They’d been walking for half the morning, Mr. Obregon leaning against her and the horse clomping along behind.
He’d grown sullen again after their kiss, his easy manner of the previous day gone as if it had never existed. When she inquired as to his state of health, Mr. Obregon had merely muttered, “I’m fine,” and refused to elaborate.
Oh, but that kiss. That kiss had been worthy of that face of his. Her heels seemed to lift a quarter inch off the ground each time she remembered it. Thank the Lord it had been so fine—it would be the only one she’d ever receive from him.
They’d cleared up their campsite in silence, and when it was time to head off, he’d tucked her under his arm with a grim set to his face that discouraged her from speaking. He was either in pain or feeling surly. Or both.
Perhaps he was embarrassed by his admissions of yesterday. Men weren’t supposed to feel fear or shame. But he did. His story of his wounding and the aftermath had awoken her compassion. Perhaps she’d been too brusque in insisting there was nothing wrong with him.
And yet. He was getting them back to the sanatorium—she’d have never managed that on her own. If he could do that, he could get up off that bed of his and do something with himself. So why couldn’t he see that?
She reminded herself that it wasn’t her concern. If he wanted to keep paying the monthly fees and take up a bed, the doctors wouldn’t protest. And she herself would be off to the teaching hospital in Los Angeles soon if all went to plan.
Except for their kiss. That wasn’t part of the plan. If he told anyone about that, she could lose her job. That thought prompted her to break the silence between them.
“About that kiss…,” she began.
“What about it?” His voice was a breathy sort of growl, one that made her knees unsteady.
“I would appreciate it if you kept it to yourself,” she said firmly, commanding her knees to stop their foolishness. “If the doctors ever found out—”
“I’m not that kind of man.”
She twisted her head around and up to catch his expression. His face was tight, whether with pain or ill humor, she couldn’t say.
“Stop looking at me like that,” he ordered.
She turned her gaze back to the road and kept marching. Given his reaction, it seemed likely he wouldn’t tell. Perhaps he was even ashamed of what he’d done.
That thought had her staring blindly into their surroundings for a long time. She felt as if they were in some never-ending roundabout of forest, coming back to this exact stand of pines and rocks over and over again no matter how many hours they walked.
“What’s your name?” he asked out of the blue.
“My name? But you know my name.” She peeked up at him from under his arm, but his face was raised to the horizon, the sunlight streaming across her vision making it impossible to see him clearly.
“I know your title,” he said. “Nurse McCallahan. And I know what the other nurses call you. Mae.”
“Mr. Obregon,” she mock chided, “have you been eavesdropping?”
“We patients overhear as many things as the nurses do.” A pensive moment of quiet. “I kissed you, and I don’t even know your name.”
“I’d imagine with a face like yours,” she muttered, “that wouldn’t be a hard thing to achieve.”
“Nurse McCallahan.” Now it was his turn to mock chide. “Never tell me you’ve been mooning over my face when you ought to have been thinking of me solely as a patient?”
The heat in her face was no longer simply due to the sun beating down on it. “Mary Margaret,” she said. “Mary Margaret McCallahan.”
A perfectly ordinary name for a more than ordinary woman. There’d been thousands of Mary Margarets in the slums of New York. Perhaps even hundreds of Mary Margaret McCallahans. She wasn’t even the first Mary Margaret her mother had given birth to—there was an earlier Mary Margaret in the family Bible, gone before she’d even reached a year.
“Mary Margaret.” He tested the name, drawing it out. She could hear it rolling around his tongue. “I prefer Mae. It suits you better.”
“Because it’s short and so am I?”
“It’s efficient, yet lovely. Just like you.”
Oh, that was good. She’d never seen even a hint of such charm in him. Not that he could charm her once they were back at the sanatorium. Not that he ought to be doing it now. “You know you can’t use that name once we’ve returned.”
“Of course.” The charm was gone. “You already know my given name, but I’m going to tell you it properly. Since we’ve kissed and shared a bed.” He paused. “Joaquín Julián Obregon López.”
