Cheryl Reavis by An Unexpected Wife Read Free Book Online Page B

That’s good. I’m...glad.”
    “I liked Mr. Markham very much,” she said after a moment. “We
would talk sometimes.”
    “Did he ever—” He suddenly stopped, unable to bring himself to
ask the question.
    “What were you going to ask?”
    “I— Nothing.”
    “He spoke of you once,” she said, and once again he thought she
was trying to second-guess what he might want to know.
    “He said you were his warrior son. And Samuel, his poet.”
    Robert looked away. He had thought he was ready to hear these
things, but he wasn’t. Had he not been such a hotheaded “warrior,” Samuel might
be alive today.
    He forced himself to push the conversation in a different, but
no less painful, direction.
    “The colonel—isn’t here?” he asked.
    “He and Maria and the boys left for New Bern three days
ago.”
    “Boys? There are...children?”
    “Three. Two are adopted. One, the youngest, is their birth
child. My brother had military business to attend to in New Bern and he wanted
his family with him. And Mrs. Hansen.”
    He looked at her sharply. “Mrs. Hansen?”
    “She helps Maria with the children. The boys are quite a
handful.”
    “You’re talking about Warrie Hansen?”
    “Yes. You would know her, I think.”
    “I did,” he said. “A very long time ago.”
    So, Robert thought. Now he knew where he could find Eleanor’s
mother at least.
    “How...long have I been...?” He couldn’t quite find a word to
describe his current condition. He felt as if he had slept a long time, but he
didn’t know why or how. He reached up to touch his forehead again. It still
hurt.
    “You arrived the day they all left,” she said.
    “Poor...timing on my part. Or perhaps not,” he added after a
moment, primarily because of the look on her face.
    “Given the circumstances,” Kate said, “it would have been
alarming for Maria to suddenly come upon you the way I did, but, given the state
that you were in that day, I think it would have been even worse. When you fell
in the hallway, you hit your head on the parquet floor. Hard. The army surgeon
says your collapse was caused by hunger and exhaustion from trying to travel on
foot through the deep snow. That, and the wound you received, I assume, at
Gettysburg. He says it left you—”
    “I know how it left me,” Robert said. He lived with the pain
every day and with being less than he’d once been both physically and mentally.
He was thirty-three years old, and he felt like an old man.
    But he suddenly remembered. “Mrs. Kinnard was there—when I was
on the floor.”
    “Yes,” she said.
    “I remember...bits of it. She was upset with me. It was
like...when the Canfield brothers and I tipped over...one of her outhouses.”
    She looked at him with raised eyebrows. “I can see why Maria
thinks Robbie may demonstrate a mischievous streak when he’s older.”
    “Robbie?”
    “Max and Maria’s little boy. He’s named for you. The other two,
Joe and Jake, are Suzanne and Phelan Canfield’s sons. Max adopted them after she
died.”
    Robert closed his eyes, his mind reeling. A nephew named after
him? Suzanne Canfield dead? And Eleanor. What had happened to Eleanor?
    “I shouldn’t be in here,” she said suddenly. She moved quietly
to the door, opening it slightly and peering into the hallway for some sign of
Mrs. Kinnard.
    “I think you should rest,” she said over her shoulder. “The
night you arrived, you were in no condition to either get or give explanations.
You’re better now, and you’re going to need all the strength you can muster if
you intend to try to make Maria understand why you did what you did. I don’t
think it will be easy. I know how I would feel if I were in her place and Max
had suddenly come back from the dead. Truthfully, I don’t envy you the
attempt.”
    Robert didn’t say anything. She was quite straightforward, this
new sister-in-law of his.
    “I have a favor...to ask,” he said, despite the
inappropriateness of doing so. “Two