Blue Waltz (31 page)

Adam seemed to debate. "He's unavailable, Belle. I'm sorry."

"Ah, his orders, I'm sure."

"Yes," Adam said. "Really, I'm sorry."

Blue Waltz279

Stephen couldn't move. He tried to make sense of what she had said. Born that way. His mind filled with the remembered sight of her leg—brutally broken, then never repaired. Looking down at her, his anger, never far, resurfaced. She was lying. Just as she had lied about so many things.

And just then, she looked up and found him.

"Stephen," she breathed.

Adam whirled around to find his brother. Emotions creased Adam's face—hope, sadness, regret, all dashed by despair. After a moment he turned away and disappeared back into the front parlor.

Stephen's jaw clenched and he started to turn away, to return to his new study.

"Stephen!" Belle demanded.

He halted, his back to her.

"Stephen, I need to talk to you."

"Go away, Belle."

"No! We need to talk!"

What was there to say? he wondered. What would she tell him? More lies, undoubtedly. "No, we have no need for talking. There is nothing more to say."

"Maybe for you, but I have plenty to say!"

He snorted. "That doesn't surprise me. But I'm no longer interested in listening."

"Too bad!" she screeched. "You are responsible for that party at my house, and I will not have it. Call it off."

"I would think you'd enjoy a party," he said dispassionately. "But if you don't want it, you call it off."

She grit her teeth. "I've tried. But they won't listen to me.

He merely shrugged his shoulders and continued toward his study.

280Linda Francis Lee

"You arrogant, unfeeling, selfish man! It's my house! Do you hear me. My house. And I don't want a party."

He froze. Long months of frustration and anger and uncertainty congealed in his mind. Slowly, menacingly, he turned back to her. His smile was cold. "No, Mrs. Braxton. It's my house."

She took a step back, confusion marring her perfect brow. "Your house? That's absurd."

"No absurdity. Simply the truth. I had the contract revoked. On a technicality. In the future, you'd do well to hire better solicitors."

"You're lying!"

"No, Belle. I may be many things, most of which you have taken great pleasure in enumerating these last months, but I do not lie."

She stammered and stuttered, before saying, "You can't get away with this! I'll fight you!"

His cold smile fled. "If you do, you'll lose. I'll crush you, Belle, just as I have crushed a thousand others."

Her shoulders came back. "But you won't crush me," she said, the disquiet magically gone from her voice.

His eyes narrowed. "Of course I would."

"No, Stephen. You wouldn't. You would never hurt me. Just as you would never intentionally hurt . . . anyone else."

His anger grew. "You're wrong. I can and I will."

"No, you won't!"

A fact. No doubt.

He stared at her hard, before he turned on his heel and strode into his office angrily. Belle followed, hurrying up the stairs as fast as she could manage. He was standing behind his desk when she finally reached the room.

"Stephen," she said, her breath short.

He wouldn't look at her.

Blue Waltz281

"You said you don't lie, then don't lie to me now. You saved me, Stephen. You won't take away the one thing I've worked so hard for and destroy me now."

Fury, frustration, and cold empty loss riddled his brow as he grabbed up a document, the papers crumpling in his fist. "You're wrong!" The words reverberated against the walls. "It's done. Do you understand? Finished. You are living in my house!"

Staring at the document he held extended in his hand, Belle stepped forward. As if taking hold of something deadly, she took the papers and began to read, first once, then again. She pressed her eyes closed. "Why?" she finally asked. "Why did you bother to save me?"

"You betrayed me!"

Her head shot up. "I've never betrayed you!"

"You knew about Adam and didn't tell me."

Anger welled in her breast. "That's not the reason!" she said, her tone seething. "You're doing this because I said I wouldn't be your wife."

"I loved you, as I have never loved anyone else in my life."

"That was your mistake, not mine. I told you all along I had no interest in marriage. All I wanted was to be your friend."

"I don't need friends!"

"Everyone needs friends!"

"Not me! I wanted a wife! Not a friend. Not a paramour! A wife!"

"But I don't want a husband," she whispered, turning away from him.

Stephen could hardly believe the things he was saying, but couldn't help himself, couldn't stop the anger and frustration, and . . . panic that flowed through his veins, thicker than his blood. And like a child, he couldn't seem

282 Linda Francis Lee

to stop himself from lashing out again, as if he wanted her to hurt as badly as he was hurting. "I guess the story you told Adam about your leg being something you were born with is about as true as you having been happily married."

She stopped in midstride.

He came around the desk. "I know all about your leg."

Her back was to him, but he saw her flinch.

"Yes, I saw it."

"No," she breathed.

"Yes, the night I . . . saved you, as you are so fond of saying. That is no defect from birth, Blue Belle."

He took her arm and turned her around. "You're a liar, Blue Belle Holly. Admit it. You lied about your leg, just as you've been lying about this father of yours. And while I know now that indeed you were married, I find it hard to believe that it was the happy marriage you have presented."

She tried to break free from his grasp. "Let go of me," she bit out.

Stephen's anger and frustration dissolved, leaving only heart-breaking panic in its wake. "Tell me, Belle. Tell me that you didn't love him. You couldn't have."

"Think what you want," she hissed.

