Frustrated, impotent silence resumed. Jeremy paced the carpet. Gray moved to uncork a fresh bottle of liquor. With a vicious oath, Joss quit the room. The door slammed shut behind him. Toby supposed he ought to start prattling again, provide more distraction. But he didn’t really feel like talking. What he felt like doing was charging upstairs, finding Isabel, gathering her into his arms and burying his face in her sweet-scented hair. He didn’t want to kiss her, or lie with her, or even speak to her. He just wanted to be near her. Desperately. The yearning hit him like a fist, leaving a dull ache in his chest. And with it came a realization that left him without words.
He was deeply, irretrievably in love with his wife.
“What the devil do you think you’re doing?”
Miss Osborne froze on the first riser of the staircase, hand on the banister. She didn’t turn around.
“If a man wants to see his wife, who are you to stop him?” Joss demanded, stepping closer. Staring into the fine wisps of auburn hair where they curled against her pale neck. So delicate and soft. So completely unlike her.
“If a woman does not wish to see her husband,” she said calmly, pivoting to face him, “who am I to force her?” Miss Osborne was a small woman, but with the benefit of one step’s height, she stood nearly eye-to-eye with him.
“Do you know what it does to a man, listening to his wife in such agony, knowing he is powerless to help her? Knowing she could die? It is the most acute form of torture imaginable. Any devoted husband would swallow hot coals to spare his wife a moment’s suffering.” He jabbed a finger toward the closed salon door. “That man is sick with worry, and your heartless remarks only multiply his distress.”
“If Lord Kendall is sick with anything, it’s guilt. He regrets their argument, and well he should, from Lucy’s report of it. But his apologies will have to wait. I’m here to deliver an infant, not coddle a grown man’s conscience.”
Her impersonal tone only added fuel to Joss’s anger. It was clear from her prim carriage, the proud jut of her chin—she meant to deny his presence had any effect on her. But he knew it did.
He stepped closer, knowing she would not back down. Though she stood perfectly still, her pupils widened a fraction, and her auburn lashes quivered as she blinked. Good. He wanted to unsettle her. He wanted to crack open the ice encasing this woman and discover the warm, beating heart that instinct told him must lie somewhere within. “Miss Osborne,” he whispered.
“Hetta. Can you truly be so cold, so devoid of sympathy?”
“I’m not cold, I’m competent. I’m a physician.”
“A physician treats people, not merely injuries and illnesses. You would be a better doctor if you gave some consideration to your patients’ feelings. And you would be a better person if you allowed yourself to feel.”
She laughed bitterly. “You would encourage me to feel. Of course—by your accounting, one cannot claim true suffering without a proportional measure of public grief. Not all of us have the luxury of indulging our emotions, Captain Grayson. Don’t you know Lucy is my dearest friend? I do not enjoy watching her in pain, any more than Lord Kendall does. Should I come join you gentlemen, then? Spend the evening cursing into my brandy? Perhaps that would give you sufficient proof of my sympathy, but it would not help Lucy deliver her child.”
“Miss Osborne, you’re the most educated woman I know. Surely you’re more clever than that argument implies.” Joss inhaled slowly, tempering his frustration. Why did this woman affect him so? Every time he was in her presence, he felt compelled to defend his behavior, explain himself in ways he shouldn’t need to explain himself to anyone. He didn’t know why it should matter what she thought of him, but somehow it did. It mattered a great deal. “You needn’t choose between the two,” he said. “Can’t you be both a physician and a human? Both Lady Kendall’s doctor and her friend?”
She stood silent for a long moment. Joss waited for her to speak.
“My mother,” she began at last, “was ill, bed ridden for more than a year. My father personally saw to her treatment. He consulted specialists, spent long nights scouring medical journals for new treatments. Not once—not even toward the end, when she forgot our names—did my father indulge in a moment’s self-pity. Not once did he allow her to see his distress. And the day she died, did he sit by her bedside and weep useless tears, just to prove his love for her?
No, he went to tend victims of a mining explosion the next county over. Because he was the doctor, and they needed his help.” The sparks of green flashed in her hazel eyes. “Everyone has wounds, Captain Grayson. Some of us do our bleeding on the inside.”
Suddenly, she raised a hand to her temple and closed her eyes. Her posture softened, and Joss finally glimpsed what he’d been waiting to see since the day of their introduction. At that moment, she wasn’t a doctor. She wasn’t efficient or headstrong or abrasive or cold. She was simply a woman—and an exhausted one, at that. The long hours of work weighed heavy on her shoulders. Eyes still shut, she swayed slightly on her feet. She desperately needed a rest. More than that, she needed to be held.
He could hold her. He had two strong arms, and her slender frame would fit quite neatly in their circumference. On another day, she might be strong enough to hold him in return. But it couldn’t be that easy. Nothing was ever that easy. There were questions and enmity and ghosts between them. And Joss knew from experience that taking a woman in his arms was a great deal simpler than letting her go.
“I’m sorry.” He rested a hand on the banister, sliding it slowly higher until it rested an inch from hers. “I realize this day has been a trial for you as well. It’s just that I know what a living hell it is to be in Lord Kendall’s place. In many ways, his misery is my own. If you cannot have a care for his feelings, perhaps you could have a care for mine.”
