Lori Benton Read Online Free Page B

horse must have strayed after he fell.
    Neil felt a plummeting in his gut as the magnitude of his situation drew clear. By necessity, he’d traveled light into the back country, but there were things in his saddlebags he could ill afford to lose. His medical case. The field desk and its contents. His cooking gear. The plant press!
    He stifled a groan. Was this the end then? Was his hope of creating a collection of botanical drawings of the Adirondack Mountains—in the spirit of Catesby’s work, and Colden, and the Bartrams—to terminate in such ignominious defeat? Must he return to Philadelphia with his tail between his legs … if he could find the courage to show his face to the Philosophical Society members and explain why their long-suffering faith in him—not to mention their monetary investment—had been woefully misplaced?
    And he would be making that journey afoot, without Seamus. He’d never been much of a horseman, but he’d managed to acquire a fondness for the roan—not a mutual regard, apparently. Still, the horse ought to have been his first thought, not the last.
    “Lord Almighty, he’s Thy creature. I’ll trust Thee to watch o’er him and lead him, if not back to me, then to someone who’ll ken his worth and treat him kindly. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ …” He looked up to find the woman staring.
    “Amen,” she finished for him, as if in startled reflex.
    He gave her a half-embarrassed smile. “I’ve fallen into the habit of conversing aloud with the Almighty, alone on the trail.” When that garnered no response, he added, “Well, then. Since I havena got my own supplies to hand, I’ll need something for bandaging. Splinting as well.”
    “I will find sticks for the splinting.”
    Before he could reply, the woman ducked out of the cabin. Cap lifted his head, looking after her, then settled back with a sigh.
    “You’ve reached an understanding with yon woman, I see.” Neil supposed that was reassuring too, but was glad for her departure. What had to be done next was a thing best attempted in solitude, by chance the need to emit unmanly noises got the better of him.
    “Physician, heal thyself,” he muttered, and clenched his teeth.

    A cracked distal radius was his best diagnosis, though for all his stoic teeth grinding as he probed the inner workings of his wrist, it might only be a bad sprain, absent an obviously misaligned bone. Since the treatments were identical—prolonged immobility—he saw no reason to prolong the agony too, when his arm already felt jammed through with a heated poker in place of bone. He was near to swooning from the pain when he felt the woman’s hands easing him back to lie down again.
    “You ought to have waited.”
    “ ’Tis no matter,” he said, sounding weak as a half-drowned kitten. “I’m a physician—or trained as one.”
    The spinning cabin settled into place. He was between the woman and the fire now, its light falling full on her face. Neil found himself staring again, at her eyes.
    They were the most peculiar he had ever seen. Both were large and thick lashed, well set—at the same slight tilt as her cheekbones—but otherwise they might have belonged to different faces. While the left was hazel, predominantly green, the right was a warm, vivid brown, nearly the same shade as her hair.
    He tried but couldn’t look away from them.
    As if accustomed to such rude gaping—and not best pleased by it—the woman frowned and looked away. “I have the sticks for splinting. We should make a sling for the arm, yes?”
    She started to rise, but Neil sat up, and despite his spinning head managed to grasp her wrist. “Aye, but wait. I’ve not asked your name.”
    She stiffened at his touch, and he released her.
    “I am called—” She paused, then with a little huff of breath said, “I am Wilhelmina, daughter of Dieter Obenchain.”
    She had named her father but not a husband. “ ’Tis
Miss
Obenchain, is it?”
    She leveled