“I don’t pronounce it anything like that.” She didn’t know if her lips could ever reproduce the lilt and twist he’d turned his name into. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you speak Spanish, not even with your family.”
“We prefer English in public.”
Sad that he’d been in that room for a year and he and his family considered it being in public.
“Joaquin.” She tried it, much as he’d tried her name.
“Very good for your first attempt. But of course, you can’t use that name once we’ve returned.”
Was he teasing her? He must have been. Dr. Robinson was correct—the rest cure had worked miracles with him.
“But we haven’t returned yet. Joaquin.” She could tease a bit herself.
“No, we haven’t. Mae.”
She ducked her head so that he couldn’t catch her smile. They continued on in a pleased kind of silence and for a while. Mae didn’t care that everything looked the same, that it seemed as if they were on an infinite loop to nowhere.
Until suddenly it wasn’t all the same. Until there was a speck ahead of them on the road, a speck that grew into Dr. Young and the wagon.
The good doctor’s pleasant face was aglow with his smile as he drove up to meet them. Mae didn’t think that anything was so beautiful to her as Dr. Young’s face right now. The wagon he was driving was a close second, though.
“I found you!” he called. “Everyone in good shape? No injuries?”
She glanced at Joaquin—no, Mr. Obregon—expecting him to answer. But he only stared at the doctor. So she answered instead. “We’re quite all right. Shiney disappeared with the other horse.” She frowned. “I’m still not sure why.”
Dr. Young’s smile twisted. “We had a visit from the sheriff while you were gone. It seems that Shiney is wanted for robbery. We set off to find you, but we came across him and the horse first. He must have seen this as a chance to escape, but he didn’t get far.” His face turned admiring and disbelieving all at once. “Did you two walk all this way from the lake?”
“We did,” Mr. Obregon said, an edge to his voice daring the doctor to say anything more.
Dr. Young’s expression went puzzled for a moment before he climbed down from the wagon, moving toward Mae. “Well, let’s get you both home. You must be exhausted and hungry after your ordeal.” He offered his arm to Mae. “May I help you into the wagon?”
To her surprise, Mr. Obregon put himself between her and the doctor, his height effectively blocking Dr. Young from her view. “I will help her in. Unless you think I’m unable?”
She peered around him to catch the doctor’s expression of shock. “No one said you weren’t,” she said with a reproving glance. But she took Mr. Obregon’s arm anyway. For some queer reason, she didn’t think she could do anything but.
Mr. Obregon handed her into the wagon well enough, but his own climb wasn’t near as graceful.
“Does your wound ache?” she inquired, thinking to help him if she could.
The look he sent her from those dark eyes was hot enough to scorch. “No.”
She swallowed hard, feeling a heated flutter move within her at that intense gaze. The flutter grew stronger as she recalled their kiss by the fire.
Throughout the entire drive back to the sanatorium, a simmering mix of unease and fascination forced her to keep stealing glances at him while he stared resolutely ahead.
It was all much as Joaquin remembered it. His room, the dining room, the reading room, the sunroom—nothing at all out of place. And yet, something was altered.
Him.
He felt out of place. Something had turned within him on that trip, something that irritated and itched under his skin, something that made him want to burst out of the familiar walls.
He spent the first few days going from his room to the reading room, to the sunroom, to the garden, then back again, finding contentment nowhere. Finding Nurse McCallahan nowhere.
On the third day, he stalked down the hall to his room—or at least the fairest impression of stalking he could give. The effect was muted by the thunk-thunk of his cane hitting the floor. He’d retrieved it from the back of his wardrobe where it had sat since his parents gave it to him.
He had to admit she was right—it made walking much easier.
And where had she been? They’d been lost in the woods together, he’d kissed her, and then she just… disappeared. It was almost as if she was avoiding him.
His steps slowed. Perhaps she was.
Their kiss had been… well, he’d enjoyed it. For all that she disliked him, for all that she wasn’t the kind of woman he usually appreciated, he couldn’t stop thinking of it.
But what was one kiss? He hesitated to call it a flirtation. A flirtation might lead to infatuation, which might lead to affection, which could lead to love.
