CHAPTER ELEVEN
CADE WAS QUIET at supper, the only solemn note in a pleasant meal that left everyone else relaxed and contented. He didn’t seem to notice. He brooded, hardly eating anything, and excused himself to go into his office with one long, silent glance at Bess. She colored, and he frowned slightly at the reaction. That was the one faint glimmer of hope, that she still reacted to him physically. It was enough to build on at least. In time she might forget his cruelty and learn to care for him all over again. She was a totally different proposition now, no longer the frightened child she’d been when she left for San Antonio. A woman with spirit and the need to stand on her own two feet could take anything he, or Lariat, threw at her. She’d grown into a woman he could marry. He only hoped he hadn’t figured that out too late. He didn’t like the way Robert was flirting with her, or her shy response to it. Robert was nearer her age than he was, and not as hard a man. He’d worried all through the meal, but that faint color in her cheeks dispelled some of it. He went off to his study to work with a lighter heart.
Bess averted her eyes from his intense scrutiny. He had to know that she was still vulnerable. She’d lost her head in the truck and let him kiss her. She’d kissed him back, and now he probably thought she was dying for love of him. That could be why he was keeping his distance, although he’d given the impression in the truck that he intended to pursue her in earnest.
Maybe it was better that he backed off, though, she told herself. After all, she didn’t dare let him close now. Not only was she barren, but he was knee-deep in guilt. Her life was becoming more tangled by the day.
Meanwhile Elise was passing around a plate of homemade pound cake. Gary and Robert had their heads together discussing sales, but they paused long enough to have dessert.
“Cade didn’t wait for his,” Elise said with a sigh.
Gussie got up, looking uncertain but determined all at once. “I’ll take it to him,” she said, and several pairs of shocked eyes watched her carry it on a saucer, with a fork, to his office.
She opened the door and went in without knocking. Cade looked up from his desk, where he was sitting, brooding over columns of figures that wouldn’t balance no matter how hard he budgeted. He glared at Gussie.
“I didn’t poison it,” she said with forced humor as she put the saucer and fork within his reach and sat down on the edge of the worn leather chair.
“You might as well have,” he said coldly. “You’ve poisoned everything else.”
Gussie stared down at her folded hands. Only Cade and his late father had ever made her feel so helpless and inadequate. “There’s a reason for what you think you saw...the day your father died,” she said quietly.
“Yes, and we both know damned well what it is, don’t we?” he retorted.
Her head jerked up, and there was hurt and a certain amount of pride in her eyes. “Think what you want to about me,” she said. “It’s better than telling your mother the truth.”
She started to get up, but he slammed his hand down on the desk, startling her.
“What truth?” he demanded, his voice flat and measured with cold rage. “That you were having an affair with him? We know that already.”
“That’s a lie,” she said, meeting his glare levelly. “That’s a bald-faced lie.”
“You never denied it before.”
“My daughter never hated me before! Some of that is your fault, too,” she said. “It was because of your ceaseless animosity that I stretched the truth about Bess. All right, I thought I was helping her, but it didn’t bother me one bit to hurt you.” She sighed. “Until I realized that I was only hurting Bess more in the process.” Her shoulders slumped wearily. “You put me in an impossible position by accusing me in front of your mother. I couldn’t tell the truth about what happened, so I had to take the blame and ruin a years-old friendship.”
“Some friendship. Mother was your seamstress—”
“And my friend,” she said quietly. Her eyes met his. “She loved your father.”
“So did you, I gather,” he returned harshly.
“I hated him!” she said with sudden venom. Cade stared at her expressionlessly and she laughed softly. “Are you that shocked? Did you really think he was so lovable? He was hard and selfish to a fault! He thought nothing of having affairs, and it didn’t really bother him very much that Elise might one day find out about them!”
Cade rose slowly from his chair, his eyes blazing. “That’s not true,” he said. “My father was always faithful to my mother, except at the last, with you.”
