Chapter Fourteen
To Caroline’s amazement, next morning her wayward husband decided he had nowhere more important to travel, and was staying home. Sophie seemed as surprised as her stepmother.
“Daddy. Two days in a row?” she demanded at the breakfast table.
“Uh-huh.”
She paused in the act of spearing a pancake. “Daddy.” The voice was lowered dramatically. “Have you been fired?”
He laughed. “Nope, no such luck. Sorry if I’m in your way, Princess, but I can head on out to the stables, instead.”
Squealing a vehement protest, she jumped down from her own chair to clamber up on the rung of his. “Naw, you can hang around if you like. Me and Carrie can put up with you.”
“Zat so?” Ben put down his fork to squeeze the little girl’s shoulders, clad in a goldenrod-yellow tee that matched her pair of miniscule shorts printed with sunflowers. Then, still leaning sideways, he slanted a speculative look up at his wife. “Think you can put up with me today, Carrie?”
Calmly spooning sugar into her cereal, she refused to meet a glance she knew would be laced with irritating good humor. The man was a pain in the patootie, when you came right down to it. All that twinkling sense of mischief, all that lighthearted boyish delight—it tended to wear thin, after a while.
Or maybe her somewhat sour mood was due to the fact that she was still smarting a little from yesterday’s brush-off.
The house had been, thankfully, deserted, when they’d returned from their cowboy hi-jinks. Caroline had hastily slunk upstairs to shower and change before going out to track down Sophie, who, under the supervision of a watchful Tom out near the stable, was full of questions as to the reason for her father’s unexpected disappearance.
“He was here, and then he wasn’t,” Sophie complained, with reason. “Where did he go, Carrie?”
The little girl had found a small discarded tree branch and was busily drawing circles in the graveled drive with its tip. She didn’t seem terribly broken up by Ben’s absence—which she’d had six years to get used to—but more curious than anything.
Caroline’s questioning gaze had met Tom’s. He did one of those open-palmed shrugs in response. Well, then.
“Let’s go inside for a bit, have some milk and cookies, and I’ll tell you all about our adventure. How’s that?”
“Oh, uh, Carrie?” Tom stopped her as she was turning away. “That other matter, y’ know?”
“Yes, I do know.”
“All taken care of. Gone off, under supervision. I’ll fill Ben in on the details, and he can take care of things from here on.”
She was conscious of a great relief. “Thank you, Tom. I was wondering what had happened.”
In the kitchen, where Mrs. Wyeth was holding court with two housemaids, Caroline made herself at home with snacks from the pantry and two glasses of rich cold milk.
“I am discussing procedures here, Mrs. Taggart,” the cook icily informed her.
Caroline waved a negligent hand. “Go ahead, please. We don’t bother you. Sophie, run into the powder room and wash really well with soap, okay?”
As the little girl scampered away, the housemaids could see which way the wind was blowing and quickly made themselves scarce in another part of the house. When a tornado is bearing down, one is wise to get out of its path.
“Mrs. Taggart,” said Mrs. Wyeth, breathing heavily, “might I speak privately to you?”
“Of course. Please, have a seat.”
“No, I’d rather stand, thank you. Mrs. Taggart…” The woman’s face was mottled red, her expression murderous. “I want to register a complaint.”
Taking a sip, Caroline surveyed her employee over the rim of her glass. “Pray, do so.”
“Pray? No prayin’ about it. You’ve been treatin’ me like dirt since the minute you walked in the door, and I want it stopped.”
Both of Caroline’s brows arched. “Do you?”
The heavy jowls turned even darker, like a turkey’s wattles. “I been here since the first Mrs. Taggart hired me. Not a word of complaint from her, ever. And you ain’t got a patch on her, lady.”
“Indeed. And just exactly what problem is it I’m supposed to have caused?”
“You been disrespectin’ everything I do.” Standing flat-footed, massive arms folded across her chest, Mrs. Wyeth resembled nothing so much as a bovine statue. “You change the food I fix, the place I serve it, the time when it’s put on the table.”
“And this has caused you—”
“We had us schedules here,” she went on heavily, angrily. “We knew what time of the day things were goin’ on. Kids need schedules. They need rules and regulations. You’ve turned things upside down, doin’ whatever you want whenever you want. It’s playin’ hob with my own work, and I ain’t havin’ it.”
“You aren’t?”
“No. It’s gonna come down to you or me, and I can guess which one of us Mr. Taggart would want to stay.”
If she was guessing herself, Caroline mused whimsically, she might be quite right. It all depended on which was uppermost in Ben’s mind at the moment: food or sex. “Well, I’m certainly sorry you feel this way, Mrs. Wyeth, but I appreciate your bringing your concerns to my attention. Perhaps we might—”
The woman leaned closer, a sneer on her face. “I ain’t messin’ around here, Mrs. Taggart. We both know how you ended up on the ranch. We both know you weren’t his first choice, nor his second, nor even his third. I hear things. I hear what’s goin’ on. You just ask—”
“What kind of cookies do we have today, Carrie?” Innocent Sophie interrupted any further disclosures, skipping back into the kitchen with pony-tailed hair bouncing.
“Well, honey, looks to me like chocolate chip. Fresh-baked, too. Let’s thank Mrs. Wyeth for them, shall we?” Her cool gaze caught and held the scornful eyes of the cook, and dismissed her. “We’ll talk later, Mrs. Wyeth, at another time.”
That scrumptious little confrontation, and the usual supper, bath, and bedtime routine for Sophie a little later, had occupied the rest of Caroline’s day. She had explained about finding a sick dog, and taking him to the dog doctor to make him all better, and the child’s chatter had been centered on that subject alone.
At nine she had retired to her suite for some personal TLC time. That meant a lengthy soak in the tub, filled with hot water and eucalyptus and lavender oil, while a whole musical selection by Mozart playing in the background softly and sweetly lulled her into semi-consciousness.
Eventually she eased her slippery body from the cooling water to slip it into a cool lawn nightgown. Barefoot, she wandered out to the terrace, where a friendly moon and several billion glittering stars shone in upon her. What a lovely spot this was! The comfortable padded chaise called her with an almost audible siren song.
“Join me here,” it said. So she did.
Contented night sounds drifted in, from the rustle of birds settling down in the giant branches to the subdued hoot of an owl farther off in the distance. The lonely wail of a train far away, and its busy chug-chug on the rails, reached her next. A gentle breeze drifted in, carrying with it a mixture of scents: dampness and moss from the pond, dusty gravel, the more homely aromas of cow and horse.
Relaxing, Caroline tilted her head back and crossed one ankle over the other.
The mean, spiteful words of the cook had stabbed deep. She had harbored them through the rest of the day, like a burr under the saddle, to dither and nag, until she had had a chance to think things through. So the whole household was aware of the marital arrangement? How? And when? And, for heavens’ sake, why?
She wasn’t about to dignify such a complaint with any questions. That would completely negate any chance she had of maintaining control.
“What in the hell am I going to do about that old harridan Wyeth?” she wondered aloud.