Adam shook his head. “Yesterday I thought she was better. But today, I don’t know. The leg is healing and the cuts are all clear of infection, but she’s not fighting. Twice this morning I thought I saw her open her eyes and close them again as if life was too much bother.”
“You want me to sit with her?” Nichole asked.
Adam nodded. He, the nun, and Nichole had been taking shifts for days waiting for Dancing to improve enough to answer them. Adam believed she’d be frightened and would need someone with her. He’d seen men in war wake up screaming, still believing they were in battle. Dancing might react the same.
“You might try talking to her. It couldn’t hurt.” He shrugged.
Nichole touched Adam’s arm as she passed him. The touch was light, but she felt him tense.
Since the night they’d kissed, he had avoided touching her again, but she could see the longing in his glances. She wasn’t sure if the lie about her being engaged to Tyler, or his engagement to Bergette, was stopping him.
“How are your hands?” He lifted her fingers from his arm.
She looked down at the strip of cotton around each of her palms. “Much better.”
He cupped his other hand beneath hers. For a long moment, he held them protectively in his grasp. Since childhood, she’d always thought of herself as big. There were few men she had to look up at, and Wolf said once she was as strong as a man. Yet her hands felt small in Adam’s grasp.
“Do you think you could manage with Dancing this afternoon?” He slowly stepped away from Nichole, looking slightly embarrassed that he’d caressed her hands for so long. “I’ve got a woman just outside of town who is due any time. I need to check on her.”
“Of course,” Nichole answered, knowing that watching Dancing would be no problem. Every few hours they forced a couple of swallows down her. The rest of the time, they mostly just observed.
“Thank you,” he said almost formally as though they were no more than strangers.
“You’re welcome,” she answered, wishing she could talk to him… really talk. Why couldn’t she tell him how she watched him sleep, the few hours he allowed himself to rest each day? How did she ask this polite, kind man to hold her? Why did all her bravery vanish when she thought of making the first move?
He slipped on his jacket and moved through the door leading to his office. Since Dancing had nowhere else to go, Adam’s office now also served as his examining room.
Nichole heard Bergette calling him just before Adam closed the door between the two rooms. Instinctively, she pressed against the wall, out of sight. Moving closer to the door, Nichole listened.
Bergette’s whine was growing very familiar. Like a fire wagon rushing through the night, they usually heard her clanging before they saw her coming into view.
“Adam, aren’t you coming up to lunch? How can it be possible you never have time to sit down to a meal?”
Nichole covered her mouth to keep from giggling. Adam had developed a habit of avoiding Bergette. A few times Nichole had shared her supper with him in the study, because he would rather miss dinner than have to eat with his fiancée. Sister Cel must have anticipated his actions, because Nichole’s tray became fuller.
“I have to go,” Adam answered. “I have a patient to see just out of town.”
“Can’t you let them wait for a few minutes?” Bergette’s song of sorrow drifted through the office door. “Honestly, Adam, don’t I count? Maybe I’m getting sick of your excuses and this town that civilization hasn’t seemed to touch yet. All day you have your work, and at night you have to read. It’s like living upstairs from a ghost.”
“We’ll talk of it later,” Adam said.
Nichole fought down a full laugh. This appeared to be the only conversation Bergette and he ever had. For a man planning to marry, he acted like he feared the pox every time he got near his beloved. She hated his town, his work, and didn’t seem all that fond of him either. And Bergette would probably die of shock if she knew just how many “ghosts” lived below her.
Nichole heard Bergette storm up the stairs in a most unladylike stomp. The front door closed, telling her Adam had gone. Dancing mumbled in her sleep. Nichole turned her attention to helping.
It was twilight when Sister Cel relieved Nichole and still no word from Adam. Both women talked of all the reasons he could be delayed, as they worried.
Dancing drank most of the glass of milk Sister brought her but still didn’t speak to them. She curled up and went back to sleep, crying softly with pain each time she moved.
Sister Cel picked up her mending. Nichole tried to get interested in a book as they waited for Adam’s return. A half hour later, a tapping on the side door made them both jump with alarm.
“Don’t answer it,” Nichole whispered.
“It might be someone needing help,” the nun suggested.
“It might be someone bringing trouble.” Nichole moved into the shadows. “Let them come back when the doc is home. We can’t help them.”
“No.” Sister Cel hurried to the door. “I won’t turn away someone in need.” As she turned the handle, a tiny woman resembling a red ball of yarn almost fell into the room.
“Help me,” she whispered with hands reaching toward the nun as though she were drowning. “All I said was I was going to see Dancing, and he started hitting me.”
The visitor kicked the door closed with her foot and hurried to Sister Cel.
“I’m bleeding, but it ain’t nothing.” She patted her face with a square of lace. “Please, can I see Dancing?”
Nichole moved from the dark corner and pointed toward their patient as the nun collected supplies to bandage the cut at the woman’s forehead.
The visitor had wild, long red hair, a color nature never produced. Her clothes were layers of undergarments and frills tied together with faded silk ribbons. Wide red lips spread into a smile as she saw Dancing sleeping. She hurried to her side and closed her hand over the sleeping woman’s as she looked back at Nichole.
“I had to see Dancing, no matter what he tried to do to stop me. We came out here together four years ago from Arkansas. We figured to find ourselves real western men.”
She laughed as the nun tried to doctor the cuts and bruises on her face. “And we did. We found plenty of them, but most was as wild as the land. If they wanted a wife, it was to slave out on some farm all alone. Dancing and me like town life, so we kept working our way west hoping to find a town wild enough to let us stay. Finally, we stumbled on Fort Worth and Mole. He’s the bottom of a barrel full of scum, so rotten the rats won’t nibble his body when he’s dead.”
She smiled, her red lips spreading from ear to ear. “By the way, my name’s Rose. You got any whiskey, dear? For medicinal purposes, mind you.”
“No,” Nichole answered. “I don’t think so.”
“Oh, well, hard times all around. Like I was saying, Mole ain’t worth nothing, but he pays better than most. He treats us worse than my pa used to treat his lame hunting dogs. He expects his girls to do everything he says, like he’s our master and we’re mindless slaves. But it’s about time somebody told him slavery’s over.”
Before anyone could say more, the door opened with a pop as loud as gunfire.
“Where is she?” a man in his mid forties yelled as he stormed in the room at full charge. He wasn’t tall, not much over five foot, but he was made of hate from his dirty straight hair that hung halfway down his back to his scarred hands that opened and closed in a hunger to hurt someone. “I’ll kill Dancing for sure this time and that no good bedbug she calls a friend.”
The woman with the bruises across her cheek screamed and ran behind the nun. Nichole moved in front of the table where Dancing lay mumbling.
Glancing at Sister Cel, Nichole watched the nun fold her arms and widen her stance like she was the wall of Jericho and it would take a thousand trumpets to blow her down.