“After the accident, Uncle Curtis made it his mission to clean himself up and make himself a proper guardian, to find you and bring you back home. By the time he tracked you down, though, you were already living with the Thorntons. He saw how kind they were to you, how they took you in and provided for you as if you were their own child. Most of all, he saw that with them you would be free from the constant reminders of all you had lost. He wanted that for you, for you to grow up with love and happy memories. So he never pushed himself back into your life, but he did return to Galveston every year to check up on you. And on one of those visits he found me.”
The outskirts of town grew visible up ahead, and Mollie fell silent. The horses’ hooves thudded abnormally loud into the packed dirt of the road. The call of a jay echoed like a cannon blast.
“Who wrote the letters?”
Mollie started, her gaze swinging around faster than a gate on a well-oiled hinge. “What?”
He turned, his jaw still as stony as ever, yet his eyes . . . his eyes seemed almost vulnerable. “Who wrote the letters to my uncle about me?”
“A Mr. Alfred Yates.” She smiled slightly at the name. “He would sign his letters Alfie, which always made me giggle. But then, he and Uncle Curtis had known each other since they were boys.”
Jacob lifted his chin in a slow, exaggerated motion. “Ah, yes. I remember Mr. Yates and his wife from church. They were good friends of my . . . of Mr. and Mrs. Thornton.”
Why did he speak of them so formally? Mollie’s brow furrowed. It had sounded like he’d been about to call them his parents but stopped himself. Why?
“I had wondered how Curtis knew enough about me to make his recommendation to the council.” Jacob nudged his horse into a trot. “Now I know. He had a spy.” At the word spy, he kicked Galen into a canter, veering off the road and into the woods.
Where was he going? Mollie nibbled her bottom lip, unsure if she should follow or give him privacy to deal with his demons on his own. Jacob was intelligent enough to recognize the difference between a concerned friend and a spy. That’s not what worried her. What made her want to give chase was the fact that he seemed determined to erect barriers around himself, keeping people out. Uncle Curtis. The Thorntons. Her. If he kept pushing people away, he’d end up alone. She knew what being alone felt like, and she wasn’t about to let him fall prey to that miserable fate.
Decision made, she steered her gray in the direction Jacob had headed but held the horse to a walk. Only one place to the south made any sense as a destination. The graveyard at the old church. He’d want to see his family. Be close to them as he tried to find his way through the tangle he found himself in. She’d give him time to think things through before she intruded. Besides she had some thinking of her own to do.
Specifically about that kiss.
Dr. Jacob Sadler had kissed her. Ardently. And on horseback. She wasn’t sure why that last detail gave her such a thrill, but it did. It hinted at something unplanned and unrestrained. Something inspired by passion. True, he had apologized for it afterward, but an apology couldn’t undo the kiss. Couldn’t steal the memory of the way his lips felt pressed against hers or the way his hand had cupped her face and locked her in his embrace. For one blissful moment, she’d felt like she belonged, truly belonged, to another person.
Uncle Curtis had given her a home. He loved her and watched out for her, yet she didn’t feel as if she belonged to him. He had other family, or at least memories of other family. And Jacob. Whether the new doc wanted to admit to the relation or not, it existed.
She had none of that. All she had were vague memories of prim ladies in black dresses and white aprons who would slap her knuckles with a ruler if she misbehaved. No mother or father. No brother or sister. Just an orphanage, and then a group of street thieves who taught her how to pick pockets in order to line their own, and finally a kind man desperate to atone for his mistakes.
Oh, she didn’t doubt Uncle Curtis’s sincerity. He loved her. Just as she loved him. Yet that deep sense of belonging she craved always lingered barely out of reach.
Until Jacob kissed her.
She couldn’t let him push her away, not if there was a chance that he’d felt that belonging, too. Such a gift was too precious to toss aside just because things got a little difficult.