“You would ask me to care,” she said, eyes still shut. “Care for you.”
“Yes, damn it. Do I not deserve as much? Am I not just as human as Lord Kendall, as any man?”
“Lord. You are just as much a fool, as any man.”
Her eyes opened and looked to his. There was something there. Not the respect he’d been seeking, but something better and worse at once. Emotion, raw and intense. She did care for his feelings. She cared a great deal. Good Lord, the girl was half in love with him, the devil knew why. For weeks now, he’d been searching for her weakness, and the truth had been staring him in the mirror all the while. He was her weakness. And now that they both knew it, she trembled.
“Oh,” he said softly. “Forgive me. I didn’t realize.”
She made a choked sound, rather like a swallowed sob.
Some tender, protective impulse uncoiled in his heart. Leaning forward, he slid his hand along the banister until his thumb rested in the crook of hers. A warm pulse fluttered there, where her skin was chafed and cracked from frequent scrubbing. He soothed the spot with his thumb, at every moment expecting her to pull away. She didn’t.
“Could you, Hetta?” he asked quietly. “Could you care for me?” He hadn’t known, until that moment, how much he’d been wanting to ask her exactly that. Neither had he realized how much of his rudeness had been aimed at avoiding the answer.
“Captain Grayson …”
“Joss,” he corrected, raising his other hand to cradle her smooth, flushed cheek. Closing her eyes, she leaned ever so slightly into his palm. “My name is Joss.”
Then a low moan sounded above them. Hetta bristled away from his touch. Joss dropped his hand from her face, but he kept the other twined with hers. They stared into one another’s eyes for a few seconds more, and in that remarkable shade of hazel, Joss read possibilities and questions and fears. And then—he saw the moment of her decision.
He released her before she could pull away.
“I can’t care for you,” she whispered. “Grief, bitterness … those are wounds I don’t know how to cure.”
“Hetta, wait. I didn’t mean—”
“I have work to do.” Crossing her arms, she retreated up the staircase. “Go back to your brandy and be at ease. No one is going to die here today.”
“I’m going to murder him.”
Bel exchanged a worried glance with Sophia. Her sister-in-law stood at the other side of the bed, fanning Lucy industriously. For her part, Bel placed a fresh damp cloth against Lucy’s brow.
Their efforts did nothing to cool the laboring woman’s temper.
“I’m going to murder Jeremy for doing this to me,” Lucy said, panting for breath between contractions. “Does he know how much this hurts?”
“You’ve been making enough noise to give him a fair idea.” Miss Osborne swept back into the room, bearing an armload of towels in one hand and dabbing at her eyes with the other.
“Good,” Lucy growled, curling in on herself. Her face contorted in pain as another spasm gripped her.
Bel noted Sophia’s bleached countenance. She’d probably never witnessed a woman in the worst pains of labor. Bel herself was no midwife, but she’d been present at a handful of births
—most notably, and most tragically, that of her nephew, Jacob.
She knew enough to realize something was wrong.
Skirting the edge of the bed, she approached Hetta at the washstand.
“Did you tell Lord Kendall?” Bel murmured, making a show of folding and refolding the towels as Hetta scrubbed her hands with the cake of soap.
“No. What purpose would it serve? He’s already worried sick.”
“Do you intend to tell Lucy?”
“No. There’s no benefit in distressing her.” Hetta flicked a glance over her shoulder at Sophia.
“And your sister-in-law looks ready to faint as it is.”
“She’s just anxious for her friend, and for herself. It will be her turn, come the winter. Right now, she is imagining herself enduring the same ordeal. Perhaps you could explain to her, afterward … why it is likely to go easier for her.”
“But it might not.” Hetta rinsed her hands, and Bel offered her a towel. “One never knows. I can’t make your sister any promises. A physician never makes promises.”
“But you have attended births like this before? Where the babe is turned backward?”
“Yes, several. Most of them with perfectly healthy outcomes for both mother and infant.”
“Most.” Bel’s stomach knotted. “But not all.”
“No, not all.” Hetta turned to her and looked her square in the eye. “Lucy and her child will be fine. I’ve made a promise, and I mean to keep it. No one is going to die here today.”
“I thought you just said a physician doesn’t make promises.”
“I know.” Wilting against the washstand, Hetta put a wrist to her brow. “A physician doesn’t. That promise was made by a stupid, fanciful girl.” Shrugging back into her mantle of brisk professionalism, she added, “But the physician means to keep it.”
Hetta returned to her position at the foot of the bed, lifting the bedsheets to examine Lucy’s progress. Bel returned to Lucy’s side, replacing the warmed cloth on her forehead with yet another, freshly doused. There was little she could do, except make Lucy as comfortable as possible. And pray.
Silently, she resumed the litany she’d been reciting all afternoon. Now she expanded her petitions, applying not just to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but to the Virgin Mary, too. Normally, Bel avoided anything that smacked of papist beliefs. She avoided following her mother’s example in general—be the passions holy or profane. But sometimes it comforted her, to put faith in a divine mother. One who embodied all the serenity and grace her own had lacked.
