Marry Me. Jo Goodman

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СКАЧАТЬ leave it until later,” he said, getting to his feet. “I’d like to begin my examination.”

      Cole accepted Rhyne’s permission as the absence of an objection. He took the thermometer out of the bag. “May I open your shirt? I want to take your temperature.” At her faint nod, he unfastened the first two buttons, slipped the material over her shoulder, and placed the thermometer under her arm. “It will take some time.” He withdrew his stethoscope. “Your heart now.”

      “I thought you observed it was fine.”

      “This just makes me thorough.”

      “I liked observation better.”

      “Liar.” Cole placed the bell over her heart and listened. “Now your lungs.” He helped her on her side. “Can you cough for me?” She did, but it was painful and caused her to draw up her knees. “That’s enough. Just breathe in and out, deeply and slowly. Good. Like that.” He eased her onto her back. “I want to see the welts.” He saw her tense and waited it out before he folded down the sheet. “Do you want to lift your shirt or shall I?”

      It gave Rhyne some small comfort that he asked. “I’ll do it.” Closing her eyes, she scrabbled at the fabric with her fingers until the flat of her abdomen was exposed.

      “I’m going to swab them with a tincture of mercury and salicylate that I asked Chet Caldwell at the pharmacy to prepare for me when I came to Reidsville. It will be wet and a little cold.” He prepared a cotton pad with the tincture and swept it lightly over each of her wales. She shivered slightly but otherwise didn’t move. “I have to remove the wadding between your legs.” He did this quickly, examining it for blood. There was very little evidence that she’d bled after the last change, but he replaced it with a clean cotton cloth anyway. “I think we can put you in a pair of drawers now.”

      Rhyne nodded. She kept her eyes closed and threw up barriers one after another to keep humiliation from tearing out her soul.

      “I have a pair here,” Cole said. “I found them in a trunk in the root cellar. I aired them out on the back stoop.”

      “Just my regular drawers,” she said.

      “You only have a union suit,” he said, lifting one of her legs. “I don’t want to cut another one off of you if there are complications.”

      She didn’t ask about complications. She didn’t speak at all, accepting this was another argument she had no strength for. Although she had never had a doll, she knew what they were and how young girls cared for them. Now she allowed herself to be cared for in exactly that manner, lying back without dignity or complaint, dressed in lace-trimmed undergarments that made her feel extraordinarily vulnerable.

      Rhyne imagined she should have felt some relief when he finally pushed them over her hips and drew the strings taut at her waist, but she only felt exposed, more naked now than when she’d had nothing on.

      “Are you all right? Have I pulled them too tight?”

      She batted his hand away then laid her forearm over her eyes. The thermometer slipped under the sleeve of her shirt, and she had to lie still while he probed under the chambray.

      Cole read the thermometer. “Almost returned to normal.”

      If only that were true, Rhyne thought. She tugged on her shirt, fixing it over her shoulder and smoothing the fabric across her belly. She allowed Cole to pull the sheet over her, mostly because she couldn’t stop him from helping her. She wanted to wail.

      “When are you going to let me get up and get on with my business?”

      “Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”

      “I can’t stay in bed all day.”

      “If you get up now you won’t be able to stay out of it for the next three days.” It was an exaggeration but not much of one. “You need to rest. You’re strong, healthy, there’s no reason you can’t move around tomorrow. Nothing strenuous, though.”

      She lifted her forearm and glared at him.

      “Will’s sending out someone to help with the place.”

      “Who?”

      “Johnny Winslow was his first choice. Ned Beaumont was the runner-up.”

      Rhyne groaned. “Not Ned. He’ll get half the work done in twice the time. I can’t afford him.”

      “Then hope that Johnny shows up.”

      Rhyne supposed that was all she could do. “You’re not going to sit in here all day, are you?”

      Cole shook his head. “Not if you tell me what’s to be done.”

      “I meant that you could go in the other room, maybe get some sleep. You look haggard.”

      Remembering Will’s comment about Rhyne finding no favor in his fine patrician looks, Cole’s mouth twisted in a wry smile as he bent to retrieve his notebook and pencil. He recorded Rhyne’s temperature and then turned the page. “Give me your chore list,” he said. “First to last.”

      Rhyne found that obeying the doctor’s edicts was downright disagreeable, but she didn’t really doubt that he understood her limits better than she did. She only had to recall how she’d slept the morning away after giving him the list. Cole Monroe had been forced to shake her awake when he brought her lunch: more bread and broth, and to prove that he wasn’t trying to starve her, a soft-cooked egg.

      Lying in bed, she could hear him chopping wood. Try as she might, there was no angle from the bed that allowed her to see more than limber pine and blue sky through the window. Rhyne took her sense of his activity by listening to it. He didn’t know how to swing an ax or efficiently set and stack the wood. She found herself holding her breath at times, quite literally waiting for the ax to fall. Sometimes the wood would split; sometimes Dr. Monroe would swear. He couldn’t find his rhythm, so he did a great deal of swearing.

      Rhyne didn’t mind the swearing. It made him ordinary in a comfortable sort of way, reminded her that he was flesh and blood and bone. He hadn’t seemed so regular the first time she’d had him in her rifle sight. On that occasion, coming through the trees on horseback, he’d put her in mind of a warrior king. She’d only seen drawings of men like Alexander, Charlemagne, and Marc Antony in her father’s books, but Cole Monroe was one of their ilk: proud, straight, and tall, with features struck from marble with tools only the gods could have used.

      She’d pulled her shot on purpose, sending it just wide of his perfectly cast ear. Rhyne recalled that he hadn’t been able to stay in the seat of his startled mount, but perhaps not even warrior kings could manage a beast like Becken. The stallion was known to be the most powerful–and the most skittish–animal in Joe Redmond’s livery, and Rhyne believed Joe had sense enough not to send Becken out with a greenhorn. If nothing else, respect for the horse should have stopped him.

      Rhyne knew now that by giving Joe the benefit of the doubt, she’d allowed herself to set Cole Monroe firmly in the pages of Judah’s history books. There was comfort in that, too, or at least there was safety. If he wasn’t real, then neither was the danger.

      It had been foolish, she supposed, to believe the doctor wouldn’t come calling again. If she’d known СКАЧАТЬ