“Three?” Blair asked blankly.

Lee gave her a look of reproach. “Alan. The man you love, remember? The man you’re going to marry. He’ll be in on this, too. He’ll have to have a part in the new infirmary, too. And he’ll help us like he did yesterday.”

It was strange, but Blair could barely recall Alan being at the hospital yesterday. She remembered the way he hadn’t wanted to help the man who’d been crushed, but had he been in the operating room with them?

“Here we are,” Lee was saying, as she followed him into an enclosed place between gigantic rocks. He dismounted and unsaddled his horse. “I never thought I’d be able to bear this place again after what happened here.”

Blair stepped back as he unsaddled her horse. “What did happen here?”

He paused with the saddle in his hands. “The worst day of my life. I brought Houston here after the night we’d made love, and I found out that the woman I’d spent the most wonderful night of my life with wasn’t the woman I was engaged to.”

“Oh,” Blair said meekly, wishing she hadn’t asked. She stepped back as Leander pulled a blanket from his saddlebags and spread it on the ground, then watered the horses from a little spring nearby and began to spread food on the blanket.

“Have a seat,” he said.

Blair was beginning to think that she shouldn’t have come out here alone with him. He was easy to resist when he was being obnoxious and tossing Alan into the lake, but the last time they’d been alone and Lee had been this nice, they’d ended up with their clothes off and making love. Blair looked up at Lee standing over her, the sun making a crescent around his head and thought that, under no circumstances whatsoever, must she let him touch her. And she mustn’t let the conversation stray to what had happened between them. She must only talk about medicine.

They ate what Lee had brought and Blair talked to him about all the worst cases she’d ever seen in her life. She needed to remember the gory details, because Lee had taken off his jacket and stretched out inches away from her. His eyes were closed, and all he had to do was murmur a response now and then to Blair’s stories and she suspected he was falling asleep. She couldn’t help looking at him as she talked, those long, long legs, and she thought about how they felt next to her own skin. She looked at his chest, broad, strong, his pectorals straining against the thin cotton of his shirt. She remembered how his chest hairs felt against her breasts.

And the more she remembered, the faster she talked, until the words seemed to clog in her mouth and refused to come out. With a sigh of frustration, she stopped talking and looked down at her hands in her lap.

Leander didn’t say anything for a long while, and she thought perhaps he was asleep.

“I never met anyone like you,” he said softly, and Blair couldn’t help but lean slightly forward to hear him. “I never met a woman who could understand how I felt about medicine. All the women I’ve known raged at me if I was late picking them up for a party because I was sewing some man back together. Nor have I met any woman who was interested in what I did. You are the most generous, and the most loving, person I’ve ever met.”

Blair was too stunned to speak. Sometimes, she thought she had fallen in love with Alan because he was the first young man who hadn’t reviled her for the way she was. There were many times when Blair had tried to be like her sister, to be quiet and genteel, to not tell a man, when he said something stupid, that what he’d just said was stupid, but she couldn’t seem to help herself. And as a result of her laughter, of her honesty, she had never had very many suitors. In Pennsylvania, men had seen how pretty she was and been interested, but when they’d found out that she was going to be a doctor, they were interested no longer. And if they had stayed around, they’d soon learned that Blair was very smart, and that was death to a woman. All she had to do was beat a man at chess, or do an arithmetic problem in her head faster than he could, and there would no longer be any interest in her. Alan was the first man she’d ever met who wasn’t repulsed by her abilities—and Blair had decided that she was in love with him within three weeks of their first meeting.

Now, Leander was saying that he liked her. And when she thought of all the things she’d done to him in the last few days, the times she’d left him in the desert to walk back to town, she was astounded that he could stand the sight of her. He was either a remarkable man or he liked punishment.

“I know that you’ll be leaving town in a few days, and maybe I’ll never see you again, so I want to tell you what that one night we had together meant to me,” he said in a voice that was little more than a whisper.

“It was as if you couldn’t help yourself that night, as if my simple touch made you come to me. It was so flattering to my vanity. You’ve called me a vain man, but I’m vain only when I’m with you because you make me feel so good. And to have found the woman of my life…a friend, a colleague, a lover without equal, and now to have lost her.”

Blair was inching toward nun as he spoke.

Lee turned his head away from her. “I want to be fair about what has happened. I want to give you what you want, what will make you happy, but I hope you don’t expect me to be at the train station when you leave with Alan. I imagine that on the day you leave with him, I shall get rip-roaring drunk and tell my problems to some red-haired barmaid.”

Blair sat upright. “Is that what you like?” she said stiffly.

He looked back at her in surprise. “Is what what I like?”

“Red-haired barmaids?”

“Why, you stupid little—.” Instantly, his face was flushed red with anger, as he stood and began to shove the blanket, pulling it out from under her, and food into the saddlebags. “No, I don’t like red-haired barmaids. I wish I did. I was fool enough to fall in love with the most pigheaded, blind, idiotic, stubborn woman in the world. I never had any trouble with a woman in my life until I met you, and now all I have is trouble.”

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He slammed the saddle on the horse. “There are times when I wish I’d never met you.”

He turned back to her. “You can saddle your own horse, and you can find your own way back to town. That is, if you’re not too blind to see the trail, because you sure are blind about people.”

He put one foot in the stirrup and then, on impulse, turned back to her and took her in his arms and kissed her.

Blair had completely forgotten what it was like to kiss Lee, forgotten that overwhelming sensation. She couldn’t have told you who she was when he was touching her, because all sensation left her except for the touch of this one man.

“There,” he said angrily, drawing back from her, then having to give her a little shake to make her open her eyes. “I’ve had blind patients who saw more than you do.”

He walked away from her and started to mount his horse, then mumbled, “Oh, hell,” and saddled her horse for her and put her in the saddle. He led her a chase back into Chandler, and when he stopped before her house, he said, “I expect you at the hospital at eight tomorrow morning.”

Tags: Jude Deveraux Montgomery/Taggert Historical
Source: readsnovelonline.net