Stephanie Mittman Read online

  “You know I can’t love you,” he said as he lowered his head and tasted first her temple, then her cheek.

  “I know,” she said, tipping her head back farther so that her mouth brushed against his as she waited for him to take possession of those lips.

  “And I won’t ever love you,” he murmured against the softness he could taste.

  “Of course not,” she agreed, leaving her lips parted slightly so that he had no choice but to kiss her fully, soundly, to take her head in one hand and her back in the other and pull her against him until he could feel her heart beating against his chest, feel the crazy throbbing of her pulse as it matched his own.

  “Just so there isn’t any misunderstanding later, Abidance, I am leaving Eden’s Grove,” he warned her, his fingers lost in the waves of hair piled on her head. This was madness. Insanity. If he weren’t a man of medicine, he’d think he’d been bewitched by some magician with a very strange sense of humor. And with every ounce of strength he had, he fought against the urge to just give in to it all—that it was all too big to fight, too strong.

  He could think of nothing else to say, no good reason not to go on kissing her all night and all the next day….

  High praise for Stephanie Mittman’s previous novels

  HEAD OVER HEELS

  “A delightful tale … Mittman’s latest effort will appeal to readers of LaVyrle Spencer and Debbie Macomber and everyone who loves upbeat and nurturing romances.”

  —Booklist

  “Award-winning historical author Stephanie Mittman proves that her storytelling magic translates easily in contemporary tales. Rich with emotion and complexity, Head Over Heels is a winner!”

  —Romantic Times

  “A wonderful, beautiful, heartwarming, magnificent debut … Head Over Heels is a love story from the beginning to the end with strong, compelling characters. With this wonderful offering Ms. Mittman has proven herself to be a force to be recognized in contemporary romance.”

  —Betty Cox, Writer’s Club Romance Group

  “[This] one demanded I finish it in one sitting.”

  —Old Book Barn Gazette

  A KISS TO DREAM ON

  “A Kiss to Dream On is a historical romance that has the typical Mittman Midas magic: a fun-to-read story line filled with two heart-wrenching, wonderful lead characters. Fans of the genre will immensely enjoy this novel even as they dreamily await more magic from the magnificent Ms. Mittman.”

  —Affaire de Coeur

  “Mittman joins the ranks of the greats in this poignant historical western romance.”

  —Oakland Press (Pontiac, Mich.)

  “A VERY POWERFUL BOOK … Ms. Mittman deserves heaps of awards for writing some of the best Americana romance around. Ms. Mittman brings daily life into focus so well that you feel like you are stepping into these people’s lives. The depth of understanding is unbelievable.”—The Belles and Beaux of Romance

  THE COURTSHIP

  “INSPIRING … WELL-WRITTEN … Stephanie Mittman brilliantly infuses vitality and freshness into the … love triangle between a woman and two brothers.The Courtship is a splendid piece of Americana that entertains while teaching a lesson on the pioneering days of women’s rights.”

  —Affaire de Coeur

  “PASSIONATE, HUMOROUS … this story of star-crossed lovers is bittersweet and poignant.”

  —Rendezvous

  “Mittman, who does sweet historical romance to perfection, delivers her finest in this gentle tale. [Her] characters are, as always, endearing and well-developed, but here she enriches her story by giving them seemingly insurmountable obstacles.”—Publishers Weekly

  Also by Stephanie Mittman

  HEAD OVER HEELS

  A KISS TO DREAM ON

  THE COURTSHIP

  SWEETER THAN WINE

  THE MARRIAGE BED

  This book is dedicated to the following people, who made it possible:

  Jennifer Po, dear friend and wonderful nurse, who brought me dusty, antiquated texts on brain surgery from the late 1800s.

  John Mangiardi, M.D., neurosurgeon, who spent hours on the phone with me and helped “diagnose” Abidance.

  Robert Whitfield, pastor of the Centerport Methodist Church, who spoke with me, lent me his own books, and even invited me to Easter services.

  Shelle McKenzie, my sister, who read the manuscript and told me where it needed tweaking.

  Alan Mittman, husband, confidant, friend, who listened to every word, rubbed my back, and offered encouragement, advice, and unqualified love.

  My friends at LIRW—Roberta Gellis, Pam Burford, Myra Platt, Julie Righter, Happeth Jones, and especially Bernardine Fagan, to name a few, who stroked me and coddled me and forgave me when I was late with articles for the newsletter!

  And especially to readers everywhere who wrote or E-mailed and told me to stay at my desk and keep working even though the sun was shining and the trees were calling.

  Thank you all.

  1898 EDEN’S GROVE, IOWA

  I KNOW, I KNOW,” ABBY MERGANSER SAID, SHAKING her head as she stood in the doorway of Seth’s office with yet another steaming pot of soup for his dead sister. “I keep telling myself she’s gone yet I still keep making all her favorites.” She shrugged, or maybe she was just raising her shoulders against the cold. Seth wasn’t sure.

  “What is it this time?” If it was anything but her potato-leek soup, he was turning her away, sending her home, or back to the newspaper office where she no doubt caused more trouble than she was worth to her brother, Ansel.

