Eyes of Silver, Eyes of Gold (41 page)

“You told me you were all right, but I’ve heard about that washing business before. What did they do to you?”

She looked steadily at the sheets. “Nothing. I’m fine.”

“The hell you’re fine. Tell me.”

Mute, she just shook her head. He reached for her, thinking to hold her, try to get a response with a kiss, but she fought him. “No, no, don’t. You can’t, you can’t touch me like that. It’s no good. We’re over.”

He didn’t force her close but didn’t let go either. Holding her firmly by the lower arms, he waited until she stopped struggling. She still would not look at him.

“If we’re over anyway, what’s the difference if you tell me? Don’t you think I deserve to know why?”

She started trembling then, but didn’t answer. Frantically searching through everything he knew had happened, Rob’s words came to his mind again, and with them a tiny glimmer of light. “Must have been something in Chicago. Rob told me everything happened back home.”

Panicked eyes met his for an instant before jerking away. “No, not everything.”

“Yes. Everything.”

She broke then, sobs shaking her, and didn’t struggle when he pulled her against his chest. Too much strength could be a curse, leaving a person unable to bend, only break. Don’t let it be that way for her, he prayed. Let her be whole again.

“It was my fault. I shouldn’t have let them in. And then, then, when he told me, I turned to jelly inside. I knew it wouldn’t do any good, but I begged him, begged, on my knees.” The sobs were shaking her so hard he was afraid she would tear apart.

“Annie, Anne….”

“I knew it was no good, knew it wouldn’t help, and I did it anyway.”

He wondered whether anything he could say would help, if there were words that could ease her pain, and knew he had to try. “My love, listen to me….” He held her hard until the great gulping sobs lessened to smaller shudders. “Letting them in was a mistake, babe, just a mistake. Nobody gets through life without judging wrong sometimes. It’s a matter of whether you can fix things and go on, and we’ve fixed this. We’re all right again, so it’s over.”

She quieted a little more against him, and he knew she was listening. “You did do some good. Not with your father, but with Rob. When I got there he was so crazy with guilt he told me all of it, and it was because of you that he felt that way - told me. He could have lied, told me only what he had to.”

“You’d have forced him to tell.”

“I’d have forced him to tell where you were, but I didn’t know to look for more than that. If he hadn’t told me all of it, I wouldn’t have known I had to hurry, that time mattered so much.”

Her face was wet against him and her breathing ragged, but the sobs had almost stopped. She was listening intently now.

“Annie, last year…. That day in the yard…. I made a mistake not strapping on a gun the minute I found you, and it wasn’t that I was against marrying you, it was that I was against letting them make me do anything. So they almost killed Foxface and threatened to shoot the horses, and I gave in. But they could have shot everything in five miles to pieces and couldn’t have made me crawl.”

A tremor passed through her, but he continued. “That was last year. Now if somebody pointed a gun at you, really could hurt you, I’d crawl on my belly or my knees or do anything else. Maybe that’s part of why loving is frightening. I’d rather pay the price and have you than be invincible because I have nothing.”

He held her away from him. Tears slipped down her cheeks, but she met his eyes steadily. “When Rob told me, I thought maybe I’d die of fear sitting there. Begging to try to save the baby isn’t your shame, it’s theirs - for doing that to you.”

She whispered, “It wasn’t just the baby. It was you. To never see you again, never touch you, never be touched, knowing you’d think, you’d think - it would be worse than being dead. Even if I got away from them, how could I come home? How could I just come back and say I let them do that but now I want you to love me again?”

He shook her gently. “Listen to me, listen, there’s nothing anybody could do to you that would make me not want you - no hurt, no scar,
nothing
. These past days I’ve been afraid they broke you, ruined all the fire. I’d mourn, Annie - I don’t want you different - but I’d still want you. I love you.”

Her hands reached for his face then. “I thought you’d believe the note. I thought you wouldn’t come.”

“I don’t even know when I stopped believing you’d go. Maybe in the hay meadow, maybe after the race when you were sassing me about it. I always knew you wouldn’t sneak away like that. You’d tell me to my face.”

“I believed them - that even if you wanted to you couldn’t get there in time. The storm, the trains.”

He smiled at her then, a real smile he let lift the corners of his mouth. “You should have known better than that.”

“Yes. I should have known better than that.”

Her tears had stopped, but he kissed every bit of her face anyway. “How about I get some more food for you? Maybe soup stuff?”

“No, I can’t…. Not yet.”

“Then will you stop fighting it and sleep?”

“Yes. I promise.”

He spooned her tightly against him and fell asleep almost instantly himself, knowing she was at least on the way to healing.

First light was only turning the room from black to gray when something woke Cord. Anne was not curled against him but watching him, her face only inches from his on the pillow, her eyes huge in the dim light. She still looked haggard and drawn, a long way from right.

“Did you sleep at all?”

“I only woke up a few minutes ago.”

“It’s not enough. Go back to sleep.”

She reached out to him then, feelings clear in her mobile face, reflecting and reinforcing her words. “I can’t. I need you.”

Dismay brought him all the way awake. “No, it can’t be right. You need more rest, a doctor….”

“No, I need you. Please, Cord.”

He wanted to hold her, protect her, cherish her, but there was no physical desire in him. She looked so fragile. She needed his love, not his body, and that he could give her.

He slid gentle kisses across her face, felt the delicate skin of her eyelids, tasted the honey of her mouth. For long seconds he simply pressed his lips to the fluttering pulse point of her throat, grateful to have her there, warm and alive against him. He touched as lightly as he could, trying not so much to speak with his hands as to whisper. Her face, her throat - he pushed her hair aside, turned her on her side and slid kisses around to the nape of her neck, down her spine, across the sensitive skin under her arms, beside her breasts.

