One Heart to Win (2 page)

Rose saw the angry tears welling in Tiffany’s eyes before Tiffany bolted out of the parlor. God, what had she done to the people she loved the most?

Chapter Two

T
IFFANY HATED FIGHTING WITH
her mother, hated it so much the painful lump of emotion was still in her chest when she went downstairs for dinner that night. But her mother took one look at her and understood, holding out her arms. Tiffany flew into them for a hug. Both of them laughed after a moment because Tiffany, who was above average in height, had to bend over slightly to get her hug.

Rose put her arm around Tiffany’s waist and led her into the dining room. Dinners were formal in the Warren household, guests or no, and mother and daughter dressed accordingly. Tiffany’s evening gown was coral with ivory sequins outlining the square neckline. Rose’s was navy blue with black lace, but her bright red hair countered the rather somber colors. Only one of the four Warren siblings had Rose’s dark-red hair, Roy, the third oldest. The other two boys were blond like their father. Only Tiffany with her reddish-gold hair got a blending of both parents’ hair colors.

“We won’t talk about it anymore until it’s time to pack,”
Rose assured Tiffany as they took their seats at one end of the long table.

“It’s all right, Mama. I convinced myself I wouldn’t be going. Now that I am, I have a few questions that are long overdue.”

Tiffany realized she probably shouldn’t have added the overdue part. A flash of wariness crossed her mother’s face before Rose smiled and said, “Of course.”

“I know that the Transcontinental Express can cross the country all the way to California in a record-breaking four days, and Chicago isn’t even half that distance. I appreciate that you’re going to travel with me that far, but why are you really going to stay in Chicago rather than return home to await the outcome of this courtship?”

“Is that really what’s on your mind?”

Tiffany chuckled. “No. I just feel if you’re going to go that far, I don’t see why you can’t go all the way to Nashart. Why spend two months in a hotel when—”

“Chicago is the closest big city that offers the comforts I’m accustomed to.”

“Fine, but doesn’t Nashart have a hotel?”

“It didn’t the last time I was there, just a boardinghouse. It might have one now, but I can’t hide in a town that size. Too many people will remember me. Frank would find out and he’d be breaking down doors.”

Tiffany looked at her mother incredulously. “Breaking down doors? You’re exaggerating, right?”

“No.”

“Then why didn’t he come here and break our door down?” Tiffany demanded, her tone taking on an angry note that, fortunately, her mother didn’t seem to notice.

“Because he knew I’d have him thrown in jail.” Then Rose added in disgust, “In Nashart, no one would blink an eye over such rambunctious behavior.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m still his wife and they all know it.”

“Why is that, Mama?”

There it was, floating in the air between them, the question that interested Tiffany most and that had never been answered to her satisfaction. Her parents had been separated for fifteen years but they hadn’t gotten a divorce so they could remarry. And Rose was still a beautiful woman. She wasn’t even forty yet.

Tiffany’s parents had met in Chicago when Rose had gone to visit her great-aunt, now deceased. Her last evening in the city, Rose had gone to a dinner party given by a friend of her aunt’s, who was the lawyer Franklin Warren had hired to negotiate some cattle contracts he’d come to the city to arrange, so he’d been invited to the dinner, too. After talking with each other that evening—all evening, actually—Frank impulsively got on her train the next day and followed her all the way to New York and began a whirlwind courtship that swept Rose off her feet. They were married a month later. And that’s about all Tiffany knew about her parents’ marriage.

When Rose didn’t answer the question, Tiffany added reproachfully, “I assumed when I turned eighteen, you’d finally tell me why I’m living here with you and my brothers are living in Montana with our father.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” Rose said evasively, and began eating her soup, which had just been served. “Your father and I just weren’t suited to each other.”

“You were suited long enough to get married and have four children.”

“Don’t be impertinent.”

Tiffany flinched. “I’m sorry. That really was uncalled for. But, Mama, please, I’m old enough to hear the truth, and I’d like to hear it before I actually meet him.”

Rose continued eating. It looked as if she was going to pretend they weren’t having this conversation. Tiffany hadn’t touched her own soup yet.

She was debating whether to turn mulish or give up when Rose finally said, “We married too quickly, Tiffany, before we found out how little we had in common. And he didn’t warn me ahead of time about that feud that was going to intrude on our marriage. I still tried to make a go of it. I did love him, you know.”

And still did, Tiffany guessed, but she didn’t say that. Rose was still evading the question. Telling her that she and Frank had nothing in common was purely an excuse so she wouldn’t have to discuss the real reason she’d left her husband.

Rose added, “I would have divorced your father if I’d found a reason to.”

“You mean another man?”

“Yes. But that never happened. And actually, I’m not sure I can even get a divorce. Not long after I snuck off, taking you with me, he said he would fight a divorce.”

“You
snuck
off?”

“Yes, in the middle of the night, so I could catch the stage first thing in the morning to get a head start on Frank. The railroad hadn’t connected to Montana yet. And my maid delayed him from finding out I’d left by telling him I wasn’t feeling well.”

Tiffany was fascinated. This was the first she’d heard that her mother had fled Montana stealthily. But if Frank hadn’t woken up and found her gone, then . . .

“You weren’t—sharing the same room?”

“No, not by that point.”

Tiffany wasn’t blushing over the subject, but she wondered why her mother suddenly was. Rose hadn’t blushed even once a couple of years ago when she’d given Tiffany all the information she would need to know about married life. But if her parents’ marriage had deteriorated to the point of their not even sharing the same bed, then Tiffany pretty much had part of the answer. Rose must have stopped wanting her husband—in that way. Either that or Franklin Warren had simply turned into a bad husband, one that Rose couldn’t stand living with anymore. And the latter was something Tiffany wanted to know
before
she showed up at his ranch. What if he prevented her from leaving if she decided not to marry Hunter Callahan, the same way he’d tried to prevent Rose from leaving?