When the old church came into view, Mollie scoured the yard for sign of Jacob. His horse stood tethered near the large pine where she’d found the branches for Adam’s splint on the day of the accident, the doc’s coat draped over the saddle. She pulled her gray alongside Galen and dismounted. Making her way on foot, she circled to the rear of the church. Expecting to find Jacob at his family’s gravesite, her eyes immediately sought the marble angel Uncle Curtis had erected at his niece’s grave. It stood next to the tombstone marking Jacob’s mother’s final resting place, with his father’s stone on the opposite side. But no Jacob. The graves had been swept clean of debris, proof that he had been there recently, yet the man himself was not in evidence. Mollie scanned the entire graveyard to no avail. Then a dull thwack echoed from around the side of the church.
Jacob?
Mollie moved cautiously, not wanting to startle him—or draw attention to herself if whoever was making that noise turned out to not be Jacob. A second thud sounded as she made a wide arc around the corner of the building. She kept to the trees, using them to camouflage her approach.
A relieved breath escaped her as she recognized the new doc’s tall frame, wide shoulders, and the black leather vest he always wore. His back was to her as he strode up to the wall of the church and pulled something free from the old boards. A knife. She’d seen the sheath he wore on his belt but had never thought much about it. All men in these parts carried either guns or knives or both. Too many dangerous critters roaming about not to. Still, it seemed out of character somehow for an educated man, a doctor, to be wielding one—against a church, of all things.
Jacob tugged the blade free, then strode back to where he’d been standing several yards away. He turned, lifted his arm, and with only the slightest hesitation, flung the blade again. Merciful heavens! He’d nearly hit the exact same spot. She watched in awe as he repeated the procedure again and again. Each throw hit the same board in the old church wall, but some of the time the blade landed vertically, sometimes horizontally, and sometimes on a diagonal. And nearly every time, the blade landed farther to the right than the previous shot. At first she’d assumed the variation was due to natural error, but as she watched him, realization dawned. He knew precisely where each shot would land.
Mollie finally left the shelter of the trees, her curiosity luring her in. She’d nearly reached Jacob’s throwing spot when he yanked his blade free of the wall and turned. He froze, his gaze locking on her.
“What are you doing here?”
Mollie ignored the churning in her stomach, praying she hadn’t made a mistake by following him. “I didn’t want you to be alone.”
He lifted a brow and continued toward her. “I’m a big boy, Mollie. I can take care of myself.”
“Can you?” she challenged.
In answer he spun on the balls of his feet and flung his knife in a sharp, fluid motion. It landed diagonally, the blade piercing the same board all his other throws had hit, the slash it would leave behind closing off the letter A. Mollie stepped closer to the church, not quite believing what she saw. There in the wood stood four nearly perfect letters. E M M A. He’d spelled out his sister’s name.
Mollie followed him to the wall and ran her fingers over each of the letters as he pulled his knife from the wood and thrust it into the sheath at his waist.
“I’ve never seen such skill,” she said, pivoting to look at him.
A hint of a grin played at his mouth. “My m— er, Miss Nicole taught me. Darius calls her his pirate. Can’t say that I’d disagree, though she’s as good with numbers as she is with knives.”
“Why do you do that?”
His bro
w crinkled. “What?”
“Stop yourself from calling the Thorntons your parents? They raised you. Do you not think them worthy of the title?”
Fire sparked in Jacob’s blue eyes. “Darius and Nicole Thornton are worthy of any parental honor ever bestowed. They loved me like a son, and even after they had children of their own, they never once made me feel any less a part of the family. Any distance in our relationship was at my instigation, not theirs.”
His spirited defense shouted his love for them, his respect, his loyalty. So why would he feel the need to keep himself distant from them?
He must have read the question in her eyes, for he let out a heavy sigh and leaned his back against the church wall. “They wanted to adopt me,” he said at last. “Asked me every year on my birthday, in fact. But I always refused. Deep down, I think I was afraid that if I accepted their offer, I would forget the family I’d left behind. My mother. My father. Emma.” His voice cracked a bit on his sister’s name.
