In a Stranger's Arms (24 page)

Flames crackled and a pall of smoke hung in the air, haunting Caddie with images of that harrowing night Richmond had burned. At least the fire had not yet spread from the nearby trees to the piled lumber or the buildings. It would only take one shift of the fickle wind to change that.

“More buckets!” Bobbie Stevens lurched toward Caddie and relieved her of her burden. “Bless your quick thinking, ma’am.”

She peered around through the haze of smoke, but saw no sign of Manning. “How can I help?”

“Go fetch Doc Mercer. We don’t need him yet, but we may before this is over.”

Part of Caddie longed to put as much distance as possible between her and the fire that stirred so many terrifying memories. Yet something inside her recoiled from the prospect of leaving when she might finally help Manning. A token repayment for all the help he’d given her since coming to Sabbath Hollow.

She slid from the gelding’s back, fanning the smoke away from her face. “Doc Mercer isn’t likely to come on my say-so. Alice, can you ride?”

The girl nodded.

Caddie handed her the horse’s reins. “Then go into town and fetch the doctor. After that, could you stop at Sabbath Hollow and make sure Dora and the children are all right?”

Alice glanced at Bobbie, who nodded.

As the girl rode off, Bobbie handed Caddie back the last of her pails. “Fetch water from the millpond and wet down anything that looks likely to bum.” He glanced up at the sky. “And pray those clouds do something more than hang there looking black.”

It took over an hour for the storm clouds to carry out their threat. Once they made up their minds, however, the rain quickly gathered momentum.

With her aching arms as limp as a couple of wet rags, Caddie blessed every drop of water from heaven. Even when they sent sodden locks of hair straggling over her forehead, and cold droplets slithered down her back.

The business was safe...for now, at least.

“Looks like we can stand down, folks,” someone called.

Caddie and the others staggered from the millpond back to the yard. Two horses, one of them Manning’s, stood hitched to a post near the wood shop. Dr. Mercer’s resonant tones carried from inside. He must have commandeered the place for a makeshift surgery, she decided, mildly surprised that the doctor had heeded their summons.

After confirming with Alice Gordon that all was well with the children, Caddie once again looked around for Manning. She hadn’t laid eyes on him since he’d dashed out of the house. A fresh chill snaked down her spine, and this time the rain was not to blame.

She caught the eye of Joe McGrath—at least that’s who she thought it was beneath the soot “Have you seen Mr. Forbes?”

The boy bobbed his head and pointed toward the woods. “Saw him head that way with an ax a while ago, ma’am.”

“An ax? Are you sure?”

“Yes, ma’am. Reckoned he was fixing to cut a firebreak. Keep it from coining back this way if the wind shifted.” Joe squinted at something over Caddie’s shoulder. “Reckon that might be him coming now, ma’am.”

Caddie spun around.

It was him, all right. His shoulders bowed with exhaustion. A layer of soot on his face so dark the whites of his eyes seemed to glow in contrast. Hair bristling like broom corn. Not since her return from Richmond to find the plantation house still standing had Caddie beheld a more welcome sight.

Forgetting the harsh words they’d exchanged such a short time ago and the lack of enthusiasm with which he’d greeted her last embrace, she launched herself at him.

“Manning, thank God you’re all right!” Circling his neck with her arms, she drew his face down to hers. At the last instant, mindful of the young folks who might be watching, she kissed him on the cheek instead of on the mouth. A faint bristle of whiskers rasped her lips and she tasted smoke, seasoned with sweat.

She couldn’t begin to make sense of the outlandish patchwork of feelings this man provoked in her, so much of it hopelessly tangled with her unresolved feelings for Del. Only one thing she knew for certain. Every time she faced the threat of losing him from her life, it frightened and grieved her as the loss of her first husband never had.

Manning accepted her embrace passively. The poor man was probably too tired to raise his arms.

“Let’s go home, wash up and get something to eat.” She reached for his hand.

A sharp cry broke from his lips.

“Manning?” She turned his hand palm-up. “Dear Lord!”