“Sit down, young man,” Gussie said commandingly. “You’re going to get the truth, for Bess’s sake, and I hope you choke on it. Because you won’t be able to tell Elise any more than I could.”
“Are you capable of telling the truth?” Cade asked, but he backed down a little. She didn’t look as if she were lying.
“Do you remember the Brindle girl?”
Cade frowned. He had known her over ten years ago, when Bess was barely a teenager, long before he saw her as a woman and began to burn for her. Daisy Brindle had been a special girl to him at the time, and her sudden departure from Coleman Springs had hurt and puzzled him. Now he realized that he hadn’t thought about the girl in years. “Of course I remember her,” he replied slowly. “I was dating her. After Dad died, she left town...”
“Oh, she left town, all right,” Gussie said quietly.
Cade felt the smoking cigarette burning in his fingers. He put it out with deliberation, because a nasty suspicion was beating at the back of his mind. Daisy...and his father? Bits and pieces of memory came back, of Daisy’s sudden uneasiness when he brought her to the house, the tension when his father came around her.
“You’re beginning to get the picture now, aren’t you?” Gussie nodded. “Care to make a wild guess, Cade?”
“It couldn’t be,” he said slowly, but his eyes were admitting the possibility already.
“Well, it was,” she said, pushing back her blond hair angrily. “Your father just couldn’t resist the chance to cut you out with your pretty young brunette. He wasn’t a rich man, but he had a way with women. It was about the time you bested him riding that Arabian crossbreed you bought, and he lost face with his men. He got even, in the most elementary way. It was your little Daisy Brindle he was with in that hotel room. He phoned you, didn’t he, to ask you to bring some papers over to the Barnett Hotel. He phoned you from the desk, and I just happened to be coming out of the restaurant and overheard him give you the room number. When I looked outside and saw Daisy waiting for him, I understood the look on his face. He was going to let you find them together.”
Cade felt sick all over. “For God’s sake, why?”
“He thought it would pay you back for showing him up in front of his men, of course. He had a sadistic streak, as you, of all people, should know. He used it on Elise enough.”
He put his head in his hands. He didn’t even argue with her. It was all too obviously the truth. “Why did you get involved?”
“For Elise’s sake,” she said. “I thought I could head him off. Can’t you see what a scandal it would have been? Not only a younger woman but your younger woman. Inevitably you’d have lost your temper and it would have been all over town in no time. It would have killed Elise. She didn’t know he was having affairs at all.”
“Neither did I,” he said angrily.
“Well, Daisy wasn’t the first, I’m sorry to say. He knew that I knew about him; one of his lovers was one of my acquaintances, and she talked. I walked around brooding about it for a long time before I finally decided that I had to do something. Not for your sake but for your mother’s—there would have been such a scandal. Anyway he wasn’t prepared to find me knocking at the door of his hotel room. I threatened to go straight to Frank and tell him. Your father was breaking horses for us, and it was a very profitable sideline that he didn’t want to lose. He backed down and let me get her out, but I’d interrupted them at a rather...emotionally stressful moment,” she added uncomfortably. “I told her what your father was planning. She was trembling so hard that she barely made herself decent before I pushed her out the door. When I turned to tell your father what I thought of him, he started gasping for breath and clutching his chest.”
“So you ran to get help,” Cade said as he realized it.
“That’s exactly what I did,” Gussie replied calmly. “But you’d just arrived at the hotel and you saw me and made the obvious assumption. My good deed turned to tragedy and destroyed the one friendship I’d ever managed to keep. I hated you for that. Over the years, making you pay was my one reason for living. Now, of course, having watched my daughter face death because of that hatred, it all seems rather pointless. So does protecting you from the truth. Nobility can be expensive. I’ve paid too much for mine already.”
She got up, feeling less burdened. “I’m sorry. But it was time.”
“Past time.” He searched her face quietly. “It took me years to get over Daisy. I can’t imagine why, now. She was nothing but a tramp apparently.”
