stick.”
“I trust you to know.” Cole pointed to the bedroom. “You go on. Say good-bye to her if she’s awake. If she asks, reassure her that she’s safe with me.”
“She won’t believe me.” Will’s quicksilver grin made his deep dimples appear. “I gotta tell you, Doc, Rhyne Abbot might just be the first female around here that doesn’t think much of your fine patrician looks.”
Rhyne felt as if she were being held underwater. Her lungs were near to bursting with the need to breathe. Panic made her want to flail and thrash; pressure from an unknown weight kept her in place. Sparks of pure white light appeared at the center of her vision, while at the periphery there was only unrelenting darkness. If she didn’t draw air, she would die. If she did, she would die. There was no real choice, only the inevitability of death.
She decided to embrace it.
Cole jerked awake. His feet slipped off the iron bed rail and thumped to the floor. He sat up straight, alert. Something had changed.
Rhyne lay exactly as she had when he fell asleep in the chair beside her. The sheet covered her to her throat; her hands remained at her side. Her stubby lashes cast no shadows to add to the violet smudges beneath her eyes. She was pale, ethereally so, her shape defined by softly draping cotton.
And she wasn’t breathing.
Jumping to his feet, Cole bent over her. He placed his cheek near her lips and laid his palm over her heart. “Rhyne!” He forced her jaw open and swept the inside of her mouth with his finger, searching for an obstruction. He could not feel anything, but his finger was wet and darkly stained when he withdrew it. Blood? The lantern light was inadequate to know with certainty, but no other cause came to mind. “Rhyne!” Turning her on her side, Cole gave her several hard blows between her shoulder blades with the heel of his hand.
She hunched her shoulders, gagged, and finally expelled the object caught in her throat.
Cole stared at the pillow. Not blood at all, he realized, but something deeply brown yet transparent, more like water in its consistency.
After a moment, it came to him. Tobacco spittle.
And lying just beyond the pillow where she had expelled it was the thing that had almost killed Runt Abbot: a black bolus of chaw.
Coleridge Braxton Monroe surrendered to both the consequences of adrenaline and the absurdity of his discovery. Slumping into his chair, he threw back his head and laughed until he was the one in danger of choking.
It was a struggle to sit up. Rhyne supported herself on her elbows and stayed there while the first wave of pain ebbed. Grimacing, she inched backward until she felt the headboard pressing against her shoulders. With the iron rails behind her, she was able to rise to a full sitting position.
Her first coherent thought was that she was late beginning her chores. She’d seen the position of the sun from Judah’s window often enough to know she should be bringing him breakfast now, not merely waking herself. She hadn’t gathered eggs or fed the chickens. The horses needed her attention. There was no fresh water in the pitcher on the washstand and no kettle heating on the stove. Normally the aroma of brewing coffee would be filling the cabin, nudging Judah awake before she arrived at his door with his tray.
She’d tasted the coffee that the sheriff and Will brewed in their office, and it wasn’t an invitation to linger. She couldn’t imagine that the prisoners got a cup that was any better. That no-account Beatty boy didn’t know what he’d taken on when he’d taken Judah in. Her father often set his mood by that first cup: bitter, black, and blistering hot.
Rhyne glanced at the empty chair at her bedside. She remembered waking once in the middle of the night and seeing the doctor sitting there, his head bent forward, his breathing slow and steady. At first she thought he was sleeping, then realized he had positioned the lantern and turned it down so that the circle of pale yellow light fell on his lap, or more precisely, on the book he had open in it. Even as she watched him, he turned the page. She considered telling him to put the book back before Judah discovered it was missing, but the recollection that it was Judah that was missing came to her before she spoke.
She fell asleep again before he turned another page, yet the memory of his hands lingered. She could see one of them folded around the book, the other lying flat over the page he wasn’t reading. His hands were broad, the fingers long with nails that were trimmed short and scrubbed clean. The whole of his hands was clean, she recalled now: the tips, the palms, the creases of his knuckles. She imagined him rubbing them together over the basin, squeezing lather from between his fingers, reciting Lady Macbeth’s best-known line, “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!” The vision of it made her lips twitch.
“Oh, you’re awake.” Cole stood in the open doorway, a tray in his hands. “May I?”
Surprised by his sudden appearance, Rhyne blinked. How had she not heard him? She couldn’t believe he’d been that quiet, so she had to suppose her reverie had been that deep. She jerked her chin at the tray and regarded him narrowly. “I don’t smell anything. What do you have there?”
“Broth and bread.” He watched her curl her lip in disapproval. “It’s what I believe you can tolerate.”
“My stomach knows better.”
Cole decided that conversation was an invitation and carried the tray in. He set it carefully on one corner of the washstand and then looked over his patient. The curl in her lip had disappeared, but her mouth was tight, suggesting she was in considerable pain. “I can give you some laudanum after you eat something.”
“I don’t want laudanum ladled down my throat. It muddies my mind.”
Cole didn’t ask about the circumstances that gave her familiarity with the opiate. Instead he said, “I’d like to examine you.”
“I’ll eat.” Rhyne held out her hands for the tray.
“I wasn’t trying to trick you into eating. I’ll still want to examine you.”
She said nothing and kept her arms extended.
Cole passed the tray and made sure she could balance it on her lap before he sat down. He propped his heels on the bed rail and folded his arms comfortably across his chest.
“You’re going to watch me eat?” she asked.
“I thought I would, yes.”
“If I had my rifle …”
“It’s under the bed on your right. Would you like me to hold the tray while you get it?”
“You’d do that?”
“If it would make you feel better.”
Rhyne wondered if she could believe him. His expression was grave, too grave perhaps to be strictly credited, and it occurred to her that he was secretly amused. It followed that she amused him, and while that didn’t agree with her, it was better than being the object of pity.
She tore off a corner of bread and pushed it into her mouth, aware that his eyes followed her movement.
