Lost in Your Arms

by Christina Dodd

  She sat down on the windowsill, crossed her arms, and gazed at him.

  He might not remember being married before, but he knew a few things about handling a woman. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That fall was stupid, and my fault.”

  She fingered her braid.

  He tried again. “You’ve made me feel well so quickly, I was overconfident.”

  Sighing, she stood and walked to the pitcher.

  “Please, may I have water?” he asked.

  She turned on him so quickly that she almost burned the floorboards. “Is that so hard to ask? ‘Please, Enid, bring me water.’ ‘Water, Enid, water.’ Even, ‘Get up and get me water, woman.’ I might not like it when you’re a rude barbarian, but I don’t ever refuse you anything, do I? Do I?”

  The return of her fury caught him by surprise, and he used his most reassuring tone. “You are everything a man could want in a wife.”

  “No, I’m not. You always made sure I knew that. But I’m a wonderful nurse.” Stalking toward him, she handed him the water. “Here.”

  He took a sip, then, when he noticed how forbiddingly she stared, he hastily swallowed the rest of it.

  “Are you hurt?” she asked in a more reasonable tone of voice.

  “Bruised,” he admitted. “Nothing serious.”

  She took the glass and filled it again. “Are you hungry?”

  “Please, may I have bread?”

  She must have anticipated his request, for she removed the towel from a loaf on the table, tore off a small piece, and presented it to him.

  He considered the golden crust. “I never thought you’d let me have bread. You told me I could only have broth and vegetables.”

  She reached for the bread.

  He held it out of reach. “But I’ll keep it.”

  “Take small bites,” she advised, then she knelt to pick up the pieces of shattered crockery.

  Prickles of discomfort ran up his spine. He didn’t like to see her on her knees, cleaning up after him. It made him feel . . . uncomfortable. “Call a servant to do that.”

  “They’re asleep.” She sounded brisk and unaffected as she bent her head to her task. “Besides, I’ve done worse jobs.”

  The bread tasted yeasty, rich, and so wonderful that he wanted to stuff the whole thing in his mouth. Curiosity stopped him. He had questions he wanted to ask. “Jobs like being a governess?” he inquired.

  “I’ve never been a governess.”

  “But you said you worked for the Distinguished Academy of Governesses.”

  “No, I said Lady Bucknell found me my last position.” She tossed the big pieces of the washbowl in the dustbin and fetched the broom from the corner. “I’m a nurse.”

  He was a proud man. He knew he was. Yet he had allowed his wife to become estranged from him? And that woman had been forced to toil for her living among strangers? As a nurse? Nurses were little better than prostitutes.

  Enid must have read his mind, for she stopped sweeping and asked, “Would you rather I’d had a man support me?”

  “No.” He looked at Enid. Slim, straight, with a clear gaze. She didn’t look as if she’d ever been touched by a man. She certainly didn’t look as if she’d ever been touched by the filth of a sickroom. He didn’t believe she had worked as a nurse. He didn’t believe he had allowed such a thing.

  Yet . . . yet she exuded scorn, resentment, distrust—of him. Surely no female could simulate such intensity.

  “You cared for . . . people. Who?”

  “The ill.” She knew what he was asking, and she taunted him with too little information.

  “Men?”

  “Yes.”

  He wanted to shout at her. Instead, he coaxed, “Enid, talk to me.”

  Leaning against the broom, she sighed and yielded. “I stopped caring for gentlemen. Even the most elderly would bring themselves back from the brink of death to offer me a position as their mistress.”

  He hated this. He could feel the fury coiling in his belly, but his fury was for the circumstances that stood between them, for his loss of memory, for his helplessness in her resentment. He didn’t want to hear, and at the same time he needed to understand. “How did you come to be a . . . a nurse?”

  “There was a doctor in the village where we lived for awhile.”

  “Where you and I lived?”

  “Yes.” She swept beneath the bed, beneath the nightstand, chasing pottery into every corner.

  “A village in Scotland?”

  “No, in Little Bidewell north of York.”

  “Why was I living in England?”

