Cassandra Austin

Cover Page

Praise

Excerpt

Dear Reader

Title Page

Books by Cassandra Austin

About the Author

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Author’s Note

Copyright

Flint Hills Bride

“…an exciting, action-packed love story with a very special twist.”

—
Romantic Times Magazine

Hero of the Flint Hills

“A beautiful love story with vivid descriptions…a definite keeper to be cherished.”

—
Rendezvous

Please address questions and book requests to:

Harlequin Reader Service

U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3

Dedicated to my sisters:

Nora, Sally, Nancy, JoAnn, Bobbie and Mari.

Special thanks to Warren S. Freeborn, Jr., our retired family doctor and friend, for assistance with medical aspects of this book.

Any errors that remain are purely my own.

Kansas, autumn, 1879

D
r. Adam Hart leaned against the unyielding back of the train seat. He had almost reached his destination; his chance to practice medicine in the Wild West was a few short miles away.

Only one thing kept him from feeling completely elated. He reached into the inside pocket of his suit coat and withdrew the letter Doreena Fitzgibbon had given him just before he boarded the train. “Don’t open it until you’re underway,” she had whispered. He had hugged her and kissed her and promised yet again to send for her once he was settled.

He didn’t read the letter now, but tapped a corner of it thoughtfully against his chin. She wasn’t coming west. “I’m confident,” she’d written, “that once you have served the year you must in that backward town, you will come home and we can be married.”

Hadn’t she listened to his descriptions of this land? Didn’t she recognize the wonderful opportunities that were here? Wasn’t she as eager as he to live surrounded by the unspoiled prairie?

Evidently not. Perhaps he had made the whole adventure sound a little
too
exciting. And the gunfights. He should never have mentioned the gunfights.

At least, he thought with a sigh, she had given him a year. The glowing reports he’d send home were bound to win her over, then she would consent to move here and become his bride.

The train slowed for the Clyde, Kansas, station, and Adam strained to see out the dirty window. A crowd had gathered on the platform under a banner that read Welcome Dr. Heart.

Adam grinned. He could ignore the misspelling with a greeting like this. As the train pulled to a stop, a brass band started playing…something. It was hard to tell what since the musicians were hardly together. Still, Adam was warmed by the sentiment. He gathered the two bags he had with him, stepped into the warm autumn air and received a rousing cheer from the crowd.

A rather stout man who couldn’t have been much more than five feet tall stepped away from the others, motioning them to silence. “George Pinter, at your service,” he said as the band tapered off. “Mayor of this fair city.”

“Mr. Pinter,” Adam said, “this is indeed a warm welcome.”

Pinter beamed. “My buggy is waiting to take you on into town,” he said, directing Adam along. “Your trunks will be delivered straight away.”

Adam climbed in beside the little man and they started toward the main part of town, a few blocks away. The band struck up again and the crowd followed.

“We have a house for you to live in that should serve well as an office besides,” Pinter shouted over the noise. “I’d suggest you eat next door at the Almost Home Boarding House. Miss Sparks sets a fine table.”

Somehow the particulars of living and eating had not occurred to Adam. He had always pictured Doreena keeping house. “Until my fiancee arrives, I might do that,” he shouted back.

The buggy stopped in front of a tidy little twostory frame house with a narrow porch nestled between currant bushes. As Adam stepped out of the buggy, he noticed the house next door, a much larger affair with a porch that wrapped around two sides. A few late flowers bloomed in the flowerbeds beside the steps. That house, he realized, would suit Doreena much better than his tiny one.

He shook off the thought. When Doreena came west, it would be because she loved him. Where they lived was immaterial.

Pinter had opened the front door and was waiting
for Adam to join him. The house had obviously been scrubbed clean. Adam walked across the front room, furnished with a desk and a few mismatched chairs, and peeked into what looked like a well-appointed kitchen.

Turning back into the room, he discovered that

several of the townspeople had followed them in. More crowded the porch and street outside. The band began another tune.

“There’s a bedroom here you could use for examinations,” Pinter shouted, indicating a door. “Upstairs is another. Don’t worry about dinner tonight. I’ll be over to get you.”

Adam thanked him, setting the two bags on the desk.

“Well, come along, folks. Let’s let him get settled. Your trunks’ll be along.”

