil. And where a sad cradle, an unused dresser, and a lonely rocking horse had once stood, the room now held shelf upon shelf of medical texts, a cabinet stocked with amber remedy jars, and an enormous desk with myriad cubbyholes beckoning her to fill them with her notes.
“Do you like it?” Eric asked, urgency in his voice. “Could you work in an office like this?”
Letty nodded, keeping the slightest hint of hope from swelling inside her.
Eric took her hands and brought them to his lips. He kissed her palms and then folded her fingers over them. Pulling her closer, he tucked her hands against his heart. His tenderness brought tears to her eyes and hope to her heart.
“Are you willing to take on a crotchety, widowed newspaperman?” he asked. “For life? I love you, you know.”
She gasped. Tears spilled onto her cheeks. “Eric . . . ?”
“Yes, liebling, will you marry me?”
More tears careened down her face. She nodded, then said, “No.”
“What? You won’t marry me? Why not?”
“Oh, Eric,” she cried. “It’s not that I don’t want to, because I do. It’s just that I—I can’t. Not while I’m in the shadow of scandal. I hate what that could do to you, your newspaper, your standing in the town you love so much.”
He ran his hands through his hair, then smoothed his mustache. “Scandal means nothing to me,” he said. “The newspaper can deal with controversy, and if this town doesn’t like the woman I marry, well, then, that’s just too bad. They’re not the ones who’ll take you into their home. It’s me, and that’s where you belong—in my home and in my heart.”
“Perhaps, but not while I can cause you trouble.”
Determination burned in his eyes. “Fine. If that’s the way you must have it, then fine. But you can say yes to my proposal.”
When she didn’t answer, he persisted. “It’s a matter of solving a problem, not that you won’t marry me. Right?”
In that one final word, Letty learned the depth of Eric’s vulnerability, the power of his need, and she couldn’t find it in herself to deny him further. “I love you, Eric.”
“As the Lord in heaven is my witness, Letty, I love you, too.”
Strong arms swept around her. The tears of moments ago returned, only this time they came with joy. Eric pulled away to look at her, and as she met his gaze, she saw matching dampness on his lashes. So much loneliness had been banished by such few, precious words. Such a future opened up before them by the power of those words.
He brought his lips to hers and, with infinite gentleness, kissed her. His mouth pressed against hers, touching, warming, loving her with a new sense of rightness, a sense of belonging such as Letty had never known. A sigh escaped at the exquisite feelings Eric sent through her. He loved her.
She pulled her lips from him. “You honestly want to marry an unwomanly woman? A female physician?”
Eric laughed. “Letty, if you were any more woman, I might not be able to handle you. How in the world did you form such an absurd image of yourself?”
“My mother always said I was a sorry excuse for a woman. I didn’t see the point to delicate embroidery, nor did I possess the tact she thought so valuable in dealing with society. It struck me more like hypocrisy. I was a trial to her, an inconvenience. So you see, Eric, a man in your position should consider the social liability in marrying what many see as an unnatural woman, certainly one who speaks her mind regardless of how others might view her opinion.”
Eric’s laughter roared. “If that’s your way of scaring me off, you’ve failed. I’ve dealt with all that since the day I launched my campaign to bring a female doctor to town. You’re no inconvenience to me. Remember who built your shelves. I love who you are—you, the talented, courageous, and forthright Dr. Letitia Morgan.”
When he again reached for her, Letty flew into his embrace. With her head against his chest, she felt the rumble of his words.
“It’s that honesty of yours that broke through my shell of self-pity. Don’t change—or only your name. Please become Mrs. Wagner. Don’t take away the light you brought back to my heart.”
Letty smiled through her tears, then lifted her chin. “Yes, Eric, I’ll become Mrs. Wagner. As soon as the scandal is past.”
“Blast the scandal with dynamite—”
“No, Eric. I now accept that my mother was right. The perception of those around us matters. She did say that due to my unladylike behavior, men would see me as good for meeting only certain . . . needs. In fact, a while back a man in Philadelphia began to show interest in me, interest that I returned. But Mother must have been right, since when I continued my studies, he stopped coming around. Less than a year ago he married a pristine debutante.”
At Letty’s mention of a former suitor, Eric felt indignation fly up from his gut. How dare the fool judge her inadequate? Then he smiled in triumph. It was just as well that the man had. Letty was meant for him, for Eric Wagner, and for no one else.
Her sad, sweet voice went on. “Here in Hartville, my stubbornness made matters worse. I don’t regret fighting for the girls, but my curiosity made me ignore your advice, and I followed you to Bessie’s Barn that night. It’s no wonder many lump me with Bessie’s girls. No lady would be present at that moment. Mother predicted my future quite accurately.”
“And blast them, too—”
“Hush, Eric. Listen to me, please. You’re a wonderful man, very influential, too. You need a lady, a woman who can share your prominent position. Why, Mother gave up having me join her and Father when compan
y came for supper. My conversation wasn’t suitable for proper guests. I’d rather die than embarrass you any more.”
“Hogwash! Your mother was wrong. Most likely your intelligence surpassed hers, and she couldn’t appreciate your talents. That was her loss, not a failing on your part.
“As far as a man is concerned,” he added, grasping her determined chin, “a woman as strong as you is quite exciting, and a mature man relishes the challenge you pose. At least, I do.”
His finger against her lips stopped her response. Her eyes widened at his impassioned words.
“Your mother and all the others are mistaken. You’re more woman than those silly chits who know nothing more than curling their hair or the latest style of bustle. I admire you, respect you, and want you in every way a man wants a woman. I want you for my wife, the mother of my children, and the lover in my bed. Your mother’s bias belongs to the past. You and I have a future to share.”
Tears of joy filled Letty’s eyes, tears that Eric felt honor-bound to kiss away. Those kisses led to others, delicious caresses that momentarily made him forget they had a house full of children. He asked her to set a date. She refused.
“When the gossip dies,” she argued. “When scandal doesn’t taint me.”
No matter what he said or did, Letty wouldn’t budge. He scheduled his days so he could spend as much time as possible pressing his suit. To no avail.
Days turned into weeks. Letty remained unmoved.
Many in town had noted her tenacious care of Steven. Pastor Stone sang her praises from the pulpit, and patients began trickling back. No one disputed her medical talents; Letitia Morgan’s worth shone through despite the hypocrisy of certain residents of the town.
Eric didn’t know how to make Letty see the change. He couldn’t take her from house to house for personal apologies. And he was fast losing patience. He wanted her for a wife, and he wanted her now.
A month after he’d proposed, Eric sat at his desk at the newspaper office, gnawing on the wood casing of a pencil and pondering his predicament. All that time wasted and they still stood at an impasse. He couldn’t sleep for seeking a solution, and work failed to hold his interest. A paper range had grown on his desk, nearly burying his hapless typewriter.
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