The Doctor's Lady Read Online Free Page A

validity of such a post. When they’d finally agreed to support him, they’d given him one stipulation: He had to take a wife.
    He’d argued long and hard about the fact that a white woman had never made a crossing overland to Oregon Country, that taking a wife along would only slow him down, perhaps even threaten the entire trip.
    But the Board had insisted he go with a wife or not go at all.
    “You don’t need countless women.” Dr. Baldwin leaned back in his chair and blew a cloud of smoke into the dusky air. “You just need one.”
    Eli helped the boy sit up. “I had one.”
    “Yes, had ,” Dr. Baldwin said.
    Eli steadied the boy on the edge of the examining table. “And it’s not my fault she married someone else while I was on my exploration trip.”
    His gut twisted, as it did whenever he thought about his first glance at Sarah Taylor during the Sabbath meeting the day after he’d arrived home. When she’d stood to greet him, first her eyes, then her very rounded abdomen had told him all he needed to know.
    It had only confirmed the foolishness of the Board’s stipulation. Sarah hadn’t really wanted to go. She had deserted him at the first opportunity. And there weren’t too many other women excited about the idea of traveling where no other white woman had gone.
    He couldn’t blame them.
    “The Board knows I tried to find a willing partner. And now they need to just let me go.”
    Dr. Baldwin shook his head.
    Eli had tried to overlook his wounded pride, tried to make excuses for Sarah. The truth was that her rejection had stung—it had hurt a lot more than he cared to admit. And he wasn’t ready to face the possibility of another rejection anytime soon.
    “How are you feeling?” Eli asked his young patient.
    Tears pooled in the boy’s eyes.
    “Still hurts more than the worst whoppin’, huh?”
    The lad nodded.
    Careful not to touch the wound, Eli wrapped a strip around the boy’s head and covered the stitches. Then he nodded at the patient’s brother. “You take him straight home and tell your ma to give him another dose of laudanum. It’ll take the edge off the pain for a little while.”
    He helped the boy from the table. “And tell her to keep the wound clean.”
    “Thank you.” The older boy slipped an arm around his brother. He hobbled with him to the door, stopped, and looked back. “Oh, Doctor, if you need a real good woman, you won’t find a better lady than our teacher.”
    “That so?”
    “Yep. Teacher . . . well, she really cares for us. And I just know she’d make a great ma someday.”
    “Thank you, son.”
    The boy nodded solemnly, as if he’d just done Eli the greatest of favors.
    Dr. Baldwin coughed. And once the boys were gone, Eli turned to look at his old friend. “What?”
    “Oh, nothing.”
    Eli dipped his hands into the basin on the bureau near the examining table. The ice cold water rushed over the calluses he’d gained during the past year and reminded him of the mountain springs he’d washed in not many months past.
    He scrubbed at the blood on his fingers and glanced around at the dark paneled walls of Dr. Baldwin’s office. Was this to be his fate? A tiny office? And the never-ending bumps and bruises of the neighborhood children?
    Keen longing flashed through him. What he wouldn’t give for a ceiling of blue skies and four walls of endless mountains. And the beautiful brown eyes of the natives who were still open to the gospel and untouched by the hate of the whites.
    “You might want to take the boy up on his advice,” Dr. Baldwin said.
    Eli took a deep breath of the stuffy, tobacco-spiced air. What he wouldn’t give for just a whiff of the fresh, wind-tossed air of the prairies.
    “She’s one of the best young women I know,” Dr. Baldwin continued.
    “Who?”
    “The teacher.”
    Eli’s stomach pinched. “I just don’t want a wife.”
    “Eli, now, we’ve been over this before, and you know as well as I do that most of the single