“She was in love,” Gussie corrected him. “Your father was her whole world. She didn’t know that he was only using her, and she felt guilty about betraying you. When he died, she was desperate to get away so that she wouldn’t involve her family in the scandal. I gave her some money and drove her to the airport.”
Cade sat back against the chair, his hands absently smoothing the arms. “Mother loved him.”
“Of course she did, Cade. You don’t stop loving people when they hurt you, any more than you throw a child out the door because it’s been bad. Love lasts. Frank never believed what you did about me, you see,” she said gently. “He loved me. That brings a kind of trust you can’t imagine unless you’ve experienced it. I’m selfish, too, and spoiled, and I can’t quite cope with life right now. But I never lied to Frank, and he knew it. It very nearly killed me when he died. I went a little wild, and Bess suffered for it.” She smiled ruefully. “But I think I’m growing up, just as she is. And you needn’t worry that we’re going to leech off you. As soon as Bess is able, we’re going back to San Antonio, and I’m going to start taking care of myself.” She got up. “Don’t tell Elise, will you?” she added, pausing at the door. “She’s suffered enough just from thinking it was a woman her own age. It’s hard for a woman to lose out to someone half her age and beautiful. Don’t do that to her. She’s learned to live with it now. Let it be.”
Cade only half heard her. He’d hated her so much, for so long, that it was hard to accept that she was innocent. He drew in a slow breath, wanting to say so many things that he couldn’t manage just yet.
“Thanks. For the cake,” he said stiffly.
“It’s safe to eat,” she murmured. “Elise hid the rat poison the minute I offered to bring it to you.”
A corner of his mouth tugged up, but he didn’t say anything else. Gussie left him sitting there, alone.
It was something of a shock for Cade, if he could believe Gussie’s confession. It was hard to think of it as a lie, because she hated him too much to bother with fabrications. He lit another cigarette and lifted it to his mouth. It seemed that he hadn’t known his father at all, not in any private ways. It didn’t bother him half as much that Daisy had betrayed him as it bothered him that his father hadn’t even considered Elise Hollister’s feelings. Gussie was right. His mother would have been destroyed if she’d found out. Even now the knowledge would hurt her terribly.
Well, knowing it did put a new complexion on something, he mused. At least it removed one barrier between Bess and himself. Not that there weren’t plenty left—her new attitude of coolness toward him in any way except physically, and her accident, which he’d helped bring about, were others. Then there were the old differences, of class and wealth. He sighed. Those were the hardest to overcome. His dark eyes went slowly around the room, critical of the used furniture and the flaking paint on the walls and the long, bare lightbulb hanging from the high ceiling on its twisted cloth cord. Bess was used to crystal chandeliers. Hell, even the apartment she was living in now was ritzier than his whole house.
He got up from the desk, forgetting the books, and went down the hall and outdoors. He had to clear his head and stop brooding about things. If Bess still cared for him after all he’d done to her, it wouldn’t matter that he didn’t have a lot to give her, he told himself. He had to hope that it didn’t anyway.
He hadn’t mentioned to Gussie that he’d told Bess about her affair with his father—now he’d have to set that record straight as well, and it was going to be uncomfortable. He’d made all too many mistakes recently. A world of them. He was cool with Bess because he didn’t want to play his hand too soon. But it was wearing on him, having to hold back, when what he wanted most was to sweep her into his arms and make passionate love to her. She wasn’t in any condition for that just yet, and she was pulling away instead of reaching toward him. He was living from day to day while she healed, trying to manage the confusion of his own new feeling for her. Robert’s adulation of her was his next biggest problem. He didn’t want to hurt his brother, but Bess was his. Somehow he had to nip that situation in the bud before it became troublesome. He couldn’t bear the thought of Bess belonging to anyone except him.
Meanwhile Robert was having the time of his life at the supper table entertaining Bess. She seemed to enjoy his wild stories about the cowhands and ranch life, and he was much too busy staring into her soft brown eyes to notice his brother Gary’s worried scowl or his mother’s curious glances.