But she gave her mother a reprieve from answering that question since Rose seemed uncomfortable with the subject. And Tiffany was still curious about how her mother managed to escape, especially since Tiffany now wondered if she might have to do the same thing.

“Isn’t a horse faster than a stagecoach?” she asked.

“Yes, and I knew Frank would catch up to us, so in the next town I bought a stage ticket to the nearest train depot, but we didn’t get on it. I hid us in that town instead.”

“I have no memories of that trip, none at all.”

“I’m not surprised, as young as you were.”

“So he got ahead of us?”

“Yes. It was much less nerve-racking knowing where he was than constantly having to look over my shoulder. I telegraphed my mother so she knew to expect him and turn him away. I wasn’t able to go directly home because of his stubbornness. For
two days he didn’t sleep, he just stood across the street from this house, waiting for us to show up. For three months he stayed in New York, banging on the door to this house daily. One day he even forced his way in.”

“Were we here yet?”

“No, I wasn’t about to go home until he actually left the city. You and I stayed with an old school friend nearby. Mama had Frank arrested, of course, for pushing past our butler and searching the house from top to bottom. She was furious with him by then because his persistence was keeping us from coming home. She let him rot in jail for a week before she dropped the charges at my request. He finally gave up after that and returned to Montana.”

“Maybe he hasn’t divorced you because he still hopes you’ll come back to him,” Tiffany said.

“Oh, I’ve no doubt of that. No matter what I said, no matter how nasty I got about it, he continues to think I’ll return to him someday.”

“Will you?”

Rose lowered her eyes to the table. “No.”

“And you don’t think that the fact that you haven’t tried to get a divorce gives him false hope? Surely after this long he wouldn’t still fight it, would he?”

“I don’t know. He said he’d go to his grave married to me. He’s a stubborn man. He just might. But like I said, I’ve never had incentive to find out.”

“You two write to each other,” Tiffany said incredulously. “Why haven’t you simply asked him?”

Rose smiled wryly. “We don’t write about ‘us’ in those letters, Tiff. We did for a while, at least he did. He was angry that I left without telling him, then he was heartbroken when I
refused to go back, then he got angry again. He finally got the message that I would only write about you children and nothing else. The one time he wrote about our marriage, I didn’t answer him for a year. When I finally did, I warned him you would be reading his letters from then on, so he confined himself to neutral subjects.”

All those letters Tiffany got to read were friendly in tone. Some were even funny, indicating that her father had a sense of humor. But all he ever wrote about were the ranch, her brothers, and people she didn’t know, friends of his and her mother’s in Montana, people she’d probably meet once she got there. Never in those letters did he address Tiffany directly, other than to say,
Give Tiffany my love
. But she also got to read Rose’s letters to him, and her mother always asked her if she wanted to add anything to the letters. She used to. She told him about learning to ice-skate with her best friend, Margery, and that Tiffany thought it was fun when she fell through the ice, but no one else did. She told him about David, a boy who lived on her block, and how she felt so bad for accidentally breaking his nose, but that he forgave her, so they were still friends. She told him about the kitten she found and lost and how she and Rose searched for it for weeks. She shared a lot in those letters—until she began to resent that he never visited her, not even once.

That resentment got worse, especially when her brothers would arrive at the town house alone. She used to stand at the door, staring at the coach that dropped them off, waiting for her father to step out of it, too. He never did. The coach would drive off. Empty. After the second time that happened, that’s how her heart felt anytime she thought of Franklin Warren. Empty.

She stopped standing at the front door with hope in her
heart and tears in her eyes, and she stopped reading Frank’s letters, or adding anything to Rose’s. She’d been nine or ten at the time, she couldn’t remember exactly. She only pretended to read them after that, so her mother wouldn’t know how painful she found her father’s rejection of her. It was the only way she could shield herself from something that hurt that much. She tried to put her father so far out of her mind that he didn’t exist—until she got a letter from one of her brothers that mentioned their father and clearly conveyed how much they loved him. Then the tears would stream down her cheeks before she finished reading it.

Her brothers didn’t know how she really felt either. The boys still talked about their father when they visited.
They
loved him. Of course they did, he hadn’t abandoned them as he’d abandoned her. They just didn’t notice that she wasn’t listening to them, or that she interrupted them to get them to talk about something less painful. She hated it when they had to leave to return to Frank. She had so much fun with them when they were here—playing with them, riding with them in the park, being teased by them. It felt as if they were a real family. Their departure always proved they weren’t.

“Did you lie to me, Mama? Do you actually hate him?”

“That’s a strong word that isn’t at all appropriate. He’s an infuriating man. His stubbornness rivals my own. He had the sort of arrogance that I suppose comes with carving an empire out of nothing. He was at war with his neighbors. Sometimes I think he actually enjoyed the conflict. Some days I was afraid to even leave the ranch, but his attitude was for me not to worry my pretty head about it. You can’t imagine how exasperating that was. I got so angry I could have ridden over to the Callahans’ and shot the lot of them. I might even have tried it if I
actually knew how to use a rifle. No, I didn’t hate him, I just couldn’t live with him anymore.”

“And you’re not going to tell me why, are you?”

“I did—”

“You didn’t! He cheated on you, didn’t he?” she guessed.

“Tiffany!”

“Just tell me yes. It’s the only thing that makes any sense.”