Pinter shooed everyone out. Adam followed, closing the door behind them. He then turned and leaned against it, closing his eyes. His dream of practicing medicine on the frontier was about to come true. The perfection of the moment was marred by a touch of melancholia. It might have been homesickness, but he was inclined to think Doreena’s letter was the cause.

He was reminding himself that Doreena would come around when suddenly the door behind
him
shook with someone’s forceful knocking. He swallowed a groan at the abuse to his shoulder blades and flung open the door. He. wasn’t sure what he
had expected. The mayor again, perhaps, or the men who had promised to bring his trunks.

What he found was a tall young woman who seemed as surprised to see him as he was to see her. She was covered from neck to toe in a simple dress of blue calico dotted with brown flowers. Her dark brown hair was pulled savagely back from her face and bound at the nape of her neck. A few wisps of hair had escaped their confinement and curled around her face, softening the effect quite charmingly. Dark circles around her brown eyes made them seem too large for the pale face.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” she said. “I was looking for Dr. Hart.”

“You’ve found him,” he said, stepping aside and opening the door wider. She remained standing on the porch.

“You’re…younger than I expected.” She waved a hand as if deciding that was unimportant. “Grams is quite ill,” she said. “Can you come see her?”

“Your grandmother?” Were they both ill, or was this exhaustion he saw in the young woman’s face? Adam moved quickly to the desk and grabbed the smaller of the two bags. He joined her on the porch and closed the door.

“I’m Jane Sparks,” she said, leading the way. “I run the boardinghouse next door.”

In a moment they were inside the large house. She led him past a tidy parlor, through a dining room and into the kitchen. The smells that greeted him
told him her dinner preparations were well underway.

She led him into a tiny room just off the kitchen. A narrow bed took up most of the available space. A woman Adam guessed to be in her sixties lay covered to her neck with a white sheet. As they entered, her body was racked with an agonizing cough. The granddaughter hurried to her side, supported her shoulders and held a handkerchief until the spell passed.

“Pneumonia,” Adam whispered. He didn’t need to see the pale skin and overbright eyes, or touch the hot dry brow. He could hear it in the sound of her breathing and the dreadful cough.

“Yes, I thought so,” Miss Sparks said. She showed him the blood on the handkerchief before she tossed it aside. She dipped a clean cloth in a basin of water, wrung it out and smoothed it carefully on the fevered brow. She must have left this task only a few minutes before. “Is there anything you can do for the pain?”

Adam set his bag on the edge of the bed across from Miss Sparks and found his stethoscope. He needed to know how far the infection had developed. He listened to the rattle in the woman’s lungs while the granddaughter made soothing sounds.

“When she’s awake, she’s in such pain it breaks my heart. I just want her to sleep.”

The last was spoken just above a whisper. The
emotional and physical strain the young woman was under was clearly visible.

“I could give you something to help you rest,”

he suggested gently. “You could find someone else

to care for her.”

She didn’t look up from her task. “I can’t,” she said. “I have to be here.”

Adam slipped the stethoscope back into his bag. “Her lungs are full of fluid,” he said. “My recommendation is to drain them.”

“Drain them?” The dark brown eyes turned in his direction and he was struck again by how large they were.

“With a tube, uh, into the chest cavity.” Adam touched his own side. He knew it sounded pretty awful. Well, it
was
pretty awful. But he had seen it done successfully, and he knew he could do it. “She’s drowning, actually, in the infection.”

“This would…hurt her?”

“There would be some pain, yes, but she’s in pain now, and it could save her life.”

The young woman shook her head and turned her gaze back to her grandmother. “I can’t let you hurt her.”

“I don’t mean to hurt her,” he said. “I want to save her. If I don’t do it, she will die. It’s her one chance.”

Tears welled up in Miss Sparks’s eyes and she brushed them away. “Don’t you understand? It’s already
hopeless, and she’s already had more pain than she can stand-than I can stand.”

Adam clinched his teeth as the dying woman took another rattling breath. “Is there other family I can talk to?” he asked.

“No. We only have each other.” She turned to him and spoke fiercely for the first time. “I won’t let you experiment on Grams. If you can’t help her sleep, then there’s nothing you can do.”

