Summer Is for Lovers (31 page)

Julianne fought a building impatience. How could he be so . . .
impersonal
? Day or night, this man had occupied a central place in her thoughts for eleven long months. She wanted to scream at him. Shake him to awareness. Make him look at her as more than just a patient.

Instead, she asked, “Do you not remember me at all?”

His eyes continued their impersonal march across her various and sundry parts before settling back on her face. “Of course,” he said, his voice not changing inflection in the slightest. “You always did have a flair for a dramatic entrance, Miss Baxter.”

Julianne’s heart skidded sideways in her chest. However impassive the acknowledgement, he knew who she was. And yet, he hadn’t bolted.

She wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.

Apparently satisfied she wasn’t on the verge of pitching over in the street, Channing turned and made his way toward the injured animal. She watched as he shrugged—quite
un
-diabolically—out of his coat, one blurry shoulder after the other.

“He’s unconscious but breathing,” Channing called out. “But he’s lost a good deal of blood. The leg will probably need to come off.”

She watched as he placed his coat over the still body and then he was returning to proper focus with the animal cradled in his arms. “I’ll need to take him to my clinic and see what can be done in surgery.” The clinical intensity with which he had earlier regarded her dropped away, and for the first time his eyes flashed in challenge. “You might as well come along with me, Miss Baxter. That is, if you trust me.”

“I . . .” She hesitated, feeling the stares of a few curious Moraig residents on her, even though she couldn’t precisely see them. All she could see at this moment was this man towering over her, his arms full of beast and coat, a smear of blood wrapped around one wrist.

There had been blood on him the last time she had seen him, too. A copious amount of it, vivid scarlet turned to rust. She remembered it now, how he had stood in his father’s study as if hewn from granite, covered in his brother’s blood.

That, more than anything else, cemented her decision, sane or not.

“I will come with you.” She lifted her skirts, not even caring that she was probably exposing a good bit of ankle to those gawking Moraig townspeople. Perhaps, if she were lucky, that bit of stocking might distract them from her hair, and discourage any speculation regarding why she was conversing—without a proper chaperone—with a man charged with murder.

“It’s a half mile walk.” Channing’s gaze roved downward and settled on the exposed heel of one of her boots. “Try not to twist something en route, Miss Baxter. Because I assure you, I’d rather carry the dog.”

J
ULIANNE
. B
LOODY
. B
AXTER
.

She was here. In Moraig. About as far as a body could go in Britain and not plunge into the Atlantic. Which was really where he’d like to toss her, those tottering heels and fetching red curls be damned.

As they walked, Patrick fumed. He had spent the last eleven months in this small, sleepy town, cloaked in anonymity and immersed in hard work. Not hiding, exactly—after all, he had not taken an assumed name, or booked transport to America, or done any of the predictable things a hunted man might be tempted to do. But neither had he offered an explanation for his sudden appearance to anyone nor confessed his circumstances, even to his closest friends.

He refused to wonder, at least in the near term, how this woman had learned where he was, and why she was here now—unchaperoned, by the looks of things. And he further refused to wonder why the sight of her pert nose and probing green eyes—both of which she famously used to pry into others’ business—simultaneously felt like a punch to his solar plexus and a breath of crisp autumn air.

Patrick knew there were those in England who still bayed like hounds on the trail of a fox, demanding his blood and their own idea of justice. He assumed Miss Baxter was one of them given the nature of their last meeting. His father’s last letter had suggested opinion was slowly but surely shifting in his favor, and that when he returned he was likely to see a reduced charge of manslaughter instead of murder. But the last correspondence he had received from his father had been a month or more ago, and unless today’s letter carried some vital new information, it was not yet safe for Patrick to return.

And now he had just been discovered by the one woman who wouldn’t know how to keep a secret were her tongue cut out.