  “You probably got thrown out of Scotland.” She used the dustpan to collect the shards. “We’re going to find bits and pieces on this floor for months.”

  “Enid.” Silently, he demanded she tell him all.

  “You aren’t going to like this,” she warned him, and she seemed to regret having to tell him. “You were an adventurer. A gambler. You moved about a great deal. We would live somewhere for perhaps two weeks, and then you would have worn out our welcome by beating the constable in cards or wagering the innkeeper out of his best silver. So we’d be off again.”

  “I can’t give credence to this.” If Enid were to be believed, he was the kind of man he despised. And yet . . . yet, he couldn’t not believe her. He didn’t know about himself. He didn’t remember any of his past. And more than that, through the last few days of care and dissention, he’d grown to trust her.

  A glow radiated from her like the clearest of candles. She did her duty without self-pity, cleaning up the broken bowl and replacing the dustpan and broom, feeding him at any hour, answering him smartly, her astringent replies like the slap of a crashing North Sea wave. She made him think, she made him feel, she made him want. He wanted to warm his hands on her, hold her against him until she filled him with her light—and he filled her with himself.

  “Since you’ve come awake,” she said, “I’ve thought that you have changed.”

  There had to be a reason that she so uncompromisingly disdained his former self. He could not be so wrong.

  Staring at her, he saw a handsome female clad in a worn pink robe, beautiful in her intelligence and the force of her personality. The kind of female who would look on a situation, decide how it was, and stick to her opinion regardless of how mulishly wrong she was. That had to explain this discrepancy between who he was and who she recalled. She saw their relationship through the eyes of uncompromising youth, and what she remembered could not be the truth.

  Yes, that had to be it. When his memory returned, he would discover their marriage had been a series of youthful errors, that for her, time had altered the facts, and that with the maturity of their years, they could mend old mistakes.

  Her next words jerked his attention back to her. “I treasure the hope that in the years we’ve been separated, you reconciled with your family. You always said they weren’t important to you, but your defiance of them guided your every action.”

  “I was at odds with my family?” He would have sworn he was the most dedicated of family men. Probably she was wrong about that, too.

  “That’s why you wed me. I was not the bride the MacLeans would have chosen.” Her mouth curled in a bitter smile as she put the broom and dustpan away. “Your cousin, the laird of the MacLeans, was much opposed to our marriage.”

  “I had a cousin.” His memory of the girl on the rock flashed into his mind once more, and he asked craftily, “Anyone else? Mother, father, sister?”

  “A mother, but you dismissed her without interest. You spoke only of Kiernan. Kiernan was a stick. Kiernan thought he was so smart. You’d show Kiernan. You ate yourself alive with envy of Kiernan.”

  “Kiernan.” He sat up slowly. The name rang a bell in his mind. “I remember him.”

  She hurried to his side, and her voice sharpened with hope. “Do you?”

  “No. I mean . . . I recall the name, or something.” He tried; he tried so hard, straining as he rea
ched for the memory, but he couldn’t quite grasp it. Kiernan, like everyone and everything else, hovered out of reach in the mists of his mind.

  Exhausted from the effort, he collapsed back on the pillows. “He’s not there.”

  Her forehead puckered. “Do you want us to let him know you’re alive? I’m sure your family must be worried.”

  “It doesn’t sound as if they would be.” Perhaps he was cruel to so dismiss the clan which had given him being, but he wouldn’t go and face strangers he didn’t remember, or try to justify an existence spent in dissipation . . . if indeed he had so lived that life. “So tell me about this doctor. The one who taught you your profession.”

  “Dr. Gerritson was in his seventies, and he had lived in Little Bidewell his whole life, curing everything he could, human and animal. I stayed with him. I helped him treat his patients and learned everything he could teach me.”

  Catching the end of her braid, MacLean brought her closer to his bedside. “What have you done since then?”

  “I’ve cared for the elderly, mostly, and the very ill.”

  He tangled his finger in the braid, marveling at its silky texture.

  “For the last three years, I’ve lived with Lady Halifax as her nurse-companion.”

  Enid had been living with a female. “Is she a dear old thing?”

