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“I can feed you, Zane.”
He batted her hand away. “No. It’s good practice.”
He ate so slowly Winifred gritted her teeth to keep from snatching the bowl away. “Good practice for what?”
“For coming home. Not an invalid.”
She noticed his frown deepening and guessed his headache was back. Still he doggedly finished the oatmeal, slid down on the pillows and closed his eyes with a sigh.
“Get Samuel, will you?”
Dr. Graham administered another dose of laudanum, and Zane slept. Winifred read some Wordsworth, paced up and down the hallway outside his room, had tea with Elvira and sat by Zane’s bedside and read until her eyes burned.
Late in the afternoon she looked up to find Zane watching her.
“Who brought the roses?” he asked, tipping his chin at the vase on the side table.
“Rooney Cloudman. I was so touched I forgot to ask about their honeymoon trip.”
One of Zane’s eyebrows rose. “None of our business.”
“It seems everything that happens in this town is everybody’s business.” But she decided not to tell him of the gossip circulating about her encounter with Darla.
“Tell me about Rosemarie. Is she all right?”
“She is just fine. Sam and Yan Li keep her entertained, but she asks and asks where her papa is.”
“What do they tell her?”
“They say you are...traveling.”
“Good.”
“I think it might reassure her to see you.”
“No. Don’t want her to see me like this. Might frighten her.”
“But—”
“Don’t.” He almost snapped out the word, and Winifred was torn between joy that he had enough energy and breath to do so and annoyance at his order.
She drew in a slow, calming lungful of air and folded her hands in her lap. “I suppose it is a good sign that you are—”
“Bad-tempered?” he inserted.
“Irascible. You are never like this, Zane. Do you want some more laud—?”
“No.”
She rolled her eyes. “Goodness, one would never mistake you for a soft-spoken man, now would they?”
Zane just groaned.
“Really, Zane, don’t you think—?”
“Dammit, Winifred, I’m not used to being sick.”
“You’re not ‘sick,’ Dr. Dougherty. According to Doc Graham, you have had a severe head trauma.”
“Hate being down,” he grumbled.
Winifred resisted the impulse to laugh. It was the first and only time she’d ever seen a chink in the gentlemanly good humor Zane always exhibited. Maybe it was a good thing for him to realize he was as human as everyone else. That even a physician had vulnerabilities.
But enough was enough.
Chapter Nineteen
The next afternoon Winifred rebelled. Yan Li dressed Rosemarie in a ruffled pink pinafore, and hand in hand Winifred walked Zane’s daughter down to the hospital and into Zane’s room. He was sitting in a chair by the window and Rosemarie made straight for him.
“Papa! Papa!”
Winifred lifted her onto his lap. Zane clasped his young daughter in his arms and held her tight. Over her pink pinafore-covered shoulder, he caught Winifred’s eye and tried to frown. Then he tried to smile and couldn’t do that, either. A fist closed around her heart.
Zane closed his eyes and rocked Rosemarie to and fro, murmuring things Winifred couldn’t hear while Rosemarie played with the buttons on his pajama top and chattered on and on in a spate of nonsense syllables. Zane responded as if they made perfect sense.
Finally he set her onto the floor and she toddled over to Winifred and threw her little arms around her knees. “Up,” she demanded.
Winifred shot a look at Zane and caught her breath. His gray eyes were wet and shiny. Oh, dear Lord, had she done the right thing in bringing his daughter? Zane had been so...so... Well, lately it was hard to know what was best to do.
Rosemarie sat on her lap, playing with the buttons of the blue dimity shirtwaist she’d donned this morning, until she grew drowsy. She lifted the baby to kiss Zane, took her tiny hand and walked back up the hill to the house for lunch and a nap.
When she returned to the hospital that evening, Zane was wide awake and waiting for her.
“Tell me about you, Winifred,” he said with no preamble.
“Me?”
“How is it that you are here?”