The sight of raw, burned flesh made her gorge rise. She examined his other hand and found it almost as bad.

“Doctor! Somebody get Doc Mercer. My husband’s hurt.”

What if the doctor refused to treat him? Doc Mercer hadn’t made any secret of his contempt for her new husband and his outrage over their hasty marriage. She hadn’t done much to win him over, sassing him that day at Gordon Manor. If it would persuade him to use his medical skills on Manning now, she’d beg Doc Mercer’s pardon on her knees.

“What have we got here?” The doctor emerged from the wood shop and strode toward them.

“My husband’s burned his hands while fighting the fire.”

“Let’s have a look then.” The doctor’s tone sounded brusque, but he examined Manning’s scorched palms with an uncommonly gentle touch.

Manning kept his mouth tightly clamped and his strangely vacant gaze averted from his injuries. Caddie’s own palms tingled with a faint echo of the pain he must be suffering.

“Could be worse,” pronounced the doctor. “I can clean and bandage them. Apply some salve. They’re going to hurt like hell for a while, though, worse than if the burn had been deeper. Let’s get this man back to Sabbath Hollow, where I’ll have better light to work and a dry roof over my head.”

Caddie nodded, and after a brief exchange with Bobbie, she and Manning squeezed onto his wagon with Jeff, Alice and the others for a ride home, while Joe McGrath rode Manning’s horse.

As they drove off, the weathered shingles of the buildings faded into the gray downpour. In the distance, charred tree trunks spiked the air like the jagged black tines of the devil’s own pitchfork. Reminding them how close they’d come to losing their precarious foothold on the future.

To Manning, it felt as if that short wagon ride back to Sabbath Hollow would never end. The rest of his body might have turned to stone for all the sensation he felt in it. Only his hands were alive, quivering with pain beyond anything he’d ever known. It took every scrap of will to keep from crying out.

In a futile effort to distract himself, he thought about Caddie throwing her arms around his neck and kissing him. For a magical instant he’d forgotten he had hands... or feet, or most anything but a heart. Then she’d clutched his hand, firing the pain to a whole new level of intensity.

Perhaps he should have expected that. From the moment he’d met Caddie, she had lofted him to heaven one minute, then hurled him to hell the next. Not that she meant to most of the time, he conceded, his sense of fairness rising to the fore. She no more guessed his feelings for her than she’d known his hand was burned when she grasped it. That was just the way Manning planned to keep it.

He was vaguely aware of the wagon pulling up outside the plantation house and Caddie ushering him into the kitchen. After checking with Miss Gordon that the children were safely tucked in bed, Caddie sent the girl to catch a ride home with the others.

Collapsing onto a chair, Manning sprawled forward with his arms stretched out on the table before him. He heard the doctor murmur something to Caddie about warm water and a clean cloth. The next thing he knew fresh barbs of pain raked his right palm.

Roaring the foulest curse he could think of, Manning tried to wrench his hand back. The leathery old physician held on with a strength of grip that surprised him.

“Go ahead and yell, Yankee,” said the doctor. “Lord above knows you’ve got good cause. I’m sorry I have to do this, but there’s no help for it.”

“Don’t want to wake up the children,” Manning muttered through clenched teeth. Then a blanket settled over his shoulders and he heard Caddie’s voice just behind him. “Do you have anything you can give him for the pain, Dr. Mercer?”

“Laudanum’s too dear these days,” the doctor grunted, “but I have a flask of whiskey in my bag that you’re welcome to. Wish I’d thought of it sooner. It’s home brew and mighty strong, so don’t go giving him too much.” Manning could hardly remember the last time he’d tasted whiskey. It was long before coming to Sabbath Hollow, which now seemed like a whole other lifetime.

When he smelled the reek of raw spirits, he pursed his lips, eager for anything that might numb him. The first swallow burned all the way down, as though it had been distilled from hot coals.

He gasped and choked, then begged, “More.”