Joaquin hadn’t chosen Isabel for love. He’d chosen her as carefully as he’d chosen everything else in life—looking for the one person aligned with his ambitions, a lady who would always be a credit to his name and an ornament to his house. Hell, Isabel had chosen him for the exact same reasons.
Mae wasn’t a credit or an ornament.
She was amusing. She was needling. She was compassionate. She was brave.
He looked up at the door of his room, somehow having arrived there without realizing. He pushed it open to reveal a smartly dressed woman along with an equally well-dressed man waiting for him.
Isabel. And she’d brought the man who’d replaced him.
For all that they had entered and left their engagement as reasonable adults, a surge of something caustic rose in him. Whether it was misplaced possessiveness or jealousy that she had moved forward with life while he had not, he couldn’t say. But that didn’t lessen the acidity of it one bit.
She squeezed her hands together when she saw him, a rare show of nerves from her.
“Mr. Obregon, there you are! Tomorrow is our final day in Cabrillo, and I wanted to say good-bye before we left for San Francisco.” She fluttered a hand toward the other man. “You remember Marshal Spencer? He’s my—”
He cut her off before she could find the word husband. “I do.”
He had many memories of the marshal. He remembered him here in this very room, questioning him about the attack almost a year ago. He remembered the marshal facing down the mob, ready to die to defend the man who had done this to Joaquin. He remembered the marshal after the man had been shot by that same outlaw, insensate as he bled like a stuck pig.
But the clearest memory he had was this man on the witness stand, looking whole and hearty as he recounted his heroic efforts to bring that outlaw to justice.
Oh yes, Joaquin remembered him quite clearly. He kept his hands at his sides. “I saw the marshal at the trial. I’m sure he recalls.” His fingers curled into his palms. “I also heard all about what a hero the marshal was. The papers were full of it.”
Something rather savage sparked in the marshal’s eyes. “Perhaps I should leave you two to talk.”
“Don’t be silly,” Isabel said as she assumed her schoolmarm face, the one that had never bothered Joaquin before but was now more irritating than poison oak. “Surely you can sit together for a few minutes like civilized men.”
Strange, but when Nurse McCallahan chided him, it was so much more… charming.
Mae stuck her head through the door. “Is everything all right? I heard—” She stopped when she caught sight of Isabel. “Oh. You have visitors.”
He felt queerly glad at the sight of her, all wrapped up in her uniform and starched cap.
“Yes, everything is quite all right,” Isabel answered. “If you might fetch us some tea, please.” She turned back to Joaquin. “I heard that you were lost in the mountains with one of the nurses. How awful.”
Nurse McCallahan’s expression flattened. “I’ll just fetch it, then,” she said to the back of Isabel’s head.
“No.” Everyone turned to look at Joaquin in surprise. “She has other duties. She doesn’t have to serve us.” The thought of her stooping over to hand him a cup of tea while Isabel and this marshal looked on made his bitterness rise even higher.
“It’s quite all right,” Nurse McCallahan said. “I’m happy to do it.”
“You don’t need to—” he began.
“Mr. Obregon.” Isabel’s irritated voice brought him up short. “Let the poor girl fetch the tea.”
“Yes,” Mae said, the pause between each word a warning to him, “let me do my job.”
Marshal Spencer rose then, hat in hand, his expression solemn as an undertaker’s. “Nurse McCallahan, I never had the opportunity to thank you for your service to me that night.”
Isabel’s head whipped around, gratitude lighting her expression for half a moment before consternation followed behind. “I must thank you as well,” she said stiffly. “That night… it was so terrible, I shudder to remember it. And if not for your actions…” As her voice died, her gaze found the marshal, the adoration there making Joaquin’s belly churn.
“I was only doing my duty,” Mae said briskly, as if she saved wounded men by the hour. “But it is also my pleasure to see you looking so well, sir.”
“I thank you again,” the marshal said.
Mae nodded once. “I’ll get that tea.”
Joaquin stared after her as she hustled off.
“I visited with your mother and your sisters yesterday,” Isabel said.
He reluctantly turned to face her. He didn’t want to speak of his family, not with her and especially not in the hearing of her new husband. “How is your family?” he asked instead.
