A Starving Nurse Healed A Wealthy Cowboy In Snow, Until He Made Her His World

Chapter 2

By morning, he was burning.

The fever came like a second storm, sweeping through him until his skin crackled with heat and his breath came in wet, rattling gasps. Nora had forced him onto the pallet of pine boughs and old blankets she’d rigged in the corner, and she spent the night in her splintered chair, starting awake every time his breathing changed, terrified each time that she would find him gone.

His mouth moved in delirium. Names she did not know, spilled out of him like blood from a wound. Charlotte. He said that one over and over, sometimes with fury, sometimes with a tenderness that made her throat ache. “Don’t let them take the water, Charlie.” Then, once, startlingly clear: “They were gray, like storm clouds.”

She bathed his face with snow-cooled rags. She boiled willow bark she’d gathered in a better season and spooned the bitter tea between his cracked lips, the only medicine she owned. His wound had begun its slow, angry protest against her crude surgery — the edges flushed and weeping, the infection moving in like a squatter claiming a house. She knew what was coming. She had seen it a hundred times in Chicago, in the wards where gangrene had whispered through the beds like a rumor. Without a real medicine, without rest, without anything at all, she would watch him die by the second sunrise.