Page 10 of Highland Crown
“John knows.”
“But ye say yer not a midwife,” Jean persisted, a note of disbelief evident in her tone. “And not just a surgeon, in spite of all them fine, shiny instruments in that bag of yers.”
“I trained as a physician at a university. But I’m finding that my abilities as a surgeon have more practical uses wherever I go.”
University trained. Cinaed stole another look at her. She had an air of confidence in the way she spoke and acted that convinced him that she was telling the truth. And for the first time since theHighland Crownstruck that reef, he wondered if his good fortune was still holding, if only by thread. Lady Luck, apparently, had sent him Airmid, his own goddess of healing.
Long-forgotten words, chanted over some injury, came back to him from childhood.Bone to bone. Vein to vein. Skin to skin. Blood to blood. Sinew to sinew. Marrow to marrow. Flesh to flesh…
From the floor, she retrieved a bowl containing bloody cloths. A musket ball lay nestled like a robin’s egg on the soaked rags. By the devil, he thought, his admiration nearly overflowing. She’d not only stitched him together, she’d dug the bullet out of him.
The deuce! He’d never seen anyone like her. Frankly, he didn’t care if she came from the moon to practice medicine here. He owed his life to her.
“And a woman doctor, to boot,” Jean said. “Imagine that. I never knew there were any.”
Cinaed lifted his head to catch a glimpse of the heart-shaped face next to his. The eyes were dark and beautiful, but she wasn’t seeing him. Her attention was on wiping the sweat from his face.
“I never knew there were any either,” he managed to say before bending over the bucket and vomiting again.
In this remote and godforsaken Highland shore, where people shot at the survivors of a sinking ship, he’d been saved by a doctor.
“After digging that ball out of him, did ye sew him up wrong?” Jean asked. “Is that why his guts are spilling out into my bucket?”
“He’s throwing up because you hit him with a rock.”
“What choice did I have? Yer a stranger here, but the dog was throttling ye. Had murder in his eyes, he did.”
Cinaed did vaguely recall fighting. He was on a beach. The pain in his chest was intense. He thought someone was cutting out his heart. He felt a twinge of guilt.
“I didn’t. I wasn’t. No mur…” he managed to rasp out, trying to keep down the next gallon of boiling seawater rising into his gorge.
“I was trying to save your life, but you decided to choke the life out of me,” the doctor said calmly. “You deserved the knock on the head.”
Yet she’d still extracted that ball from his chest and put him back together. Steps shuffled off across the floor. Old Cerberus was returning to her lair. At least the woman doctor didn’t belong to this tribe of brutes who tried to kill him. He should apologize—thank her, at any rate—but he couldn’t. The bile was in his throat again. Every limb felt dead to him. His body ached, and his face was suddenly burning with fever. He only wanted to close his eyes and shut everything out.
She gently rolled him onto his back and lowered his head onto a soft mound.
The hellish upheaval in his stomach was easing now that it was empty. The doctor stood and crossed to the fire, and Cinaed studied the inside of the cottage for the first time. The smell of fish and a wood fire permeated the air. One door, two windows, a thin beam of daylight cutting across the smoky interior. The old woman sat at a wooden table, mumbling what sounded like complaints at no one in particular. The storm seemed to be lessening outside. His clothes were wet, so he couldn’t have been unconscious for too long.
Carrying strips of cloth, the doctor came back and crouched beside him. Her hands were cool, and he welcomed them on his fevered skin. Her touch moved with competent assurance as she cleaned and covered the wound on his chest.
In his entire life, no woman had ever treated him so tenderly. Certainly, he’d known the soft touches of plenty of harbor lasses, but their interest in him was more closely connected to the coins in his pocket. He’d been at sea for most of his days and never had a real home to call his own. He’d never had a woman who cared for his needs without wanting something in return.
He studied her face again.
Her nose was straight. She had a wide, lush mouth. The hollow curve beneath her high cheekbones fascinated him. He didn’t know why, but he found himself fighting the impulse to reach up and erase the furrowed crease in the middle of her brow.
Cinaed’s eyes drifted shut. It was too painful to move,to think, to decide how he could repay his debt to her. To this doctor.
Then suddenly, he was back on board theHighland Crown. The storm was again raging, and huge waves were battering his brig. Men were trapped in the stern, and he had to save them before the ship was driven down into the bottomless abyss.
Isabella laid a blanket over the man, leaving the dressed wound exposed. She wanted to know if it began to bleed again.
She hadn’t removed his boots from the long legs that hung over the end of the cot. His size alone made him quite imposing. And his reflexes were quick, despite his injuries. She touched the tender skin of her throat and rubbed her wrist where his grip had bruised her. He was a rough man, but considering all he’d gone through and the strangeness of waking up in this cottage, she understood his reaction.
He was extremely lucky to be alive. The ball had missed his heart and lodged itself in the flesh close to the collarbone. Half an inch in any direction and he would have been killed, to be sure. Isabella was glad he’d been unconscious while she’d operated. She didn’t want to think how he would have responded if he’d woken up while she was digging about in his chest.
“Well, is yer sea dog going to live?” Jean called from the table.