She studied him for a moment before answering. “They’re well. They send their best wishes to you.” Isabel looked at the door and tapped a finger against the watch face pinned to her bodice. “I do hope she doesn’t take long.”
Silence stretched between them as Joaquin studied this woman he’d once thought to marry. She wore a regal air, better dressed than she’d ever been when he’d courted her, the effect only slightly spoiled by her spectacles.
She was also subtly fidgeting, her discomfort visibly fighting its way out of her skin. She glanced at the marshal, a fleeting glance at best, a glance in no way met by a smile from the marshal, and yet it still calmed her. It was as if the marshal was the touchstone by which she settled herself.
Joaquin thought of Nurse McCallahan and how much he might like to see her, to have her softness next to him to help him through this awkwardness. But if she did come, it wouldn’t be to prop him up. It would be to serve the tea and disappear again.
“I’m thinking of reading the law, setting myself up as an attorney.” He wasn’t really—that had been Mae’s suggestion. But suddenly he wanted Isabel and this marshal to know that he wasn’t quite dead yet. And he might think more on the prospect of leaving once the two of them were gone.
The surprise on her face was disheartening. “Are you quite well enough?”
For a moment, he wondered what she saw when she looked at him. Only the mangled bit of flesh he’d been just after the attack? A man completely crippled by pain and suffering?
His family saw him that way, but somehow he’d expected better from Isabel. But why should he have expected that? She’d been gone for the better part of a year, and when she’d returned, here he still was, right where she’d left him. Why should she have thought him changed?
Nurse McCallahan didn’t see him that way. She thought him capable of nearly anything. She wanted him to leave, to go find his new self along with a new life. She might not like him, but she certainly believed in his potential more than anyone who had known him best before.
She pushed the door open then, gripping the loaded tray and carefully avoiding everyone’s eyes. He rose and took it from her, covering her hands with his and holding on until she looked up at him.
Those pale eyes of hers were tetchy, even as her posture suggested subservience. He smiled at her as best he could without giving either of them away to the visitors. And he promised her, silently, with only his gaze, that he would prove himself worthy of her faith.
The frustration slowly left her eyes, replaced by something else. But before it could slide into a sentiment he could name with confidence, her face closed again and she worked her hands from under his.
“Enjoy your tea,” she called as she left again.
All he could do then was to turn and serve his unwanted guests.
Isabel and her husband stared back at him, the tray heavy in Joaquin’s hands. He set it carefully on the table.
“Marshal Spencer,” he said, “might your wife and I speak alone? For only a few minutes.”
The marshal looked to Isabel, who gave him a small nod. He rose to his rather impressive height. “I’ll wait for you out front,” he said to her. “Obregon.” With a last glance at Joaquin, he was gone.
Isabel fiddled with her teacup as Joaquin settled into the seat across from her.
“I’m sorry for what happened last time,” he began. “With the bedpan. And asking you to leave.”
She kept her gaze on the cup, but her hands went still. “It was an accident. And I’m certain it was a shock, hearing the news like that. My family was certainly surprised.”
He watched her for a moment. She’d never been so generous with forgiveness before. “Are you happy, then?”
She looked up, her face lighter than he’d ever seen. “Oh yes. He—” She pressed her lips hard together as if to keep all the sentiments she felt for the marshal from spilling free. “It would have been easier had not I fallen in love with him. So much easier. But…” She gave a small shrug before her lips curved in a wry smile. “But I couldn’t help it. Neither of us could.”
“I’m glad that you’re happy.” When she gave him a glance from the corner of her eyes, he continued, “I do mean it.” Truth, that. The gnawing in his belly had eased at her obvious contentment. They had been friends, once, and a hint of the old affection remained.
“Are you really going to apprentice to a lawyer?” she asked. “Because if you are… well, then, I’m happy for you as well.”
He forced his smile a little wider. “Let’s not speak of my plans. Tell me about San Francisco. Is it as lovely as they say?”
“Oh yes.”
And he simply listened as his former fiancée told him all the details of her new life.