The Touch of Fire Read online

  Annie got a clean sheet and spread it over his bare torso. “That’ll keep you warm while I heat some water.”

  She had banked the fire before leaving early that morning, and the coals glowed red when she stirred them with a poker. She added kindling and more wood, then fetched water and poured it into two iron pots that hung on a hook over the fire. The little room quickly heated as the fire grew. She placed her instruments in one of the pots to boil, then scrubbed her hands with strong soap. The tiredness that had weighed on her limbs during the trudge back from Eda’s was forgotten as she considered the best treatment for her new patient.

  She noticed that her hands were shaking a little, and she stopped to draw a deep breath. Normally her thoughts would be totally concentrated on the task at hand, but something about this man unsettled her. Maybe it was his pale eyes, as colorless as frost and as watchful as a wolf’s. Or maybe it was his heat. Intellectually she knew it had to be fever, but the intense heat of his tall, muscular body seemed to wrap around her like a blanket every time she got close to him. Whatever the reason, her stomach had clenched into a tight knot when he’d pulled off his shirt and bared his powerful torso. Annie was accustomed to seeing men in various stages of undress, but never before had she been so acutely aware of a man’s body, of the maleness that threatened her own femaleness on a very primitive level. The curly black hair on his broad, muscled chest had strongly reminded her that man’s basic nature was animalistic.

  Yet he had done nothing, said nothing, that was threatening. All of it was in her own mind, perhaps a product of her fatigue. The man was wounded and had come to her for help.

  She stepped back behind the curtain. “I’ll mix you some laudanum to ease the pain.”

  He pinned her with that pale, icy gaze. “No.”

  She hesitated. “The treatment will be painful, Mister—?”

  He ignored the raised inflection that invited him to tell her his name. “I don’t want any laudanum. You have any whiskey?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’ll do.”

  “It won’t be enough, unless you drink yourself to unconsciousness, in which case it will be easier to simply take the laudanum.”

  “I don’t want to be unconscious. Just give me a drink.”

  Annie got the whiskey and poured a good measure in the glass. “Have you eaten?” she asked when she returned.

  “Not lately.” He took the glass and carefully tilted it, then knocked the drink back with two strong swallows. He gasped and shuddered at the bite of it.

  She got a basin of water and set it beside the bed, then took the glass from his hand. “I’m going to wash the wounds while the water’s heating.” She removed the sheet and studied the situation. The wounds were so close to his waistline that his pants presented a problem. “Can you open your pants, please? I need more room around the wounds.”

  For a moment he didn’t move, then slowly he unbuckled his belt and began opening the buttons on his pants. When the task was completed, Annie pulled the waistband down and away, baring the sleek skin of his hip. “Lift up a little.” He did, and she slid a towel under him, then folded another towel and tucked it in and over the open garment to keep it from getting wet. She tried not to notice his exposed lower abdomen, with the silky line of hair arrowing downward, but she was acutely, embarrassingly aware of this man’s partial nudity. This wasn’t at all the way a doctor was supposed to feel—she’d certainly never felt this way before!—and she mentally scolded herself.

  He watched while she wet a cloth and soaped it, then gently applied it to the infected wounds. He drew in his breath with a hiss.

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured, though she didn’t pause in her task. “I know it hurts, but it has to be cleaned.”

  Rafe McCay didn’t answer; he just continued to watch her. It wasn’t so much the pain that had startled him into that quick intake of breath as it was the low throb of energy that seemed to leap from her flesh to his every time she touched him. It was almost like the way the air felt charged right before a lightning strike. He’d felt it even through his clothes when she had put her arm around him to help him to the table, and it was that much stronger on his bare skin.

  Maybe the fever was getting to him, or maybe he’d just been without a woman for too long. For whatever reason, every time the good doctor touched him, he got hard.

  CHAPTER

  2

  When she touched them, the wounds began to bleed sullenly. “When did this happen?” she asked, keeping her touch as gentle as possible.

  “Ten days ago.”

  “That’s a long time for wounds to remain open.”

  “Yeah.” He hadn’t been able to rest long enough to let his flesh begin healing, not with Trahern on his trail like a goddamned bulldog. The wounds had reopened every time he’d swung into the saddle. He felt grim satisfaction in knowing that Trahern hadn’t been able to give his leg the rest it needed, either.

  The whiskey was making his head swim and he closed his eyes, but he found himself concentrating even more on every touch of the woman’s soft hands. Dr. Parker. Dr. A. T. Parker, according to the crudely lettered sign out front of the little shack. He’d never heard of a woman doctor before.

  His first impression had been that she wasn’t much to look at: too thin, with the worn, weary look women often got out here. Then she had walked up to him and he’d seen the softness of her brown eyes, the sweetly untidy mess of streaked blond hair caught back in a haphazard knot, with escaped tendrils feathering all around her face. She had touched him and he’d felt the hot magic of her hands. Those hands! They made him feel relaxed and tense all at once. Hell, he was drunk; that was the only explanation.

  “First I’m going to apply compresses of hot salty water,” she explained in her cool, light voice. “They’ll have to be almost scalding, so it won’t be comfortable.”

  He didn’t open his eyes. “Just get to it.” He thought Trahern was at least a day behind him, but every minute he lay here was a minute Trahern gained.

  Annie opened her tin of sea salt and dumped a handful in one of the pots, then used a pair of forceps to dunk a cloth in the boiling water. She held it dripping over the pot for a minute, tested the temperature with the soft skin of her forearm, then placed the steaming cloth against the entrance wound in his back.

  He went rigid and his breath hissed inward between clenched teeth, but he voiced no protest. Annie found herself sympathetically patting his shoulder with her left hand while she held the hot cloth to him with the forceps in her right.

  When the cloth cooled she placed it back in the boiling water. “I’m going to alternate sides,” she said. “The salt helps stop infection.”

  “Get it over with,” he growled. “Do both sides at once.”

  She bit her lip, then decided that she might as well. Even as sick as he was, he had an amazing tolerance for pain. She fetched another cloth and another pair of forceps, and for the next half hour applied the hot saltwater compresses, until the skin around the wounds had turned dark red and the ragged edges of the wounds themselves were white. Through it all he lay perfectly still with his eyes closed.

  Then she took a pair of surgical scissors, pulled his skin tight, and quickly trimmed the white dead flesh away. The wounds bled freshly now, though the blood was still streaked with yellow. She applied pressure with her fingers around each wound, forcing out pus and old blood; a few tiny fragments of cloth emerged, as well as a thin sliver of lead from the bullet. She talked quietly all through the procedure, explaining what she was doing even though she wasn’t certain he was conscious.

  She washed the wounds with a tincture of marigold to stop the bleeding, then applied oil she had extracted from fresh thyme to prevent further infection. “Tomorrow I’ll start using plantain bandages, but for tonight I’m going to put chickweed poultices on both wounds to draw out any pieces of your shirt that I’ve missed.”

  “I won’t be here tomorrow,” he said, making