Schulze, Dallas (32 page)

She started to turn and go back to bed, her thirst forgotten, but
something made her hesitate—a scrape of sound, a hiss of indrawn breath. Her
slippers silent on the polished wooden floor, she crept toward the kitchen.

Bishop stood near the dry sink, naked to the waist. Lamplight
flickered on the taut muscles of his back and shoulders, creating rippling
highlights that, at another time, might have put her in mind of statues carved
in ancient times. But at the moment, her eyes were riveted to the wad of bloody
cloth he had pressed to his side. On the floor at his feet was a lump of
bloodstained white cloth that she guessed must be the remains of the shirt he’d
been wearing. For an instant only, shock held her frozen in the doorway, and
then she was hurrying toward him.

“What happened?”

At the sound of her voice, Bishop spun toward her. The sudden move
pulled on his wound and jerked an oath from him. The color drained from his
face, leaving him ashen, the thick blackness of his mustache standing out in
vivid contrast. He swayed and Lila was beside him in an instant. She started to
slide her arm around his waist but he warned her off with a single word.

“Don’t!” He braced one hand against the edge of the sink and she
saw immediately why he’d warned her away. His right side was covered in blood
from the middle of his rib cage to the waist of his trousers.

“Oh, God.” The whispered words were a prayer as Lila fell back
away from him, the room tilting around her. It was like seeing an old, old
nightmare come to life. How many times had she dreamed of Billy’s death, seen
the hot rush of his blood as he died?

“If you faint, I’m not going to catch you.”

The harsh rasp of Bishop’s voice shook Lila out of the grip of
memory. She shook her head to clear it and drew a deep, calming breath. “I’m
not going to faint. But you may if you don’t sit down.”

“I’m all right,” he said.

She pulled a chair away from the table, spinning it with a twist
of her wrist and settling it behind him. “Sit.”

He obeyed, sinking carefully into the chair. Droplets of blood
fell from his side to spatter against the polished planks of the floor. He
cursed under his breath, cupping his hand over the injury. “I’m bleeding all
over the floor. I’m sorry.”

Lila gave him an incredulous look. “You’re sitting there bleeding
to death and you’re worrying about the floor?”

“The floor was clean,” he said as if that explained his concern.
“And I’m not bleeding to death.”

“The floor will wash and, if you’re not bleeding to death, you’re
doing a damned fine imitation of it,” she said sharply. “What happened?”

“I’m shocked by your language,” Bishop said, raising one brow in
mocking disapproval. Given his pallor, the effect was not what it might have
been.

“I doubt that.” Lila set a bowl of clean water and a towel on the
floor and knelt down beside him. “What happened?”

“I didn’t move fast enough.” He leaned back in the chair and let
her pull his hand away from the injury. “It’s a knife wound. It’s not as bad as
it looks.”

“It couldn’t be, or you’d be dead by now,” she said bluntly. After
moistening the towel, she began to wash the blood away so that she could get a
look at the injury.

Bishop felt almost removed from what was happening. The pain in
his side seemed a distant thing, a minor annoyance. He recognized the feeling
as a symptom of mild shock and loss of blood. He’d underestimated how badly he
was bleeding and had delayed returning home until he’d dealt with the aftermath
of the barroom brawl he’d been trying to stop when he was wounded. While it was
true that he was in no danger of bleeding to death, he’d lost more blood than he
cared to think about.

Ordinarily he would have insisted on taking care of the injury
himself. He’d handled worse, including once removing a bullet from his own leg.
He’d never liked other people near him when he was hurt. Like a wild animal, he
preferred to crawl away to lick his wounds and live or die on his own. He
didn’t know if it was the blood he’d lost or if he was getting soft in his old
age, but, for the moment, he was content to watch Lila work.

Her hair fell in a thick braid down her back, gleaming like a
banked fire where the lamplight caught it. He thought lazily of wrapping that
braid around his hand, using it to pull her close. The towel dabbed gently
against the slash across his ribs and he sucked in a quick pained breath,
jerked out of his hazy state. Fantasies of that sort were going to have to wait
for another time.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” she pronounced once the worst of
the gore had been cleaned away.

“I told you it wasn’t.” Tilting his head, Bishop studied the long,
shallow wound that started in the middle of his rib cage and cut down and in
until stopped by his belt. He’d bled like a stuck pig but it wasn’t a
life-threatening injury.

“What happened?” Assured that he really wasn’t going to bleed to
death, Lila sat back on her heels and looked up at him, her green eyes wide and
dark with concern. “And don’t tell me that you didn’t move fast enough.”

“That pretty much sums it up,” he said. “There was a fight at the
Lucky Dragon. One of the participants objected to me breaking it up. It was
nothing personal.”

“Nothing personal?” Lila’s brows rose. She turned the towel to a
clean corner, then washed a little more of the blood away. The wound was still
bleeding but not nearly as much as it had been just minutes before. “It looks
pretty personal to me. If this was much deeper, you wouldn’t be sitting here.”

“Considering the fact that he was trying to gut me like a
Christmas goose, I think I got off pretty lightly.” He saw her blanch and
immediately regretted his casual description. Reaching out, he touched his
fingertips lightly against her cheek. “It’s not that bad.”

“It’s bad enough,” she said huskily. “You should have seen a
doctor right away.”

“I told you before, we don’t have a doctor in Paris.”

“You said the barber was also a doctor.”

“I said he was the closest thing we had to a doctor,” he corrected
her, trying not to wince as she cleaned the wound.

“Then why didn’t you go see him?” she snapped, her voice quivering
on the edge of angry tears.

“Zeke was in the saloon when it happened—passed out in the
corner.” His mouth twisted in a rueful smile. “I suppose I could have had
someone throw him in a horse trough to wake him up, but I’m not sure his
medical skills would have been up to their usual high standards.”