It wasn’t until Gussie came back that Robert began to wind down. He had chores, he said, and reluctantly excused himself.
“If you feel up to it, I’ll carry you down to the barn tomorrow,” he told Bess, his blue eyes full of fun. “We’ve got a calf in there.”
“Just what she needs to recuperate,” Elise murmured dryly, “the scent of the barn.”
“Not to mention the hay,” Gary seconded.
Robert glared at him. “Why don’t you go and call Jennifer?”
Gary lifted his eyebrows. “I’ll do that. But you’d better remember a few things yourself, little brother,” he added with a meaningful stare that was instantly lost on Robert.
“He’s vague,” Robert said, grinning down at Bess. “But we have to overlook his behavior, because he’s in love.” He clasped his chest and gave a fair imitation of a Cupid sigh.
“Your day’s coming,” Gary warned.
“In fact, it’s closer than you might think,” he replied, his gaze warm and gentle on Bess’s face.
Bess frowned slightly. Surely that look didn’t mean what she thought it did? No, she moaned inwardly, not another complication. She liked Robert very much, but Cade was her heart. He always had been. Didn’t Robert know that?
Gussie walked with her to her room after she’d said good-night to Elise.
“Robert’s got a crush on you,” Gussie sighed. “I hope he knows it’s hopeless.”
“Is it?” Bess asked with a pointed look in her mother’s direction. “I like Robert. He’s very nice. Of course, he’s not rich,” she added cuttingly.
“You won’t forget soon, will you, darling?” Gussie mused. She smiled. “Well, I’ll work on you. I’ve already got Cade thinking.”
Bess frowned as she sat gingerly on the edge of her bed. “What do you mean?”
“Cade and I had a nice talk, that’s all,” she replied. “About old times and misunderstandings. If it means anything to you, I’m through playing matchmaker or devil’s advocate,” she added seriously. “If you want Cade so much, I won’t stand in the way or try to complicate things for you again. I was trying to protect you, I suppose. He’s a hard man in some ways. But he does have a sensitivity that his father lacked, so he might not make mincemeat out of you after all.”
Great, Bess thought bitterly. Now that she knew she was going to be barren, now that Cade was forever out of her reach, her mother had suddenly become her ally. It was hilarious, except that she didn’t have the heart to laugh.
“I don’t want Cade.” She forced the words out and avoided her mother’s eyes. “I’m going to focus on my career.”
“Bosh!” Gussie scoffed. “You’re meant for diapers and playpens, darling. You’d never be happy buried in business.”
Bess knew her face had paled, but she averted it. “I’m tired, Mama. I need to get some rest.”
Gussie watched her daughter curiously. “All right. I know I’m in your bad books. I even understand why. I won’t force my company on you. Maybe one day we can talk about some things that have made me so hard to live with. Until then we’ll take it one day at a time, okay? See? No coercion,” she added with a gentle smile at Bess’s curious stare. “No pleading. No tears. Just woman to woman. And I’ve told Cade that we’re not going to sponge on him longer than necessary, by the way,” she said as she paused at the door. “I think I may start a business of my own when we go back to San Antonio. But regardless of what I do, I won’t be sponging on you either,” she told her daughter. “I’m through being everybody’s cross. I’m going to become a powerful business magnate and conquer Texas. Good night, dear.”
Bess felt her forehead, but she didn’t have a fever, so maybe it wasn’t a hallucination. She could hardly believe what she’d heard. She wondered if Cade had any part in that transformation. What could he and Gussie have talked about?
She put on her gown and climbed under the covers, half hoping that Cade might come to say good-night. She knew he didn’t like Robert’s attitude, and she wanted him to understand that she wasn’t encouraging it. God knew why she should care, she told herself, when Cade was acting so distant. He’d been quiet and withdrawn since they’d come from San Antonio, almost as if he regretted his decision to let her and Gussie come here. She felt like an unwelcome visitor.
