Lost in Your Arms Read Online Free PDF Page A

shouted, “Mr. Kinman!”
    “Ma’am?” He sounded amazed by her ferocity.
    “I want hot water immediately!”
    “Yes, ma’am.” He came to the bottom of the stairs and stared up at her with something akin to awe. “Mr. Throckmorton is on his way, ma’am.”
    “Good. I have a few words to say to Mr. Throckmorton.” Indeed she did. As she peeled back the first of the bandages, she practiced those words. “If you want to save a man’s life, you don’t hire some slattern of a nurse and use some ignorant bumpkin of a physician. Incompetent, uncaring . . .”
    Dear heavens. Her hands slowed as she revealed MacLean’s face. She would never have recognized him. The explosion had obviously come from the right side, for that side of his face had been sliced and cut by a dozen shards. Each injury had been neatly stitched, but the swelling and bruising disfigured his cheek. He’d lost his earlobe, but his scraggly beard hid any injuries to his jaw. The fever had cracked deep grooves into the fullness of his lips. “MacLean?” Leaning close to his face, she looked again. She touched him using just her fingertips. That heat wasn’t just his temperature.That heat was his will to live. If he could have moved, he would have grasped life in both hands and held it tightly.
    She would have to do it for him.
    But she didn’t like the look of his wounds. “Mr. Kinman!” she called.
    “Ma’am?” He had sneaked up the stairs and even now moved toward her on tiptoe, towels draped over his arm, extending the basin as if afraid to bring it closer.
    “Put it on the bedside table.”
    He did.
    She peeled away the bandages from MacLean’s neck, chest and arms. Some of them stuck, and she glanced around. “Clean rags,” she said. “Towels.”
    Mr. Kinman thrust them at her, then scuttled as far away as he could be and still remain in the room.
    Dipping the rag in the warm water, she stroked MacLean’s still face and sought some remnant of the man he had been. Beneath the swelling she discovered the broad cheekbones and forehead and angular jaw that had made her husband such a handsome man. But his nose, smashed as it was, looked larger and sharper than she remembered. The passage of time, the effects of the explosion, her own memories betrayed her. “MacLean, what have you done?” she murmured.
    She dropped the crimson-stained bandages onto the floor in an ever-increasing pile. “Mr. Kinman, I need a bucket to dispose of these, and when I’m done washing him, I’m going to need help changing the sheets.”
    Mr. Kinman made an odd noise, and she glanced toward him.
    With horrified fascination, he gazed at the dreadfulwounds she had revealed. Color washed from his cheeks, his eyes rolled up like those of an unbroken horse, and he hit the floor with a thud.
    Too bad. She could have used the assistance. But she didn’t have time to worry about him now. Mr. Kinman would stir by himself; her patient lay motionless beneath her hands. “Your friend is useless, did you know that?” she asked MacLean in a conversational tone. “A pleasant man, and probably good in a fight, but he’s fainted clean away. I’m amused. Are you?” She watched MacLean for any sign that her words reached him.
    Nothing.
    “This explosion of yours did an amazing amount of damage.” She gently probed his ribs. “Yet you were lucky. Perhaps you have some cracked ribs, but none are broken and stabbing you.” As she washed each part of him, she dried it carefully and placed it beneath the blanket.
    Each time she touched him, the sense of connection between them expanded. When he’d been healthy and her husband, she had never felt like this. Perhaps this tragedy had altered him—or perhaps the years had matured him, permeated his essence to such an extent she discerned them. Perhaps she’d changed, softened, grown forgiving. Or she realized that death hovered above them like a great dark raven, ready to snatch him away before they could write