Reeve touched Maggie’s face again, and alarm made his voice gruff. Elena Kirk had indeed pursued him, but he’d never been in the habit of bedding other men’s wives, and he’d rebuffed her as gently as possible. “She wanted to go home, Duncan. Back to England. Not America. England. It affected her mind.”

“Now you’re saying that Elena was mad?” Duncan rasped in a furious whisper.

“Not mad. Lonely.”

“She had our sons and she had me!”

“She may have had the boys,” Reeve agreed without taking his eyes from Maggie’s fevered face, “but she never had you. You were too busy mining opals—too busy cavorting with your various mistresses. Little wonder Elena took to making up stories about lovers of her own.”

“Dear God, I wish I could believe that she’d never given herself to you.”

Reeve stood up and turned slowly to face Duncan. “What possible reason could I have for lying about it? After all you’ve done to me to avenge your imagined wrongs, I’d take pleasure in being able to tell you that your wife preferred me.”

Duncan looked taken aback, and when Eleanor entered the room an instant after Reeve had spoken, he strode out without another word.

Eleanor was carrying a bowl of water and a cloth. Without speaking at all she took the chair Reeve had left vacant by the bed and began bathing Maggie’s forehead. He wondered why his wife disliked the woman so, when she was obviously a competent and caring nurse.

“Could she lose the baby?” Reeve dared to ask. Eleanor dipped the cloth in the basin and wrung it out, then laid it to Maggie’s face again. “More to the point, Mr. McKenna,” she remarked without looking up, “she could die.”

That, the unthinkable, had not occurred to Reeve. His knees suddenly weak, he scanned the room for another chair and, failing to find one, knelt beside the bed. “No,” he whispered, remembering another cot, in another room and another country, where another woman had died of a fever, long ago.

“We’ll do our best to prevent that, of course,” Eleanor said airily. “The blunt truth is that the doctor won’t be able to do anything for Mrs. McKenna that I can’t. She’ll reach a crisis and then she’ll either live or die.”

Some of the mysteries of Maggie’s antipathy toward this woman were solved. “How the devil can you speak of life and death that way, as if this were a choice between two kinds of tea cakes?” he demanded in a raw whisper.

Eleanor’s slim shoulders moved in a shrug; she went right on trying to cool Maggie’s fevered flesh. “One learns to be philosophical in my vocation, Mr. McKenna.”

“Damn it, I don’t want you to be philosophical—I want you to fight for her!”