Free Lynna Banning by Plum Creek Bride Page A

then let it drift shut. Surely she was sound asleep and none of this was really happening! Satisfactory? It was superb. Stupendous. Sensational! All the most exciting new many-syllabled words she had learned last week.
    “Oh, yes!” Erika breathed. “Oh, thank you. Thank you! I will myself make you some tea after the lesson, so will not interrupt Mrs. Benbow.”
    Mr. Zabersky made a brief courtly bow. “Until four o’clock, then.” He turned to leave, then pivoted back to her. “One small favor, perhaps?”
    “Anything,” Erika breathed.
    “Those delicious buns the housekeeper brought with the tea for Dr. Callender. Do you think possibly.”
    “I will make sure to have buns, yes. They are very good. Mrs. Benbow makes them with Demerara sugar and honey.”
    The old man’s black eyes sparkled. “Demerara.and honey,” he murmured. “A pleasure.”
    He retrieved his hat from the oak hat stand in the front hall and stepped to the door. “A most certain pleasure.”
    Erika felt like laughing and crying all at once. Could it really be that Mr. Zabersky, that kindly oldgentleman who had helped her plant wild iris and valerian, was her fairyfolk godmother?
    Ah, no, she chided herself. My mind runs on so, as if I am dreaming. Mr. Zabersky is surely my fairy god father!
    Jonathan raised his eyes from Theodore Zabersky’s medical file and stared at the door separating his office from the rest of the house. With one hand he loosened the silk cravat at his neck and ran his forefinger around the inside of his white linen shirt collar. Too much starch again. Ever since Tess—
    His throat closed. His housekeeper had lapsed into her own ways since Tess was no longer around to give orders. Mrs. Benbow always added lots of starch to his shirts. It was her stamp of approval in a way.
    He prayed Ted Zabersky would be his last patient of the day. After arguing for an hour with Cyrus Peck about his knee joints and trying to convince Mrs. Ellis to boil their water since their place bordered the creek, he had a splitting headache. His temples pounded, and sounds in the heated stillness of late afternoon were intensified until the smallest noise made him wince.
    Perhaps he was hallucinating. A moment ago he’d thought he heard Tess’s harp. He leaned forward, planted both elbows on his paper-strewn desk and dug his thumbs into his eye sockets. Tess. Would youhave lived if I’d taken you home to Savannah, as you wanted? Or did you despise me so much for making you grow up that you died simply to hurt me?
    “My beautiful, willful Tess,” he murmured. “So accomplished at playing the lady, but such a child at heart.” She wanted him all to herself every minute of the day. How could he be a husband to her and a physician as well? There simply wasn’t enough of him.
    He recognized the rage seething below the surface of his grief. Rationally he knew it was better than being numb, as he had been these past terrible weeks, but lately he felt as if his skin were on fire, stung with the brutal points of a thousand needles, like circulation just returning to frozen limbs. Psychosomatic, no doubt. Even so, the painful, almost exquisite sensitivity of the surface of his body persisted day and night.
    His mind still felt as if it was asleep, though. Part of him wanted to shake off the torpor crushing him; another part wanted never to wake up from the halfworld he’d escaped to. Maybe it would be easier to remain numb.
    Odd how the body roused itself, clamored for life, before the spirit was ready. He’d do some research on the phenomenon sometime in the future. If he was to have a future. At times he didn’t think so. Otherdays, like today, he knew he would not. Sensed he would die soon, was perhaps dying even now.
    Despite Mrs. Benbow’s overstarched collar, his head felt so heavy he could barely hold it upright If it weren’t for the threat of cholera in the town, he would let himself drift off and escape forever.
    And what about your