  “I would say not. She is disagreeable, querulous, demanding, and difficult. Also intelligent, discerning, fair, and the best of women. I admire her very much.”

  “Did she send the letter you received?”

  “Indeed.”

  He relaxed about one thing, at least.

  “But she’s very ill. She can’t write anymore, but she dictates to the new nurse.” Enid looked down at her interlocked hands. “I left her to come to you.”

  Her expressionless voice expressed better than anything else her obdurate resentment. Tightening his grip on her braid, he said, “You would rather care for an elderly woman than for me. You would rather clean up after the ill and hold a dying person’s hand than live with me. No matter how disgraceful my morals, how could you have left me for such an existence?”

  “You misunderstand. I didn’t leave you.” Stepping away from him, she yanked her hair free of him. “You abandoned me.”

  Chapter 11

  “Ma’am, do you know what worm is eating at his gut?” Mrs. Brown watched from the rocking chair as MacLean pulled himself up on the bar over his bed for the dozenth time that morning. “He’s working himself night and day building those muscles of his, like if he doesn’t something bad’s going to happen.”

  “I suppose he wants to be able to get up and walk again.” Enid folded the towels in preparation for MacLean’s bath. For the last three weeks, he had bathed every day—after his exercises. “Ever since he fell, he’s been resolved that he’ll get on his feet.”

  Mrs. Brown glanced sideways at Enid. “Ye’re going to have to let him sooner or later, ye know.”

  “I know.” Enid weighed the linen in her hand. “I’m worried about that compound fracture. I’ve never cared for one before, but old Dr. Gerritson had, and he said the patient should just be shot, like a horse, to save trouble. I don’t want MacLean to die.”

  “Not after the trouble we’ve had bringing him this far.” Mrs. Brown threaded her needle with silky white thread and set to work on a fragile bit of froth trimming a little girl’s petticoat. “But if he was going to die, he would have already passed on, and knowing that man and his determination, there wouldn’t have been a thing we could do about it.”

  “You’re right. I agree.” But that didn’t ease Enid’s mind. At night when she lay wakeful, she found herself imagining the worst: MacLean collapsing in agony, MacLean’s leg swelling from a blood clot, MacLean’s mind slipping away again. All absurd conjecture; she knew it, yet fruitlessly she chased phantoms of ill fortune through her dreams.

  Without paying the women a bit of heed, MacLean lifted the iron weights Mr. Throckmorton had provided for him. Next he would work his legs, lifting them, flexing them, ignoring the compound fracture as if it had never been. Relentlessly he rebuilt his body as if he had a meeting with fate—as perhaps he did.

  “He’s looking better,” Mrs. Brown said. “Filling out nicely.”

  An understatement. As the iron weights rose above his head again and again, the muscles in his shoulders and arms bunched and relaxed.

  “Of course, as much as he’s eating, he should be filling out,” Mrs. Brown added.

  Long, smooth, taut muscles had developed on his massive bones and changed him from a skeleton into a living, breathing, Greek god. And Enid had been on her own for too long if she compared Stephen MacLean with Apollo for any other reason except dissipation.

  “He should wear a shirt,” Enid fretted.

  Mrs. Brown looked him over. “Why? It’s not often a woman my age gets to pleasure her eyes with such a sight.”

  Shocked by the older woman’s frank appraisal—women her age weren’t supposed to be looking at men—Enid exclaimed, “Mrs. Brown!”

  “A woman would have to be blind or dead not to appreciate him.” Mrs. Brown chuckled. “I suppose that’s why ye’re wanting him to clothe himself, though. He’s scarcely speaking to ye, so I suppose ye’re not sharing his bed.”

  “That is not any of your business,” Enid said loftily.

  “No, then,” Mrs. Brown decided. “I thought not. Ye’d both be a lot easier to be around if ye were dancing the bedtime minuet.”

  Enid didn’t need a confidante, nor did she need an advisor. She was perfectly capable of managing her life without help from anyone.