Strangely enough, though he was certainly irritated, he did not feel panicked. There was some relief in having the decision so firmly taken out of his hands. He was tired of skirting the demands of his moral compass, no matter that doing so had made logical sense once upon a time. He missed his family, and the fresh, rolling hills of Yorkshire. The leaves had probably started to turn, his favorite time of year to spend in the country. He missed the stables where he spent most of his time.

Missed his brother, although there was no help for that.

Miss Baxter’s discovery of his whereabouts was unfortunate, but it was not going to send the noose over his neck in the next five minutes. He had time enough to concentrate on saving the life of the mail coach’s latest victim.

He’d sort out what to do about
her
later.

With the unconscious dog still in his arms, Patrick kicked open the door to his derelict house-turned-clinic. He hadn’t needed to kick the door, of course. The latch didn’t catch properly, just one of a hundred things that needed fixing about the tumbledown place where he laid his head and stitched up the odd farm animal. He could bump it open with his hip, and frequently did when his arms were full. But the extreme physical reaction and the satisfying thud of his boot against the wood improved his mood.

Better still, it made the woman trailing beside him jump like a bird flushed from the heather, and
that
made him glad, for no other reason than it gave him a brief upper hand in this situation bound for nowhere good.

As he stepped inside the clinic, a ball of yellow fur came hurtling down the steps and wrapped itself around Patrick’s legs. Excited barking filled the air.

“Down, Gemmy.” He skirted the exuberant and slightly off-balance antics of his pet, the very first animal he had treated upon arriving in Moraig. “Sit,” he told the dog.

Gemmy stood.

His tail beat a furious rhythm in the air, and his pink tongue lolled happily. Miss Baxter removed her gloves, then crouched to rub the terrier’s ears. “Who is this ill-behaved beast?”

“The mail coach’s first victim,” Patrick said dryly.

The dog’s eyes all but closed on a satisfied groan as Miss Baxter’s bare fingers worked some kind of female magic on him. Patrick stared in perplexed irritation. Gemmy had always struck him as a loyal dog, a
man’s
dog. He liked to scratch himself exuberantly with his one remaining hind leg, and lick the area where his bollocks had been. He generally stayed on Patrick’s heel unless there was a chicken or rabbit in close proximity.

But now this “man’s” dog flung himself down worshipfully and presented the decidedly unmannish Miss Baxter with three limbs aloft and a belly to rub, which she proceeded to do with a familiarity that surprised him.

Though she bordered on slatternly this moment, with her hair falling down and her dress wrinkled beyond repair, Miss Baxter had always seemed a fussy sort of person to Patrick’s eye, one more concerned about the cut of her clothes and the curl of her hair than any reasonable person ought to be. To see her remove her gloves to pet not just a dog, but a three-legged mongrel, struck him as slightly absurd.

“How many mail coach victims have there been?” she asked, her voice tight.

“Four since the New Year. Mr. Jeffers is always running late, and the townspeople refuse to put their dogs on a lead. ’Tis bound to result in the odd collision.”

“I see you make a hobby out of lopping off their limbs.”

The reminder sent Patrick cursing under his breath. He had almost forgotten the bundle he carried, so disarming was the sight of Miss Baxter—well, any woman, really—crouching in the foyer of his bachelor’s quarters. But he
wanted
to save this dog, the same way he had saved Gemmy. His conscience had never let him leave an animal to fate, even when it seemed fate had it out for them both. And that meant he needed to move fast now.

He strode down the narrow hallway that led to the kitchen. A plaintive bleating came from the part of the house that had once served as the front parlor, but though it was almost time for the orphaned lamb’s bottle, he ignored it for the moment. He settled the newest patient down on the kitchen table and carefully unwrapped his coat from the injured dog’s body. Another jacket, ruined. This business was sending him to the poorhouse, sure enough.

Miss Baxter’s outrageously tall heels clicked on the weathered floor boards behind him. “Do you live here all alone?”