Adam hesitated. This wasn’t how he had imagined starting his practice. He had planned to save his patients. Especially the first one. “Miss Sparks, you don’t need to be afraid of modern medicine. I’m a trained physician. I want—”

“Thank you for coming, Doctor. I’m sorry I bothered you. If you’ll just tell me what I owe you…”

She had dismissed him. She returned the cloth to the basin, repeating a task she had doubtless done a thousand times. He watched her for a moment, then found the bottle of morphine. He poured a tiny measure of the powder into a folded paper and crimped the edge closed.

Handing it to her, he told her the price and said, “Dissolve this in a little water and see if she can drink it. I don’t think you’ll need more than that.” He hoped she understood the last as his prediction on how much longer she’d have to nurse her grandmother.

She reached for it cautiously. As soon as it left his fingers, he turned from the room. She caught up
with him in the kitchen and paid him the money without another word.

He made his way back through the dining room and down the hall, wondering who would finish preparing the meal while she waited for the old woman to die. He knew he shouldn’t be angry with Miss Sparks. She thought she was protecting her grandmother. Still, he couldn’t help thinking that a dramatic rescue of such an ill patient would have gotten his practice off to a better start.

Jane returned to her seat beside Grams just as she heard the front door close behind Dr. Hart. What had she expected? That the doctor would tell her Grams wasn’t dying, that everything would be all right? Had she expected him to offer a miracle cure the other doctors had not?

She shook her head. Of course not. Grams had taken ill almost three months ago and had been unable to leave her bed now for several weeks. Even if she survived the pneumonia, she would never be well. Dropsy, the doctors had said. Her heart was failing.

All Jane had expected from Dr. Hart was something that would stop the pain when Grams awoke. Every breath was agony for her grandmother, and all she could do was cry.

Jane fingered the paper in her hand. That was what he had given her, something for the pain. Then why did she feel cold inside?

Because he had put it into words. Grams was dying. Not in a few months but now. And he had forced her to make the choice to let her.

“Oh, Grams,” she whispered. “Did I do the right thing?”

When she thought of the doctor poking a hole in Grams’s frail side, forcing a tube into her chest cavity, which hurt already, Jane knew she had been right. She had to believe she was right.

She refreshed the cloth on Grams’s forehead one more time, then went back to the kitchen. With the door open she could hear nearly every breath her grandmother took. It had become the rhythm of her life these past few days, the slow labored inhale and exhale. With both dread and longing she waited for the moment when the breathing would stop. How could Grams take much more of this? And - how could she?

Adam’s trunks arrived shortly after he returned. He set to work unpacking them immediately, glad for the activity. The steady stream of patients he had imagined didn’t materialize. He checked his front door a couple of times and finally left it open so he’d be sure to hear a knock. All the time he was upstairs he listened for a voice from below. He opened the windows, thinking he might hear footsteps on his porch. He finished unpacking and returned to the front room, having been uninterrupted the entire time.

Uninterrupted if he didn’t count his own thoughts. He kept seeing Jane Sparks with tears in her eyes and that poor woman lying beside her.

He could have saved her. He still could. There was probably still time. But how would he convince the granddaughter? She hadn’t been willing to consider the procedure. And he didn’t know how to convince her.

If he were more experienced, had seen a little more death and had saved a few more people, he would know what to say. But he didn’t, and his first patient in his new home was going to die, probably within the next few hours.

He was pacing the front room, seething with guilt and frustration, when he finally heard footsteps on his porch. He turned toward the open door to find Mayor Pinter there.

“Evening,” the little man said. “Did you get settled in?”

“Pretty much,” Adam said, forcing a smile. “I hadn’t realized it was dinnertime already.”

“We eat a mite earlier here than in the city, I suppose.”

“I won’t complain about that,” Adam said, realizing how hungry he was. Wonderful smells had been wafting through his open windows and door all afternoon, smells he had tried his best to ignore because he knew they came from Miss Sparks’s kitchen.

“It’s nice of your family to let me come to dinner,”
he said, slipping into his suit coat as he joined Pinter on the porch.

“I don’t have a family,” Pinter said, preceding Adam down the steps. “I take breakfast and dinner at the boardinghouse. Got myself a permanent seat at her table. I recommend you do the same. Unless you got talents I don’t know about, it’ll likely be the best food you’re gonna find.”

The boarding house. So much for putting Miss Sparks out of his mind. Not that he would have anyway, Adam supposed, but he had been looking forward to a distraction.