Banner O'Brien Read Online Free Page B

the houses rising on each side of the road.
    They were sizable places with widow’s walks along their waterward sides and fashionable scrollwork edging their roofs and windows. Each house had a yard, and each a picket fence. The pruned rosebushes, in their traceries of snow, stirred a nostalgia for a vanished summer within Banner.
    At the crest of the hill was an elegant two-story brickhouse with many chimneys and dozens of glistening windows. Ivy vines, netted with snow, cossetted one end of the building like a gentle hand. At the other, a long, covered walkway annexed a one-story wing.
    Banner thought surely they would pass the place by, but the horse drew the rig into the cobbled drive without any perceptible urging from Adam.
    “This is your hospital?” Banner asked, thunderstruck.
    He laughed, but the sound was mirthless, and his blue eyes were fixed not on the magnificent building or on Banner but on the mountain rising beyond. He seemed to see something there besides the countless evergreens in their lacy snow chemises. Something he prized.
    After a second or so, however, Adam turned to Banner, and he was seeing her. Smiling. “This is my house,” he said. “Or, I should say, my mother’s house. That wing over there holds the hospital, my office, all that.”
    Banner was impressed. “Such a big house,” she breathed. Was there a woman living behind those thick walls, a woman who wore Adam’s band on her finger? She had not considered that possibility before, and now, as it edged into her mind on sticky shoes, she found it distinctly unpleasant. “I suppose you have lots of children,” she said.
    Adam laughed again, drawing the reins back and wrenching the brake lever into place in front of a small stone porch. Above this were massive, brass-handled doors. “I would like nothing better,” he said, “but propriety dictates that I take a wife first.”
    Wild relief brought swiftness to Banner’s breath and color to her cheeks—color that had no connection at all to the biting December wind. “Are you such a respector of propriety, doctor?” she ventured, her eyes sparkling.
    He chuckled. “Not normally. In most respects, in fact, I’m an unconscionable rake. However, when it comes to children, I have very provincial ideas.”
    Banner felt an odd quickening in her womb, as though it were preparing itself to nurture and cherish this man’s child. Reprimanding herself for having such a fanciful and untoward thought, she bit her lower lip and squared her small shoulders. “It is quite cold,” she said stiffly.
    The lie was so brazen that she thought Adam would surely challenge it; despite the weather, there was an unaccountable warmth under the black leather bonnet of that buggy. His face had drawn very near to hers, and for one wild moment she was certain that he meant to kiss her.
    Before the quandary could be resolved, however, one of the two doors at the front of the house swung open and a pretty young girl appeared in the chasm, one arm looped through the center of the biggest holly wreath Banner had ever seen.
    The sprite had wide, crystal blue eyes and hair as dark as Adam’s, and her face was alight at the sight of the buggy.
    “Adam!” the woman-child whooped in unceremonious joy, bounding over the snowy steps in a tomboyish leap and scurrying toward the buggy.
    Adam turned from Banner and, to her deep annoyance, climbed out of the rig to embrace the elfin enchantress and whirl her around, red-berried, prickly wreath and all, in exuberant greeting.
    Banner felt the first real jealousy she had ever known, though she forced a patient smile to her mouth. After all, it wasn’t as though she herself had any claim to this man’s affections, and though he had said he was unmarried, he had not said that there was no one he cared for.
    The girl’s eyes were on Banner the moment Adam had set her down, but no challenge leaped in their blue,blue depths. Only a sort of mischievous speculation. “Who