He heard her sniff at his silence. Knew what her nose was processing, even if she didn’t.
Eau du sheep
, musty corners, and weeks of muddy boots had left an indelible scent in the old house.
There was a bit of sweet hay mixed in there
, he thought defensively. Not that Miss Julianne Baxter would appreciate a thing like hay.

“Honestly, you are the son of an earl. You could afford a domestic servant or two.”

Patrick didn’t answer. No sense telling her he refused to accept a single sovereign from his father while he languished in this self-imposed exile. No doubt Miss Baxter had never turned down a farthing in her sweet, pampered life.

He forced his gaze to remain on the mess of the dog’s leg instead of pulling to her, as it wanted to. He still couldn’t believe she had followed him to his clinic, tripping along beside him through the streets of Moraig and entering his
house,
for Christ’s sake. It was a foolish risk for a woman to take, particularly after the terrible crime she herself had accused him of.

But he couldn’t very well leave her standing in the street. Miss Baxter was many things—exasperating, conniving, lying—but restrained was not one of them. It would have taken all of thirty seconds for her to start poking about the afternoon crowd at the Blue Gander public house, asking questions, spilling secrets. No one in Moraig knew of these most recent circumstances of his past, not even his best friends.

And until he knew what his future might hold, he preferred to keep it that way.

A lid clanged loudly somewhere behind him, and irritation yanked at the edges of his temper. “Do you even cook in here at all?” she mused. “These pans appear unused.”

Christ,
would she not shut up?

“The kettle works,” he growled in response. In fact, he kept it heated and at the ready, but his answer seemed to do little to deflect her prying. Patrick could hear her continue to poke around behind him, lifting things, setting them down. He swallowed his frustration over the feminine invasion and kept his eyes trained toward his newest patient.

The dog he had carried from Main Street was still unconscious, which concerned him. He’d given it a fairly thorough examination in the street, and while there was no obvious damage he could see other than the mangled limb, the animal’s sluggish return to wakefulness suggested it might have sustained an injury to its head in addition to its leg. However, the continued state of unconsciousness also presented Patrick with an opportunity. If he moved quickly, he might be able to take off the crushed leg without the animal waking.

But quickly was a bit of a stretch, given that he had no assistant to help him.

He gave into the urge to look dubiously at Miss Baxter, who had moved on to the side counter and was running an elegant finger over his clean, washed tools. No, she would be no help. Quite the opposite. James MacKenzie, his friend and former roommate, had once helped Patrick with these more challenging procedures, but the man was probably sitting down to supper in his new house across town, wallowing in what appeared to be a healthy dose of marital bliss.

There was no one here but the infinitely nosey Miss Baxter.

“I thought you were taking the dog to surgery.” She held up a long-handled implement with a vice clamp on the end. She raised it for a closer examination, squinting at it like a seventy-year-old woman who had lost her quizzing glass. She turned it left and then right, her lips pursed in study. “This is your kitchen,” she continued. “Surely you don’t see patients in
here
.”

Patrick considered telling her he used the thing to castrate calves. Decided better of it.

After all, she might decide to use it on him.

Instead, he reached for the surgical instruments he kept in the nearby cupboard, right next to his meager tin of tea leaves and the shaker of salt. “One table’s as good as another. I am not a particular man.”

“Clearly.” She laid the emasculator down on the far end of the table and came closer. Her eyes widened as she saw what was in his hand. “What is
that
for?”

Patrick set down a wickedly sharp knife on the table and enjoyed the quick blanching of Miss Baxter’s already milky white skin. “Not for eating.” The instruments of his trade tended to be crude and oversized, given that he used them on both cows and kittens alike. Next came the bone saw, a monstrous, well-oiled thing with teeth the size of a man’s fingernail. He heard Miss Baxter’s harsh indrawn breath as he placed it, too, beside the unconscious dog.

For the first time since he laid eyes on her, he was tempted to smile. She believed him a killer, after all. He might even be—he wasn’t completely sure of himself, or the tragic events that had destroyed his family and reshaped his future into a frail, furtive thing.