  “Potato-leek,” she said, stepping around him. He hated that uncanny ability she had to know what he wanted before he did. Confidently—because Abidance Merganser was always confident—she added, “but if you don’t invite me in out of the cold, it’ll be as freezing as I am.”

  He watched her as she took over his office, just the way she’d taken over his sister’s sickroom, just the way she took over The Weekly Herald, heck, the way the girl took over everything. “I have patients to see,” he told her, following on her heels, his mouth watering as the smell of her soup filled the air.

  “They must be very small,” she said, looking around his waiting room as she removed her hat and shook her head, letting loose those chestnut curls of hers. “I hope I didn’t step on any of them.”

  He wanted to shout at her, No, don’t take off your hat, don’t stay, but settled for asking her if that was any way to talk to her elders.

  “No. I usually ask them if I can get their canes for them,” she answered, pulling off her fine kid gloves. “Or their teeth.”

  A cane. He felt almost old enough for one, surely old enough for a rocker, especially around Abidance Merganser, who never walked but danced her way around the edges of his life.

  “You want some butter on your bread, Seth?” she asked him, reaching into her bottomless basket and pulling out a spread they’d be proud to serve at the Eden’s Grove Grand Hotel.

  “Dr. Hendon,” he corrected. With Sarrie gone it was only right to return to proprieties. After all, Abby was barely half his age.

  She looked at him in utter disbelief, as if he had suddenly grown a second head and had shaved it bald.

  “Dr. Hendon, is it?” she asked, not even having the decency to hide her smirk. “Sarah always said you weren’t half as smart as you looked.” And this from the looniest member of the looniest family in Eden’s Grove. Well, not counting her father, the reverend. Years ago Seth had looked in his sister’s bird book and found that mergansers were the closest relative of loons. The book had understated the case—obviously the author had never met the Mergansers of Eden’s Grove. After an embarrassed glance at him, Abby stumbled on as she held her glo
ves. “That didn’t come out right. Sarah thought you were the smartest man alive. She just always said that men in general—like it always says in the ‘Dear Miss Winnie’ column in the Herald, when it comes to matters of the heart—”

  “Speaking of the Herald, don’t you have to get back there?” he asked, wondering if the soup was worth having to listen to Abby quote that awful Winifred Dunbury on the superiority of women, the way she and Sarrie used to do. That was, when Sarrie was well enough to tease him. In the end, it was Abby—and that damned Winifred Dunbury—not he, who could still make his sister smile.

  “I’ve hurt your feelings,” Abby said, contritely, her wide eyes suddenly awash with tears. Amazing how she could be so lighthearted one minute and so crushed the next. Just watching her exhausted him. “Worse, I’ve made you think that Sarah—”

  “I don’t have any feelings to hurt,” he told her, enjoying her wide-eyed shock. “And you haven’t betrayed Sarah. But you do have work to do, and so do I, young lady.”

  “Seth Hendon! I am not a young lady. You act like I’m ten years old instead of nearly an old maid.” Lord help him, now she was unbuttoning her coat and settling in for the duration.

  “You can just leave the soup, Miss Merganser, and I’ll eat it at lunchtime. Just leave a cover on it, all right?” He opened his supply cabinet, pretending to check it, praying she’d just leave him alone, let him be miserable, let him grieve for what he had been unable to prevent.

  “At lunchtime,” she agreed, cheerful once again as she carefully folded a napkin next to his bowl and—he should have expected it—one beside hers. “That’d be about half an hour ago, Seth.”

  “Dr. Hendon,” he corrected yet again, as if there were any hope of getting through to the girl.

  Huge hazel eyes searched his face. “I miss her. I miss telling her how I feel and having her laugh at me. I miss planning and plotting with her. I think a hundred times a day that I should tell her this, or tell her that. I worry about her and then realize there’s nothing to worry about anymore.” She sat down in the chair beside his desk and played with the soup she’d ladled into her bowl. “I miss her so much that it hurts, and I don’t know what to do with the pain.”

  You swallow it, he thought. You bury it under a hundred layers of dispassion. But this was Abby, incapable of either, and so he merely nodded, afraid that if he spoke there was a chance she’d hear the tears that were lodged in his own throat.

  “Please let me hold on just a little longer. Let me come for lunch and we can talk about her until I’m ready to let her go. Please, Seth. I’ll never call you Seth in front of anyone else, I promise. But here, please, let it be like it was when Sarrie was still with us.”

  He’d learned a lot in all those years of medical college—to set broken bones, to suture torn skin, to let a fever run its course. But they never taught him a thing about grieving, about losing a patient, about moving on.

  He didn’t know if her way was the right one—maybe a clean break was what was called for. Maybe they were both supposed to close the door on their memories of his sister and lock it forever.

  “Of course, my father says that praying will see me through this,” she said, twisting the napkin in her lap. “But then he says that about everything. And Ansel refuses to let me talk about her. But I’m terrified that if I don’t, I’ll forget her, forget the way her eyes saw right to my soul, forget the way her smile held the darkness at bay.”

