“What!”
“That is what he said. I am afraid I know nothing more.”
“Does the man know I was gone?”
“No. I told him you were sleeping, that I would tell you Senor Austin had been injured and that they were bringing him home.”
“Thank you, Candelaria.”
The girl only shrugged. “We are friends… and you are Don Ramon’s wife.”
Carly said nothing else, just slipped into her night rail and pink satin wrapper then went into her uncle’s bedroom to see that it was prepared.
“Wake Rita,” she told Candelaria. “Have her boil some water and gather whatever supplies we’ll need to tend my uncle’s wounds.”
“Si,senora.”
But surely he wasn’t hurt badly, she thought, trying to imagine her seemingly invincible uncle any other way but issuing orders and bellowing commands. It was Ramon who was critically injured. It was her husband who needed her—and she wasn’t there.
CHAPTERTWENTY-TWO
She would have been pacing if her ankle hadn’t throbbed. Instead she sat before the window in her bedroom, her leg propped up on a pillow, worrying about Ramon and concerned for her uncle when the thunder of hoofbeats rent the air.
Tightening the sash of her pale pink wrapper, she limped to the door to meet the group of mounted men who pounded into the yard, raising a cloud of dust.
Near the front of the group, slumped over and tied onto his horse, the sight of her uncle’s bloody figure sent a shaft of terror slicing through her.
“Dear Lord,” she whispered through lips that went suddenly dry. She gripped the door frame at Cleve Sanders’s approach.
“It’s real bad, Miss McConnell.”
Numbly she nodded. “Hurry, bring him inside so we can tend him.” Sanders and three other men eased him down from the horse then carried his blood-soaked body up the back stairs and into the house. His breeches were ragged and dirty from the fall he had taken from his horse, his shirt stained crimson from the massive wound in his stomach. Another bloody hole seeped fluid from his chest.
“Take him into the bedroom.” Carly bit hard on her lip, fighting back the strangled sounds of fear that threatened to erupt from her throat. Suddenly all the heated words they’d said, all the disagreements, all her uncle’s machinations meant nothing. Uncle Fletcher was dying. He was hurting and he wasfrightened. In his own way he had been good to her. He was family. Her mother’s only brother. And she was all he had.
“Caralee?” He said her name so softly she almost didn’t hear him. She moved closer as the men laid him down on the deep feather mattress and began to pull off his boots.
“I’m right here, Uncle Fletcher.” She forced a smile and brushed the tears from her cheeks, then reached over and caught his hand. She sat down in the chair beside him, her legs no longer steady. On the opposite side of the bed, Cleve Sanders helped Rita strip away his torn and bloody shirt and begin to wash his wounds, but all of them knew the effort was futile.
A low sound of pain struggled up from his throat. He dragged in a breath and slowly released it. “Didn’t mean for it to end like… this.” He stared up at her, his cheeks sunken with pain, his skin as waxen as a candle. “Wanted… to be sure you’d be… taken care of. Your mother… would have wanted that.”
Her throat ached. She felt as if she might strangle. “You did your best, Uncle Fletcher.”
“Hoped… you and Vincent…”
“I know. Don’t try to talk. You have to save your strength.” Dear God, he was dying! Somehow she couldn’t make herself believe it.
“No… time for that.” His weak hold on her hand tightened faintly. “Want you to know… in my own way I… loved you. Never said that to anyone. Not… my way. Never told your mother either. Always… regretted that.”
She swallowed past the ache. “I love you, too, Uncle Fletcher. In the years after Mama died, I was so lonely. I came here and you took that loneliness away.”
He grimaced as a ripple of pain speared through him. “Wanted you to be happy… have the things your mother never had.” He started coughing and a trickle of blood seeped out from between his thin blue lips.
Carly pressed a clean white handkerchief against his mouth to blot the red liquid away, her hands shaking, tears flooding her cheeks. “I am happy, Uncle. And I have everything I want—I promise you that.”
He gazed at her with a measure of his old wily shrewdness. “You’re talking about… the Spaniard. You’re still… in love with him. Saw it almost from the start.”
“I know how you feel about him, Uncle Fletcher, but—”