The second drink went down a little easier than the first. The third easier still. By the time Dr. Mercer had cleaned and bandaged his hands, Manning had taken several more swigs. His hands still pained, but he felt as if the sensation was reaching him from a long distance away.

He even thanked the man for putting him through hell. “Don’t mention it, Forbes.” Dr. Mercer spoke with a kind of gruff camaraderie. “I’ve often thought I’d like to be paid to torture a Yankee. Get some rest, you hear?” Manning lolled back in his chair as a lazy warmth kindled in his belly. He heard Caddie’s anxious tone as she asked the doctor what she could do.

“Anything that might take his mind off the pain. Even with the whiskey, I doubt he’ll get much sleep tonight. Keep the wounds good and clean. Change the bandages as often as he’ll let you. Call me if you see any sign of infection. Fortunate nobody else was hurt. Any notion how that fire got started?”

“I have more than a notion.” The cold rage in Caddie’s voice sent an answering chill down Manning’s back. “And I expect you do, too, Doctor. I’ve got plenty of witnesses who heard my brother-in-law going on about how sawmills and fire don’t mix, flicking his cigar ashes around.”

“Be careful about pointing fingers, child,” advised the doctor. “Lon may talk big, but he’d never do worse than talk.”

“Talk all the neighbors into turning against us,” Caddie fumed. “Talk the tax collector into coming after us. Maybe Lon just talked somebody into setting a little fire near the mill.”

Perhaps it was just his whiskey-addled brain, but that didn’t make sense to Manning. Lon had been given his share of the family silver—why should he continue to cause trouble for them?

Manning puzzled over it as Caddie and the doctor moved out of earshot and a door opened and closed in the distance.

“Is that whiskey doing you any good?” Caddie asked when she returned to the kitchen. She sounded hesitant—almost timid.

Manning raised his heavy eyelids and peered at her. The steady downpour on their drive from the mill had washed the soot from her face. She looked cold, wet tired, bedraggled and so beautiful he could hardly stand it.

He tried to remember why he was supposed to fight the desire she kindled in him. The reason wafted just beyond the reach of his suddenly sluggish mind, dancing like a windblown scrap of paper. A letter, the writing of which he could no longer decipher...

When Caddie’s fine aristocratic brows drew together in a look of concern, he realized she was waiting for an answer to her question. What had the question been? Oh yes—about the whiskey and whether it had dulled his pain.

“Some.” His tongue felt thick and awkward, as if it, too, had been blunted by the whiskey. “My hands still hurt, but I don’t care so much.”

“In that case I reckon you’d better get out of those wet clothes and into a warm bed.”

Yes sir, Doc Mercer’s potent moonshine had managed to dull his pain, his memory and his reflexes—everything but his desire. That it had sharpened like a knife on a whetstone.

“There’s only one way I’ll be able to shuck these clothes.” Manning lifted his bandaged hands. A slow, befuddled smile spread across his face. “That’s if you take them off me.”

Chapter Fifteen

T
AKE HIS CLOTHES
off? The notion nearly toppled Caddie onto her backside.

She’d never so much as unfastened one of Del’s collar buttons. Not even when... Her tinder-dry mouth suddenly watered and a mellow heat shimmered between her legs.

Hadn’t she been hoping for a chance to consummate this marriage, if only Manning would cooperate? His drowsy, teasing grin and the improbable gleam of admiration in his eyes told her he’d be more than cooperative tonight.

Now that this golden opportunity had presented itself, a host of doubts tempered Caddie’s eagerness. What did she know about seducing a man, after all? What if he woke tomorrow morning angry with her for taking advantage of his drunken state?

She sucked in a deep breath and squared her shoulders. “Let’s worry about getting you upstairs to your bed before we bother about clothes. With that much home brew in your belly, you won’t likely be too steady on your feet. Can you stand up?”

Manning tried. He got halfway to his feet before collapsing back onto the chair like Varina’s new stuffed doll.

“Guess I’m going to need a little help with that, too.” He sounded cheerfully resigned to the prospect.