Read Online A Midwife Crisis by Lisa Cooke - Free Book Online Page B

frazzled state, she’d failed to notice him.
    “I heard you was working down at the doc’s office now.”
    “Yes, but just a few days a week.”
    “If’n you was to marry me, you wouldn’t have to work nowhere.”
    Except in his kitchen? “I’m working because I want to.”
    He snorted. “Ain’t proper for you to work so much alone with that man.”
    “Dr. Keffer is a respectable gentleman, and his daughter and housekeeper are there at all times.” Her response probably sounded defensive, but Harold hadn’t heard the pain in John’s voice. Defending him seemed natural at the moment.
    The bell at Frank’s door jingled again, causing Harold to glare at the person entering behind her. She sighed. That could only mean one thing.
    “Mornin’, Katie.”
    “Mornin’, Randy,” she answered before she even saw his face. She didn’t need to. She’d seen Harold’s.
    “Dagnabbit!” Harold fumed. “Do you have to be everywhere I am?”
    “Listen, you old coot—”
    “Gentlemen!” Katie interrupted before they came to blows. “It’s actually good that you are both here.” She waited, hands lifted to keep them apart, until they relaxed and faced her. “This arguing and bickering is keeping me from getting to know any of you.”
    “He started it,” Randy said, pointing an accusing finger at Harold.
    “ You started it when you walked in the door,” Harold answered, and the hackles rose again.
    “Hush!” Both sets of eyes rolled toward her sheepishly. “I have decided the only way to solve this problemis to separate the three of you when it comes to seein’ me. Harold”—she tipped her head in his direction—“you get Mondays. You’re welcome to come out to the cabin on Monday evenings for dinner, if you’d like, and we can get a chance to talk a little.”
    Turning toward Randy, she said, “And you can have Wednesdays. Freddie gets Fridays.”
    “And the doc gets the others?” Harold asked in a tone Katie was beginning to find annoying.
    “The doc isn’t courting me.”
    “Ain’t the doc married?” Randy asked, his ire suddenly directed away from Harold.
    “He’s a widower,” she murmured, digging into her reticule for her money. Time to get ink and get out before she had to defend John to Randy too.
    “So you’re workin’ alone with the doc, and he ain’t married?”
    Too late. His tone matched Harold’s, and she’d had about enough of both of them. “I’ll work with whoever I’ve a mind to, and if you two don’t like it, I’ll just marry Freddie.”
    Whipping around to the counter, she slammed the coins on the top with more force than she’d intended. Poor Frank jumped, knocking his glasses sideways on the end of his nose.
    “I need a bottle of ink, Frank.”
    Frank hurried to retrieve a bottle from the shelf behind the counter and hand it to Katie. It wasn’t like her to raise her voice or slam her hand on countertops. It felt pretty good, despite the fact Randy, Harold, Frank, and the gang around the potbellied stove stared at her in disbelief.
    She stuffed the bottle into her reticule and walked to the door, head held high. If they didn’t like this side of Katie Napier, so be it. She liked it fine.
    The trip to the store had been the perfect remedy for the tension that had built between her and John. By the time she returned, he was back to normal, smiling his tight-lipped smile and rearranging the instruments in his medical cabinet with the speed of a snail. No wonder his office was still a mess. The man couldn’t even put away a bandage without moving it ten or eleven times.
    They talked of nonpersonal things, such as Shakespeare and the weather, until it was time for her to take the three-mile hike back to her cabin. Her mind whirled through a thousand possible reasons why John would say such a thing about his wife’s death, while she traipsed down the wagon road and across the creek to her home.
    That whirling mind was the only explanation she could give for