He turned his gaze aside and cleared his throat before continuing. “I didn’t want to forget them. They were my reason for living. My reason for becoming a doctor. Everything I became, I did to honor them. Their memories.” He grew silent for a minute, until at last he brought his eyes back to meet hers. “The Thorntons understood. They knew even before I figured it out that my keeping things separate was just semantics. I didn’t call them Mom and Dad, but I loved them like they were. I insisted upon earning my way with them, and Darius always found a job for me to do, paying me a wage to salvage my pride even as he and Nicole made room for me in their home as a son.”
A small ironic laugh erupted then, surprising Mollie, and perhaps Jacob as well. “You know, as soon as their other kids were old enough to start doing chores around the house, Darius started paying them a wage, too. Nicole said that it was a good way for them to learn how to be responsible with money and to reinforce the value of honest labor, but I think what they really wanted was to make it clear to me that I was no less a son to them than any of their natural children.”
Mollie blinked at the moisture that had gathered across her eyes. “They sound like lovely people.”
“They are.”
He held her gaze for a long moment, and Mollie felt it again. That connection. Belonging. As if they were kindred spirits, after a fashion. And why not? The new doc had said it himself earlier. They weren’t so different. Both orphans, both rescued, both . . . thieves.
Jacob pushed away from the wall, and Mollie glanced aside, hoping he hadn’t read her thoughts as clearly as he had last time.
“Come on,” he said, trudging off in the direction of the horses. “I’ll see you back to town.”
Mollie followed, though at a slower pace. Both thieves. The stubborn idea refused to release its hold on her mind. What if . . . ? She glanced at the man in front of her, then slipped her fingers into her pocket as if pinching a watch. Maybe, if she were exceedingly clever, she’d find a way to steal the new doc’s heart. It’d be risky. She’d have to use her own heart as bait, but the poor thing was half gone already, so she might as well give it a go. The fact that Jacob preferred to keep his emotions firmly locked away simply added another layer to the challenge.
Mollie quirked a grin as she watched Jacob ready their mounts. Guess it was a good thing she’d learned to pick locks as well as pockets during her days on the streets.
Chapter Seven
That night, Jacob lay in his bed and stared at the rafters. She’d worried about him, followed him, had not wanted him to be alone. Even after he’d been daft enough to kiss her. What madness had possessed him? He was her employer, for heaven’s sake. Such an impulse would only serve to impair their working relationship and create awkwardness between them. It had been a stupid move on his part.
Yet he couldn’t dredge up a single ounce of regret over it. Shoot, he could still taste her. Spicy. Sweet. Everything that was Mollie Tate. Jacob let out a groan and rolled over.
But he couldn’t escape the memories of that moment. Sensations so vivid they were nearly real. The compassion in her gaze as she reached out to him, the lightning that passed through him at her touch, the softness of her skin as he palmed her cheek and pulled her to him. The perfect way her lips fit against his. The shiver that coursed through her the instant before she began to kiss him back.
No, he couldn’t regret it. Not when that kiss had filled every abandoned, lonely place inside him that he’d thought impenetrable. Something more than lips had met when he’d kissed Mollie. Something more profound had linked them. Something that urged him to return again and again until the ties running between them were so reinforced that nothing would be able to tear them apart.
But how could he tie himself to a woman whose loyalty lay with his uncle? He hadn’t missed the censorious looks she’d cast his way when he avoided speaking directly to Curtis while they’d been at the farm. She expected him to mend fences, to forgive and forget. Jacob grabbed a fistful of sheet and twisted it into a painful band around his wrist. How did one go about forgiving the man who’d killed his sister?
As he lay there, a new image flashed before him—bloody and dark and full of death. Faces of the soldiers he’d been unable to save. Battle-weary eyes that had pleaded for relief, voices that begged for healing, hands that grabbed at his coat as he’d left them behind to tend the ones who had a better chance at survival. What would their families say if they knew he had ignored the pleas and let their sons, their husbands, their fathers die? Would they understand the horror of the situation, the impossibility of tending so many with such limited resources? Or would they simply hang on to the pain of their grief and cast their blame and bitterness upon him?