  “You know, you and she were quite a pair of hellions once upon a time,” he said, remembering the time they’d been left in his care when he was seventeen and both his parents and Abby’s had gone to see a traveling troupe performing Shakespeare. He settled into his desk chair and spread a napkin across his lap. “Not that you’ve changed much. But once, when you were maybe three and Sarrie was close to six, I got stuck watching you two, and you convinced me that it was a good idea to play hide-and-seek. Do you remember that?”

  Abby shook her head. A tear slipped from the corner of her eye and he caught it with his thumb, studying it for a moment.

  “You two hid and I couldn’t find you anywhere. I called and called and told you that the game was over, but neither of you answered. I was afraid you were dead.”

  It was a word he almost never said. He had a thousand others in his bag of tricks, all meant to soothe the people left behind. Funny that a doctor, a man of medicine, who was supposedly an expert in matters of life and death, should have such an aversion to a word composed of four little letters. Dead. Sarrie, his beloved little sister, was dead. Despite the years of schooling he had gone through to change the outcome of her illness, despite the trips to hot springs and the steady diet of liver, despite his fervent prayers, Sarrie was dead.

  “Eat your soup,” Abby told him. “It’s getting cold.”

  “So tell me,” he said, fighting the surge of misery that threatened to pull him under. “Which instrument do you see Sarrie playing?”

  “What?”

  “Which instrument?” He sipped his soup as he watched her mind working—saw it on her face when the pieces fell into place.

  “Not in Sarah’s obituary!” she begged him, holding the palm of her hand against her forehead. “Tell me I didn’t print an error in Sarah’s story.”

  “You commended her into God’s ‘bands.’ I just wondered if she was playing the oboe or—”

  “Hands! Hands. It was God’s hands. Ansel promised me he corrected all the mistakes this time. I wanted Sarrie’s story to be as perfect as she was.”

  He lifted her chin with the same fingers that had dug out bullets from a couple of shoulders, sewn together a good score of wounds, and laid cool cloths upon a thousand brows. “It was perfect,” he said softly. “Sarrie would have gotten a good laugh out of it. Like it was a private gift from you to her.”

  “Thank you, Seth,” she said softly. “I’ll try to think of it that way.”

  “And will you try, too, to wear your glasses?” he chided. “You’re less likely to make so many embarrassing mistakes that way.”

  “I was wearing my glasses when I set Sarah’s type. I do admit that when I wrote that Mrs. Binder’s new hut was the latest style, I had pulled off the glasses because, well …”

  Abidance Merganser felt herself blush. She could hardly tell him it was because he’d come into the shop and she’d wanted to look her best. Not while he was chastising her to grow up. “There was something in my eye.”

  “I’ll miss those mistakes of yours,” he said, looking at her with those soft, sky blue eyes, all rimmed with dark lashes that she herself would die for.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll never stop making them, I’m afraid,” she said, willing that to be what he meant, knowing in her heart of hearts that it wasn’t.

  “Just like you’ll never grow up?”

  “Just like you’ll never notice that I already have,” she shot back. She stood, ignoring the pain in her head that seemed to never go away, and began collecting the dishes and plates from their lunch, “I’m not ten anymore, Seth. I’m a grown woman. And it’s time you noticed.”

  “Don’t be so quick to wish away your youth, little one. What I wouldn’t give to be your age again. To feel that life still held promise, the way it does for you. To see the future ahead of me instead of lying crippled in my wake.”

  “Sarah would be rolling her eyes at you right about now, you know.”

  “I suppose,” Seth agreed. “But it wouldn’t change the way things are.”

  Beside the basket, into which she was depositing the remnants of their lunch, was a pile of letters. She was always impressed by the number of doctors Seth corresponded with, asking for advice and giving it. He was keeping up to date on the latest surgical techniques and medical discoveries, he always said.

  She, by comparison, wrote only to her cousin Anna Lisa in St. Louis, who she visited every summer for a month, and sometimes to their mutual friend Armand, whom Anna Lisa was sweet on.

  The top
letter on Seth’s pile was to the Medical College at Philadelphia. The words to replace me in my practice here leaped out at her, and, not caring whether she was prying, not caring if Seth saw her reading it, she squinted at the words on the page until he pulled the letter out from under her nose.

  “You’re not serious,” she said. “You wouldn’t really leave Eden’s Grove, would you?”

  He leaned back in his chair until his long legs were stretched out straight in front of him. “The minute I can find someone to replace me.”

  “Because of Sarrie?” she asked.

  “Because I’m done,” he said, softly. “Because I don’t want to be the one to tell another mother that the child inside her is dead. Because I don’t want to have to tell another husband that there isn’t anything more that can be done for his wife.”

  “Because despite all you did, Sarrie died.”

  Her bluntness shook him. She could see it, but all he said, as softly as he said everything else was, “Because I’m tired of fighting God and losing.”

  “And all the times you’ve won? Do they count for nothing?”

  He shrugged, as if he couldn’t remember a single victory over death, when there had been so many.

  “So you’ve decided to run away? To leave your practice, leave Eden’s Grove, leave me?”