Read Online Rocky Mountain Widow (Historical) by Jillian Hart - Free Book Online Page B

pace, it would be time to put him out to pasture before General, who he’d best go out and check on.
    Better than trying to imagine what Claire Hamiltonhad suffered alone in the storm before he’d found her. Since it was all he could think about, a change of scenery might help. Because as bad as this pain was, it wasn’t enough to keep his gaze from wandering toward the front room, where a fire blazed in the big stone hearth and, on the other side of the brushed-velvet sofa, he knew Claire lay motionless.
    An odd feeling burrowed into his chest. Figuring it for pity, he jumped off the chair with a groan, the chilblain pain spiking new and his ankle tormenting him enough to chase away the hollow of feeling deep in his chest. He wasn’t a man with feelings. He had one feeling—anger. And it drove him now as he lifted his jacket from the back of a chair.
    But he hadn’t taken two limping steps before he swung northward to where he could see the widow on her back with her knees elevated, draped in heated blankets. The blood stilled in his veins. “My grandmother will come sit with her, if you think there’s time for that.”
    â€œIt’s hard to say why she’s lasted this long.” Haskins dried his hands on an embroidered towel and hung it back up on the dowel over the basin. “Are you gonna let me take a look at that ankle?”
    â€œMaybe. When I get back from the barn.”
    â€œYou just keep walkin’ on it. That’s sure to make it better.” The doc rolled his eyes, as if he knew better.
    Joshua had no time for a broken ankle. He had the last of the work to get done before the midwinter storms hit in earnest. Until Thanksgiving, a man could expect a lot of sunny days—not warm, mind you, but bright enough the snow would melt and give him plenty oftime to finish up with leaky roofs and surprise chimney problems. Livestock moving and hauling in enough grain for the barn and supplies for the house. All of that required hard physical work. None of it would get done if he was favoring his ankle.
    Why he didn’t head straight to the door between the front room and the kitchen, Joshua couldn’t explain. He found his boots heading north when they ought to turn east and the roaring heat from the hearth burned against his outer leg as he stared down at Claire.
    He’d seen her unconscious and wounded too many times. He’d first thought the Hamilton brothers had found her, then he realized, when the doc explained, something equally sad had happened.
    Losing the promise of a baby was no small thing. He was old enough to remember the brother that was stillborn before Jordan—the last of the family—was born. And James’s wife had miscarried twice.
    The sorrow had been palpable the last time he’d seen that woman, even if she was a dreadful moneygrubbing leech—well, he’d promised his mother he would try not to dislike the woman so much, but it was like pushing a boulder uphill with his nose. He believed his sister-in-law embodied everything essentially female that he despised. Greed, manipulative behavior and selfishness.
    But Claire looked so innocent and guileless lying beneath thick buffalo robes, she hardly made a shape beneath the blankets. He couldn’t stop the roll of emotion—it had to be pity—that tumbled out of him. It was a surprise that he could feel even that. His heart had become too hard over the years. Ma said that it was asorry result of not marrying, that a woman would have kept him from hardening up and spoiling like forgotten milk in the cellar.
    He’d always figured it had more to do with his father’s death. He’d been the one to find him, twisted in agony, dead and stiff with rigor mortis, and Joshua had lost his faith in any member of the human race the moment he’d spotted his father’s body and pulled him into his arms.
    So, why did he feel anything at all when he was near