Plum Creek Bride

A sickening feeling of failure rose inside him. Now that the baby was ensconced upstairs, out of his study, he could once again pore over his medical journals from the East and abroad. Much good it did him.

With foreboding, he noted that the leaves of trees that had been frothy with blossoms in May were even now brown and sere around the edges. Midday temperatures had hovered around the hundred-degree mark for over a month, and the thick pall of road dust swirling about Daisy’s feet smelled dry and smoky. The worst heat of this long summer was still ahead.

But there might still be time to find a suitable building—a barn, a warehouse, even a church cellar—to scrub down for use as a temporary hospital if the need arose. He thought of Tess, and the familiar knot of anger tightened around him like a hangman’s noose. She didn’t die on purpose, he reminded himself. But he still felt abandoned. It felt like pure, unadulterated hell.

He stopped the buggy, laid the reins on the bench and climbed out. “The irony, old girl,” he said to the mare as he unhitched her and led her toward the barn, “is that I finally have all the time I need for my medical practice. But now there’s no joy in it.”

It was all wrong. Tess had always wanted more of him than he could give. She’d resented his commitment to medicine, the long days spent seeing patients, the emergencies that called him out in the dead of night. To be honest, he had chafed under her misguided nagging.

He had fallen in love with her that day in Savannah, deeply in love. But in the short time they’d had together, they couldn’t seem to balance passion and resentment. He regretted that he hadn’t been able to manage things differently—make Tess happy as his wife.

And now it was over. His time with her was past.

Is life always like that? he wondered. Always learning too late what went wrong?

Chapter Six (#ulink_0b52cc76-c684-58b6-950e-aa10f92bbcd1)

Jonathan rounded the corner of the barn and started across the lawn toward the front porch. What an ass he’d been in Plotinus Brumbaugh’s office this morning. He’d lost his sense of perspective and his temper, as well. He wouldn’t be surprised if the mayor put it out that Jonathan was deranged.

Right now, he needed to be alone. He’d hole up in his study, a stiff whiskey at his elbow, and get a grip on himself. As close as he was to the edge, he didn’t want to blunder into Mrs. Benbow or that slip of a German girl. She already regarded him as an ogre. He’d seen it in her eyes that first day—a wary, assessing look, as if she expected him to bite.

Mrs. Benbow would tut-tut when she discovered the empty whiskey glass and the telltale smell of spirits, but he didn’t care a whit. He was accountable to no one. His sanity outweighed the disapproval of his housekeeper, even one who’d been with his family as long as Mrs. Benbow had. This was his home, his sanctuary. The world outside seemed unreliable. Treacherous.

For the first time in his life, he acknowledged, he could not control events by force of will. But he’d be damned if he’d change one thing about the few things he could govern—and one of them was his residence and another was his private study.

Tess had come into his life and been taken from him, and there had been nothing he could do about it. His sense of self, his trust in those things he had valued—knowledge, love, even his skill as a physician—had been shaken to the core. He needed. what? Privacy? Escape?

He needed sameness, he knew that much. Something on which to anchor his equilibrium.

He skirted the expanse of green grass, inhaling the comforting, earthy smells of summer honeysuckle, the peppery hint of horse manure, wood smoke. Cicadas screamed in the plum tree.

Four steps from the front walkway he brought himself up short “What the devil?” He raked an unsteady hand through his hair.

A new crop of scarlet zinnias poked their bright heads up along the square cement stepping stones Tess had insisted on. But instead of bordering the path in the neat orderly line he was used to seeing, the new plants were arranged in masses, mingled with clumps of purple woods iris and drifts of skyblue pincushion flowers. It looked like a riotous dance of blooms casually swirling in the general direction of the front steps.

He sucked in a breath. Never in a month of Sundays would Tess have tolerated such a wild-looking garden!