“And what?” Cullen pressed.
“I’m afraid my father played her false.”
Cullen stepped closer, jaw clenched. “What did he do to her?”
Annalise’s face burned crimson. “Nothing, nothing,” she assured him, but her expression said otherwise. “He led her to believe she was coming here as his assistant when actually…”
“Actually what?” Cullen’s voice sharpened.
“Actually, what he wanted was for her to help with the children.” She hung her head.
After Cullen thanked Miss Partlow, he hurried back to the carriage and pulled himself up onto the driver’s seat next to Fergus.
“The lass was’na there.” Fergus stated the obvious. “Where are we bound now?”
Cullen sighed, resigned. “Back the way we came.”
Willa frowned, concentrating on the writhing contortions of the colt about to be born. The young stable boy had nearly fainted when she’d suddenly put her hand up into the animal’s birth canal and motioned frantically for his help.
“No, not me,” he’d stammered, and backed into a corner of the stall, collapsing down onto his heels in the straw. Molly’s heavy stamping and heaving in the stall had left him in obvious terror.
“You have to help keep me steady if one of her contractions squeezes my arm too tightly.”
His small, pinched face paled even more in the low light. She’d lost track of time, somewhere in the wee hours of the morning, of course. All creatures seemed to birth their young in the dead of the night. Young John had sought her out in the loft, shaking her awake.
Molly was one of the huge draft horses drovers used for hauling heavy loads of supplies, like barrels of ale. How she’d come to be in the motherly way, the gods only knew. Of course, Willa knew all about pregnancy and birth. She’d grown up with a father who had trained her in every eventuality a physician might face.
The mystery was why the stable owner had allowed Molly to be exposed to a situation where she would be bred. Keeping the large inventory of horses needed for stables on a coaching line was a very lucrative business. A powerful wheel horse like Molly represented a huge investment.
By the time Molly gave up a fine, well-formed colt and Willa found her cot above the stables, the sun was peeking through the forest of masts in Portsmouth Harbour. She prayed she could get a few hours of sleep before the innkeeper realized she was not at her usual station in the stable. He was not the sort of man who would overlook a late appearance even though said worker had labored through the night.
After a few tense moments of rolling from side to side, trying to get comfortable on the hard cot, she dropped into a deep sleep. The fog-filled dream that immediately claimed her consisted of a Scotsman droning on and on about the proper length of stitches for sewing up a sailor’s wounds.
When she awoke suddenly to straw-dust-filled beams of late sun coming through the loft windows, she at first thought she was still dreaming. Another Scotsman was droning on and on beneath the loft. Willa sat up with a jerk. She wasn’t dreaming.
“Wills—” The bellow from below came from the innkeeper himself. “Get yourself down here before I let you go for laziness.”
She pulled on trousers, a shirt, and jammed a soft-brimmed hat on her head before taking the loft steps two at a time to present herself to the owner. Thank Hera she slept with her breasts bound. Of course, in truth, there was not that much to hide, which made her ongoing charade that much easier to maintain.
This time the same two Scotsmen who had demanded a fast team the day before had returned. The older man had a face like a gloomy sky lined with striated, black storm clouds. The younger man had a face like… His face was one she knew well.
His was a deeply tanned face, weathered from years of shipboard service. The lines around his mouth looked as if smiles came more easily than frowns. A long, patrician nose missed handsome by an inch with obvious signs of being broken at least once. His tall frame and broad shoulders bespoke a strenuous life.
Her father had had shoulders like that. During bloody battles at sea, this man would hoist broken sailors over his shoulders and take them down to the surgery, where the floors were covered with sand to keep the surgeons and their mates from slipping in the blood.
Her thoughts caught her by surprise. In the short time she’d served with Dr. MacCloud, she’d resented, yes, maybe even hated, his presumption to replace her father as the Arethusa’s surgeon and physician. She had no idea she’d been cataloging to memory the many quirks and planes of his face.
Cullen would always remember the moment when Willa gave up. The moment the light faded in those glorious gray eyes. The dark brows normally raised in skepticism at something he’d said or done? Now they’d fallen, and he wished to God he knew how to get back that light and her arrogant, questioning looks.
They’d stood in the shade of the stable, arguing for nearly an hour while Fergus stood by, stoic and uncharacteristically quiet.
“Do ye not see my point, woman?” Cullen gave an angry swipe at the sweat gathering on his forehead.
“You don’t have a point. This is my life. I have to follow my heart.” Willa’s voice remained calm, but she tapped a tell-tale, nervous tattoo with the toe of one of her dust-covered boots.
Cullen hesitated, watching the innkeeper’s wife out of the corner of his eye. She walked into the courtyard from a nearby orchard he knew well. She held up two corners of her white, starched apron with the center below her waist weighed down and bulging with fat red apples. He followed