It took a strong man to step out of his own pain to see a situation from another’s perspective. Jacob slowly loosed his arm from the cotton manacle he’d fashioned from the sheet and closed his eyes against the realization he’d fought for so long. He’d believed himself strong because he was a survivor, but in truth he was weak. Too weak to forgive his uncle because the man had the audacity to still be alive. He’d been prepared to face his past as long as it was easy. Deep down, he’d hoped to find a grave, to discover that Curtis Sadler had paid the ultimate price for his crime. That would have made Jacob’s token forgiveness a simple matter of words. Instead he’d found the man very much alive, and worse—changed. Godly. Kind. A good neighbor. A man who saved children from the streets. A man he would respect under other circumstances.
A few mumbled words wouldn’t be sufficient. He’d have to live out his forgiveness day after day. Anything but simple. It would require strength of character, a strength he feared he might lack. Holding on to his pain, his anger, would be easier, but if he wished for the parents of the soldiers he’d been unable to save to forgive him, he needed to find the strength within his soul to forgive the one who had wronged him.
Help me, Lord. I can’t do this on my own.
How had Jesus been able to forgive his crucifiers as he hung dying on the cross? Jacob draped his arm over his eyes and pressed away the dampness. If he could find even a fraction of that nobility, perhaps he could—
A pounding from the front of the house interrupted his thoughts.
“Doc Sadler!” The pounding intensified. “Doc, come quick! Somethin’s awful wrong with Amy and the babe. Please, Doc. You gotta come.”
Jacob jumped from the bed, his own difficulties forgotten. He turned up the lamp and tugged on the pair of trousers he always kept on the chair by his bedside, a trick he’d learned during the war. Since he slept in a regular shirt, he could be dressed in under a minute.
He did up the buttons at his neck as he made his way to the front of the house, where the pounding continued. New fathers tended to be nervous, but Trent Walters already had three youngsters at home, and when Jacob had spoken to Mrs. Walters at church last Sunday, she’d assured him that she had no need of an examination. All her births had been straightforward, and she preferred to have the mi
dwife attend her. Many women were more comfortable with other women at such a delicate time. Besides, Mrs. Horeb had delivered each of her other children. The woman was quite capable.
Something must have gone wrong for Walters to be banging on his door.
Jacob grabbed the knob and swung the door inward. “Come in,” he said, narrowly dodging the man’s fist as it descended for another pound. “I just need to collect my boots and bag.”
“Hurry, Doc.” Walters lunged across the threshold and immediately started pacing the length of the parlor. “She’s been laboring for hours. Mrs. Horeb’s done all she can, but the babe won’t turn.”
A breech. Jacob hid his concern from the worried father. If the babe was trapped high in the pelvis, two lives could be in jeopardy, not just one.
“Amy’s slipping away, Doc.” The anguish in the man’s voice tore at Jacob’s heart as he stamped his feet into his boots. “She ain’t got nothin’ left to give.” Walters’s hand latched on to Jacob’s arm. “You got to save her, Doc. Please. Even if it means sacrificing the baby.”
Jacob straightened, meeting Trent Walters’s red-rimmed eyes.
The man swallowed and grimaced as if something sour had just been poured down his throat. “The midwife . . . she took me aside and told me that doctors have ways of taking the babe out. It . . . kills the child, but sometimes the mother is spared.”
A craniotomy. A vile procedure. One of the few that succeeded in turning his stomach when he’d studied it in school. Though it would only work if the babe presented head first and was simply too large to pass through the birth canal. With a breech . . . Well, that was even more gruesome.
Jacob clapped a hand to the man’s shoulder and gave it a firm squeeze. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I haven’t even examined her yet.”
Walters nodded, his jaw stiffening.
Jacob ducked into the surgery to collect his bag. He always kept it stocked for any emergency, but he took an extra moment to retrieve a small spool of fine silver wire from the locked medical cabinet. Something told him he’d be needing it.