She gloried in the sensations, sighed his name, soaked in his touch, as he continued trying to love each inch of her skin separately. He tasted her here and there, rubbed first his cheek then his forehead against her ever so lightly. By the time he was once again at her face, he found it streaming with silent tears.

“Don’t cry.”

He tried to kiss away the tears, but they came too fast. He licked around her eyes then, washing away the hot wet drops. When he kissed her, the taste of her tears turned from salty to bittersweet. He cupped her face in his palms and began to tell her, to tell her just how much he loved her, how life without her would be just a prison sentence to serve, one joyless day after another to be gotten through somehow. He told her how she filled his life with color, light, and warmth, with the music of her voice and laughter, the grace of her movement.

Too much of his life had been lived in a withdrawn and silent way, but now he let go of the last of his reserve with her forever. As he whispered of love, the touch of her, taste and scent of her, sound of her, even her need, ignited the fire he thought he could not feel. He slid into her gently, drinking in the love she gave so freely as he possessed her. Afterwards, as he lay beside her, he could see in her face that he had in the end freed her, of the pain, of the shame, and of the rage.

Spent, they lapsed almost immediately back to sleep and didn’t wake again until afternoon - fourteen hours after they shut the bedroom door on the world.

* * *

Chapter 41

THE HOWLETT HOUSE WAS ALMOST
as large as the Wainwright mansion, yet when Cord left the bedroom and made his way downstairs he didn’t hear or encounter a single servant. The silence surprised him because last night the place had teemed with them. On the first floor he turned down the hall at the foot of the stairs toward the sound of voices.

Close enough to overhear the conversation, he understood why servants had been banished. Paul and Marie spoke in the dulled, weary tones of people who had each been making the same argument futilely for some time. The first clear words were Marie’s, edged with exasperation.

“I mean it, the sheriff would only make it worse. You have no idea what he’s like.”

Nearer now, Cord could also hear all of Paul’s answer. “Darling, we have to do something. I’m telling you I know what I saw. Those are
rope burns
on her wrists and her face is swollen - bruised. And I don’t believe the servants are making it up. He threatened to
hogtie
her right here in our house. The way she looked last night - we have to help her.”

Cord rarely took advantage of his own silent ways to eavesdrop, but waiting for a pause in the conversation before walking into the room had to be the lesser evil now, and Marie was already speaking again.

“It isn’t just a matter of my secret. You have no idea how it would be. People would get hurt, and you or I might be among them. When we were children he was never mean in any way, but he’s always been - unstoppable. There’s no way we can help that woman. Nobody can until he’s through with her, and that’s that. Martha said she seemed happy enough with him all told, and trying to interfere will make it worse.”

“My dear, he’s just a man. We have to do something. You can’t expect me to allow this in my house.”

It was nice to know Paul wasn’t buying any killer demon theories Frank or Ephraim had passed on anyway. When the unhappy silence stretched out, Cord walked into the room.

Paul gave a start and looked discomfited, aware they had probably been overheard.

Marie might believe every ugly story the rest of the family told, but she didn’t pretend a personal fear she didn’t feel. She said acidly, “Good afternoon. You certainly must have needed a rest.”

Cord didn’t see any reason to explain himself. “Been a long time since either one of us got much sleep. Is there a place in town I can get Anne some clothes? She won’t wear what she had on last night again.”

Marie’s eyes narrowed, and she exchanged a brief glance with Paul. They might suspect an excuse to keep them from seeing Anne, but Cord was more than willing to let his sister try to get Anne into one stitch of Clara Wainwright’s clothing again. The hollow-eyed stranger he had brought here last night had disappeared, and the tigress was back. She’d come down here naked sooner. He waited, half-expecting Marie’s reaction.

“She must be hungry. Can she wear some of my clothes and come down and eat?”

“Might not fit. Last year she wore things you left at the old house, but she’s more than five months with child now.”

Surprise erased some of the angry look from Marie’s face. She didn’t ask further permission, just gave a tug on a bell cord and told the maid who answered the summons, “Send Elise in, please.” When another woman in uniform appeared, Marie gave detailed instructions. “Do you remember the clothes that were delivered a year or so ago that were all too big? I had some redone, but some were just put away. Go through those things and give Mr. Bennett clothing for his wife. Choose things that would fit me loosely or be large. She needs everything - everything, you understand?”

Remembering Anne’s stories about life in Chicago, Cord watched this roundabout way of getting things done with interest, then followed the openly contemptuous maid upstairs. If her nose were any higher in the air, she’d trip and fall.

Elise stopped at the bedroom door. “You wait here.”

Cord leaned against the hall wall, looked at the many doors opening off it and felt no envy. Anne had lived this way once and didn’t want to again, and he agreed with her.

Elise returned with a pile of clothing folded neatly in her arms, topped with a hairbrush and extra hairpins. Her scowl was if anything more disapproving and purposeful than before. “I’ll just take her these.”

Enough of this nonsense was enough. “The hell you will. Give me that stuff and go scrub a chamberpot.”

When Cord returned with Anne to the sunny little room Marie had referred to as the breakfast room, Howletts were warned, for Anne had kept her shoes. She glanced back at Cord uncertainly over her shoulder as she entered the room, worried about her welcome. He increased the gentle pressure of his palm in the small of her back just a little, encouraging.

Paul started to rise, saw Anne, and fell back in his chair, too astonished to speak or move again. Marie struggled just as openly to accept the transformation. Paul showed signs of recovering first, glancing sharply at Cord, then back at Anne, and at Cord again.