He was still apparently in his office, because he hadn’t made another appearance. But he didn’t come, and Bess finally fell asleep from sheer fatigue.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING Robert was in her room before her eyes were fully open, with a tray of coffee and ham biscuits that his mother had baked.
“How are you today?” he asked with a bright smile as he helped her sit up and then placed the tray across her lap. “You look pretty first thing in the morning.”
“Thank you,” she said self-consciously. She smiled back at him, but with reservations. He was quite obviously flirting with her, and she wasn’t sure how to handle it. She didn’t want to cause any more trouble than she already had, and she knew instinctively that Cade didn’t like Robert paying attention to her.
Her big problem was that she had to discourage Cade from getting too close. He was already jealous, even though it was probably just sexual jealousy. She didn’t dare let herself give in to him. Would it be wise, though, to encourage Robert’s feeling for her just to keep Cade at bay? She didn’t want to hurt Robert.
“Why the big frown?” Robert kidded. “Don’t you like ham biscuits?”
“I like them very much. Thank you,” she said. Her dark eyes lifted to his. “Robert...”
He drew in a steadying breath. “It’s a no-go, isn’t it?” he asked, searching her face. “It’s still Cade.”
She sighed miserably and dropped her eyes to the tray. “It’s always been Cade,” she confessed. “I must be a glutton for punishment. I know there’s no future in it...”
“Isn’t there?”
The deep, quiet voice at the doorway startled them both. Cade was lounging against the door, apparently drinking in every word. He wasn’t smiling, and the look he was giving Bess was as possessive as the bridled anger he directed at Robert. Bess felt her heart shaking and wished she could get under the bed. She hadn’t dreamed that he was nearby when she’d made that impulsive confession to Robert.
“I brought her breakfast,” Robert began.
“So I see. Thank you,” Cade replied politely. He didn’t say another word, but his face spoke volumes.
Robert sighed. “No harm in finding out how things stand. I’ll just wander along and jump off the barn.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Cade murmured, slapping the younger man affectionately on the shoulder as he passed him. “Try hanging out in church instead of bars. There are plenty of nice girls around if you look for them.”
“But not Bess,” he mused with a smile in his brother’s direction.
“Bess is mine,” Cade said, his eyes steady and covetous on Bess’s shocked face.
“Your gain, my loss. Well, anyway, Bess, I smoked him out for you,” Robert said, winking at her as he left them together.
Bess was red faced and confused. She met Cade’s eyes with determination. “It wasn’t fair to tell him that,” she said. “I’m not your personal property.”
“You’re going to be,” he replied calmly. “I’m sick to the back teeth of having to watch him moon over you.”
“But he doesn’t,” she protested weakly.
“Yes, he does,” he said seriously. “He’s sensitive and he’s already halfway in love with you. Is it worth hurting him to avoid me?”
She groaned. “Don’t say that.”
“It’s true. Besides they all know how it is with you,” he added, his eyes narrowing. “You’ve been my shadow for years. Even if you’ve convinced yourself that your feelings have changed, you won’t convince them without some work. You won’t convince me either,” he added, his eyes full of dark fires as they held hers. “I’d have to be blind not to know that you want me, and how much.”
Her face flamed. She couldn’t even deny it. “You yourself told me that desire didn’t have much to do with caring about people.”
“Sure I did,” he agreed. “And it’s true. But I don’t think what you feel is purely physical. I never have.”
She buried her face in her hands. He was stripping her soul naked, and she didn’t have a comeback. She had to be strong, she had to!
He watched her, frowning. “Is it so embarrassing to talk about it, for God’s sake?” he demanded. His gaze slid over her possessively, and she felt like her heartbeat was visible against the demure rounded neckline of her blue Juliet gown. “There was a time when you’d have given blood for my mouth on yours, and it wasn’t that long ago. Now you’re sitting there trying to pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“You don’t want any kind of a relationship with a woman like me, remember?” she asked in a ghostly whisper. “All you can offer me is an affair. You said so.”