Loner's Lady. Lynna Banning

does it look?”

      “Your left leg is fine.” It was the right leg that made his breath catch. Under the pale skin he could see the bulge of the bone where it had separated. “To set the break in your right leg properly, I’ll have to manipulate it.”

      Jess wiped his fingers across his forehead; they came away wet with sweat, which didn’t surprise him. He’d rather rob the Ohio Central than put his hand on her leg.

      “Don’t drag it out,” she muttered from the bed. “Just get it over with.”

      “Don’t rush me,” he countered. “I like to take my time with some things.”

      He was damn glad she didn’t ask what things. He settled one hand on her knee, then cupped the joint with his other. Watching her face, he moved both hands toward the break. The closer he got, the tighter she scrunched her eyes shut.

      His belly knotted. “I’m sorry, Ellen.” Gently he eased his fingers onto the bulge of skin, then felt below her knee with his other hand. There it was, plain as pudding. He could feel how the edges of the bone fit together.

      Mentally he reviewed exactly what he had to do. Before he made a move, he glanced up at her face. Hell, she was sweating worse than he was. He’d try to make it quick.

      He braced himself. Holding one hand steady under the break, he pressed his palm down hard from the top. Her anguished scream sent a sharp, cold blade into his chest, but an instant later he heard the soft snap as the bone shifted back into place.

      She screamed again.

      “Yell if you want, just don’t move,” he ordered.

      While she panted on the bed, he laid out the makeshift splints. One of the gate sticks curved just the right way along her leg; the other was straighter, but it would do. He bound them in place with strips of toweling.

      “Better,” Ellen murmured. Her leg ached like a plow had hooked into it, but it wasn’t the searing pain she’d endured earlier. “How did you learn to do that?”

      “Spent some time as an army surgeon during the war.”

      Thank the Lord. She wouldn’t ask which army. Reb or Federal, she was grateful for the man’s skill.

      He straightened suddenly, reached for the decanter of port and tipped it into his mouth.

      “I’d offer you my glass,” she said, “but…oh, here.” She thrust the tumbler at him anyway. “You’ve earned it.”

      He smiled for the first time in what seemed like hours. He’d shaved since supper last night, she noticed. The dimple in his cheek reappeared.

      She watched him pour hot water from the kettle into her best vegetable bowl and drop in a piece of toweling. Clean, she hoped.

      He bent to smooth the wet cloth over her good leg, washing off the streaks of dried mud with a surprisingly light touch. “I don’t fancy cutting you out of your skirt and petticoat. Seems like a waste of serviceable garments. Got any ideas?”

      What an incredible topic of conversation! Still, it had been an unusual day, and it was still only ten o’clock, she judged, glancing at the sun outside the window.

      “If you could undo the fastenings at my waist, you could just pull my skirt and petticoat off over my head.”

      “Yeah, I thought of that.” Taking it slow and easy, he washed her broken limb from the ankle to the break, then started at her upper thigh and worked down as far as her knee. When he finished, he set the bowl of grimy water on the floor and leaned over her.

      “The skirt button’s at the back,” she said. “Petticoat has a ribbon tie.”

      “Usually does,” he answered.

      Ellen’s eyebrows lifted. She felt his hands reach under her waist, fumble the skirt button through the buttonhole and then untie the ribbon of her petticoat.

      He moved to the head of her bed. “Arms up,” he ordered.

      Ellen obliged, grateful that she didn’t need to move her throbbing leg to rid herself of her clothes. She felt both garments slide upward, and with her arms raised she managed to shimmy free of them. He tossed them on the floor with the washcloth and caught her gaze. “You want to remove your—”

      “Just my shirt,” she said quickly. “I’ll keep on my camisole and my drawers, what’s left of them.”

      She unbuttoned the blue cotton shirt and he helped her shrug out of it, his hands warm and sure. He was much more than a doctor, she guessed. He seemed to know a great deal about women’s clothes fastenings.

      At the moment, it was his experience as a doctor that she valued. His experience with women didn’t matter a whit.

       Chapter Four

       D r. James Callahan gallantly tipped his black felt top hat at the pretty young woman he met on the board sidewalk. “Mrs. Kirkland.”

      “Dr. Callahan! I was just thinking about stopping in to see you. It’s about the baby.”

      A faraway look came into the elderly man’s gray eyes. The first baby he had ever delivered scared the bejeesus out of him. Not because of the blood and the bruised and swollen flesh—he’d seen plenty of that in medical school—but because then, in his twenty-third year, he saw clearly what loving someone meant. A woman bravely—and sometimes not so bravely, he learned as he grew older—endured the agony of labor, risked her life to present her husband with a gift more costly, more treasured than anything on God’s earth. His own sister, his niece Ellen’s mother, had died bearing a child. James had never forgotten it.

      “Nothing wrong with the baby, I hope?”

      Mrs. Kirkland dimpled. “Far from it. Thad is thriving. Actually, it’s my husband I am concerned about. He seems…different since the birth.”

      James understood instantly. A man hearing his wife’s screams of agony for a day and half the night, a man who didn’t stumble out to the barn and shoot himself, was changed forever by the experience. Sometimes James thought that’s what had started his sister’s husband with the drink. Ellen’s father had let spirits destroy his life. It had almost destroyed her, as well.

      “I wouldn’t worry, Mrs. Kirkland. Husbands often feel pretty shaken by birth, just as much as the new mother. Maybe he’s just realizing how precious you are to him.”

      Mrs. Kirkland seized his free hand. “Oh, thank you, Dr. Callahan. I think you are such a very wise man!” She squeezed his hand and pivoted away into Svensen’s Mercantile.

      Wise my ass. The love between a husband and wife had astounded him back then. He knew that no woman would ever feel that way about him. He’d always been painfully shy, and awkward around women. Different. Most men would rather play poker than spend their evenings reading Byron.

      Twenty-five years ago he’d been a callow tenderfoot fresh out from the East, practicing his first year of medicine and dumb as an ox when it came to talking to a female without a stethoscope in his hand.

      He had known this about himself for more than two decades. No sane woman would love him, would suffer and sacrifice for him the way he saw the wives of Willow Flat do for their men. All his life he’d been too awed by women to ever speak to one in anything other than a professional situation. Now he was forty-eight years old.

      But Lord knew if a man never said good-morning to a lady, that man never got invited to afternoon tea. He got plenty of invites to down a slug or two of red-eye at the Wagon Wheel Saloon, but lately he felt a nagging hunger for something more. Something soft that smelled good. That smelled like lavender.

      He’d waited all these years for Iona Everett, and time was growing short. If he didn’t do something about it damn quick, he’d die a bachelor.

      Near noon, Ellen heard Mr. Flint tramp up the stairs to her