“It’s not funny,” she snapped, tilting her head back to glare at
him. “You could have been killed.”

“I could have been but I wasn’t.” He could have asked her why it
mattered to her, but he wasn’t sure he’d like the answer.

“So you just decided to come home and bleed all over my clean
kitchen?” Her hands were a gentle contrast to the snap in her voice.

“I thought you didn’t care about the blood on the floor.”

“That was before I realized that this was all a joke to you. Why
didn’t you wake me?”

“I thought I could take care of it myself.”

“Then you’re not only slow, you’re slow-witted. Any idiot can see
that you couldn’t possibly clean and bandage a wound like this yourself. You
should have woke me up immediately. Even Gavin would know that much. And he’s
only twelve. It isn’t a deep cut but it certainly needs to be taken care of.
How did you think you were going to put a bandage on it?”

“I hadn’t thought that far.” It had been a long time since anyone
had scolded him, but there was no mistaking the tone.

“Even if you could have cleaned it, you’d probably have made it
worse by trying to twist around to get a bandage on it. You should have
awakened me right away. I’m your wife.”

“Sometimes that’s hard to remember,” he said softly.

Lila’s head jerked up and her eyes met his. He saw the color come
up in her face and knew she was thinking of the bed they slept in without
touching, of the intimacies they weren’t sharing. Seeing her discomfort, Bishop
regretted his words. He’d agreed to their bargain. It wasn’t fair to reproach
her for it now. Especially not when she was still pale with fear. Fear she’d
felt for him.

He had no right to expect her to be afraid for him, he thought as
she bent her head to her task again. He’d torn her life apart and had done
little enough to put it back together again. He was lucky she didn’t take a
kitchen knife and finish what Jack Michaelson had started.

Lila forced herself to concentrate on the task at hand. All that
mattered now was taking care of his injury. She could think about everything
else later. The kitchen was quiet as she finished cleaning the cut. Awareness
crept into the silence, as soft and subtle as a morning mist. She was suddenly
conscious of the solid male muscle beneath her hands. With every breath she
took, she drew in the faint, musky scent of him. A mixture of sweat and blood
and an underlying odor that she could only identify as Man.

“I have to get something to use as a bandage,” she said. She rose
and dropped the bloodstained towel into the bowl of water. “Stay here and don’t
do anything to open that cut up again.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he promised with a meekness she didn’t trust for a
minute. But she could hardly tie him to the chair in her absence. She’d just
have to trust that he had the sense to stay where he was.

It was a misplaced trust. When she returned a few minutes later,
Bishop was kneeling on the floor, dabbing at the spots of blood that marred the
polished pine. He looked up when he heard her enter and, for an instant, he
looked as guilty and almost as young as Gavin did when caught in mischief.

“You haven’t the sense the good Lord gave a turnip,” Lila said,
setting her hands on her hips and glaring at him.

“I haven’t opened it up again,” he said, sounding so defensive
that, despite herself, she felt her lips twitch.

“No thanks to your common sense,” she snapped, refusing to soften
her expression. “Get up from there and let me put a bandage on that cut before
you do yourself some further damage.”

After crossing the room, she bent to put her hand under his elbow,
offering what support she could as he rose to his feet. Straightening, he
caught his breath in a quick gasp of pain.

“Serves you right,” she said heartlessly. She bent to examine the
wound. “What made you think you were up to mopping the floor, anyway?”

“I wasn’t mopping it. I just thought I’d get some of the
bloodstains up.”

“Why are you so caught up in worrying about the floor?” she asked,
her tone not quite so sharp when she saw that he hadn’t done any fresh damage.
“Lift your arms a bit.”

“I don’t want the children to see the mess,” he said as he obeyed
her order and lifted his arms away from his body. “I may not be much of a
father but I’m the only one they have. They’ve known more than their fair share
of loss. I don’t want to scare them.”

Lila didn’t say anything for a moment. She couldn’t. Just when
he’d annoyed her beyond all bearing, he had to go and say something like that.
She cleared her throat.

“I’ll clean it up,” she told him, her voice a little huskier than
usual. “You just do as you’re told. If you open up this wound and start
bleeding again, you’ll wind up flat on your back in bed, and that’s not going
to do you or the children any good. Now, hold still.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

There was no bite behind the soft mockery of his acquiescence.
Lila gave him a halfhearted look of disapproval. She put one end of the soft
cotton against the small of his back. Holding it in place with the flat of her
hand, she leaned forward so that she could wind it around his uninjured side.
Because of the position and length of the cut, the only way to bandage it was
to wind the bandage around his lower torso.

Standing so close and all but embracing him, Lila’s senses were
filled with him. Her vision was filled with the solid wall of his chest. Every
breath she drew filled her head with the scent of him. She reached around him
and, for a moment, her face was practically pressed against his skin. She could
hear the steady beat of his heart—a solid, reassuring sound. When she drew
back, winding the bandage as she went, her breathing was not quite steady.

“What are you using for a bandage?” he asked.

“I tore up one of my petticoats.”

Out the corner of her eye, she saw his eyebrows go up. Though she
knew it was a mistake, she looked at him. “First you use strong language, then
you mention an article of intimate apparel. Next thing I know, you’ll be
chewing tobacco and carrying a gun.”

The laughter in his eyes was irresistible, particularly since she
could see the pain that lay under it. She sniffed and gave him a haughty look.
“It’s a good thing for you that I don’t have a gun. Your life might have been
in danger a time or two.”

His laugh ended on a soft huff of pain as she snugged the bandage
tight to hold the edges of the wound together.

“Sorry.” Lila’s teeth worried her lower lip. She hated knowing
that she was hurting him.