  Of course, she would have liked to tell someone MacLean’s real problem, and see whether or not they thought he would ever forgive her. For it was she who had set off this frenzy of muscle-building. She had told him who he had been, and he hadn’t liked hearing about his gambling, his cheating, his wandering. He had been infuriated by her recitation of his crimes. And when she had said he’d abandoned her he had called her a fraud. An imposter. A hypocrite.

  She’d felt sorry for the man. He’d been so obviously flummoxed by her announcement. So she had let him abuse her and hadn’t said a word, and what did she get in return? He could barely stand to gaze at her. They never held a real conversation any more.

  See if she ever tolerated one of his tantrums again.

  Worse, he worked to bring himself to the peak of fitness so he could go off and find out the truth, and confront her with it. She knew that soon he would demand to be on his feet, and despite her fears that his leg would buckle beneath him, she would let him. She was surprised he hadn’t already attempted to stand.

  But she couldn’t confide in Mrs. Brown. Not that Mrs. Brown needed an invitation to comment on the tense situation in the sickroom. Apparently the older woman considered Enid a daughter, and she heaped wisdom on Enid’s head whether Enid welcomed it or not.

  “Ye don’t know how to manage yer husband,” Mrs. Brown began.

  “I don’t want to learn.”

  “Then ye’re a fool. All women need to know how to manage their man. How else are ye going to get the big lummox to do what ye want him to?”

  “I don’t want him to do anything.” Enid felt as if she shouted into the wind.

  And Mrs. Brown sounded so quietly exasperated. “Ye’ve got to break that habit of telling falsehoods, Mrs. MacLean. It’s bad for the soul. Now I don’t know what ye told Mr. MacLean that set him into such a snit, but—”

  “I told him he was a wastrel of Olympic proportions.”

  “There. Ye see? Ye don’t have to tell him every little thing. If ye’d told him he was a prince among men, mayhap he’d act the part. Instead, ye allowed yer grudges to cause ye to blurt out every little difficulty—”

  Enid put her hands to her aching head. “You said I wasn’t to tell falsehoods, so why would I claim he was a prince among men?”

  “Telling a falsehood to your husband isn’t really a false
hood, it’s more in the line of a stretching of the truth. The Lord will forgive ye that if it’s in pursuit of yer husband’s happiness.”

  “I don’t care whether he’s happy.”

  “Of course ye do! He’s yer husband. Ye have no choice. Marriage is forever, and ye might as well settle down and make do, just like every other woman who wed.”

  Enid had never heard Mrs. Brown speak so frankly. “Is that what you did? Make do?”

  “Yes, dear. I married beneath me. As do all women.” Mrs. Brown had finished her sewing. Shaking out the petticoat, she nodded as if satisfied. “If ye don’t need me any more today, ma’am, I’ll be off to the nursery to care for Miss Penelope and Miss Kiki. With the wedding only four weeks away, they’re wild with excitement.”

  “I imagine they are.” Enid had enjoyed hearing the details of the arrangements every time Celeste had visited, and Celeste had come at least twice a week, always carrying flowers, a haircomb, and occasionally a book. Enid would have been grateful for Celeste’s thoughtfulness, except that MacLean talked to Celeste. He teased her. And Enid was tired of being ignored, tired of being envious of a friend, tired of this anxious, vaguely guilty sensation whenever she saw MacLean concentrating fiercely on recapturing his strength.

  She was, in a word, fed up, and she told Mrs. Brown, “You go ahead and tend the children. I’ll take care of Mr. MacLean.”

  “Ye sound a little frazzled.” But nothing rattled Mrs. Brown’s placidity. “Better not get too snappish with him. Ye’ll not win with that man.”

  Enid would have argued that point, but while she thought she could vanquish MacLean and his silly resentments, she knew she would never win against the powerfully practical Mrs. Brown. Folding her hands and lowering her head in mock meekness, Enid said, “I’ll read him the London newspaper.”

  “He likes that.” Mrs. Brown rolled up the petticoat and placed it in her sewing basket. “It makes the time go quickly when he exercises.”

  “How do you know?” Enid asked.

  “He told me.” Mrs. Brown prepared to descend the stairs. “You ought to talk to him sometime, dear. He’s actually quite a nice man.”