"Good God, Belle. You were married on February the fourteenth."

"I hate you," she ground out.

"Tell me, Belle."

She jerked her arm frantically, but his hand was like a band of iron, holding her captive.

"Did you really love him so much, or was that just a story you told to keep me away?" His voice softened and he watched as her eyes clouded and grew distant. "Tell me. Did you really love him? Could you have possibly loved someone when you were so young? God, Belle, you were married on your thirteenth birthday."

CHAPTER 23

Wrenville 1877

Belle woke slowly. The first thing she noticed was the unfamiliar surroundings. The next was the pain. Intense, throbbing pain that seemed to come from nowhere specific and, consumed the entirety of her young body.

She tried to move, but the pain seared through her leg. Falling back, she pressed her forearm over her eyes. What had happened to her? she wondered desperately. It was her birthday. Why was she here in this foreign place? The fleeting image of her father's face as he looked at her gift passed through her mind, but nothing else. She remembered nothing else. Nothing. She only felt the pain.

"Where are you, Papa?" she whispered. But the unfamiliar room held no answers.

A noise drew her attention. Moving her arm away, she glanced to the side. Her mouth dropped open in silent protest. The farmer, dressed in a crisp black suit with white shirt and starched collar. The hated farmer, his head and shoulders framed by a mirror which hung on the wall behind him. Dear God, he sat, stiff and unmov-ing, staring at her without saying a word.

"Farmer Braxton," she whispered, alarmed.

Unmindful of the pain, her head jerked to the other side as she tried to place her surroundings. Fine linens, brocade chairs, gold-gilded picture frames. Nothing, however, was familiar.

Blue Waltz 285

When she looked back, he was gone, the mirror empty save for the finely plastered walls reflected from the opposite end of the room.

Had she imagined him? she wondered frantically. Was this all a bad dream? But by then her body throbbed unbearably, and her mind couldn't concentrate, only longed for darkness and sleep—escape. Though just before she sank back down into oblivion, she caught sight of a band of thin gold capturing her finger.

***************************************************************************************

She woke again. She had no idea if she had slept a few minutes or a few days. The room was dark except for a hurricane lamp of finely cut glass that burned low on a small silk-skirted table in the corner. She remembered her dream about the farmer, sitting, staring, and she shuddered. Relief followed quickly—it had been nothing more than a dream, she reassured herself.

But her relief was washed away like a wave on the sand when he walked in, the farmer, a tray held in his hand. Without a word, looking at her only briefly, as if he couldn't bear the sight of her, he set the tray beside the bed. The fine bone china slipped a bit when the tray tilted. He righted the dishes awkwardly.

"What are you doing here?" she whispered, her voice small and scared. "Where's my papa?"

"Eat," he murmured, his face a mask in the shadowy room, then he turned away and left.

She was too scared to eat, though she couldn't put a name to the fear.

Papa, where are you? she wondered frantically. Never in her twelve years, no thirteen, she amended silently, had she ever been so scared. How was it possible for her to be here without her father?

Pieces of unformulated answers began to swirl in her

286 Linda Francis Lee

mind. Her birthday party. The look on her father's face. Alone with the farmer ... the ring. Unease began to fill her, so she put the thoughts from her mind. She wouldn't think about it—yet—but deep down she knew she was afraid to think about it, afraid what the answers might be. She concentrated on her leg instead.

Pain was her only companion during the passing days. The only person she saw at all, other than the farmer, was an old woman whom Belle had never seen before, who came in to wash her and change the sheets.

One day when the woman was leaving the house, her voice drifted back to Belle as she was lying in the bed, trying to adjust to the pain that was always greater after the woman left.

"She'll never walk again, of that you can be certain," the woman intoned in her scratchy voice.

Shock and, more importantly, fear raced through Belle's body. Couldn't walk? How was that possible? her mind screamed. Surely the woman was talking about someone else. Her leg hurt, yes. But never to walk again? That was impossible. Surely.

Taking a deep breath, Belle lifted the covers, forcing herself up on her elbows, fighting the pain. She had to see, had to know. At the sight that met her eyes, her mind swam. It was all she could do to stay conscious. Her lower leg was black and blue, swollen, looking like a mockery of the one that lay next to it, perfect and white. Even through the swelling and the color, Belle could see that her aching leg was no longer straight.

That was when the despair hit her, tossing her relentlessly against the rocky shore of an unforgiving sea of desperation.

What had happened? How could her leg look as it did? Again, she couldn't remember. She bit her lip, tears

Blue Waltz 287

springing into her eyes. Hot, burning tears streaked her cheeks, falling down onto her pillow, and it was all she could do not to scream.

Shortly after, the farmer came in, holding an open Bible in his hand as if he had been reading.

"I want to go home," she pleaded through her tears.

"You are home."

Her breath caught. "No! To my home," she demanded obstinately, dashing her tears away. "I want to go home . . ." She started to say, home to her father, but something stopped her. The fear of the answer? She didn't know. Instead she finished with, "to sleep in my loft." It was easier to think about the fact that there was no light in this room, no window to the world by day or the heavens at night. "I shouldn't be here. It's not right."

"You're my wife," he stated, snapping his thick, black Bible shut.

Windows and heavens vanished from her mind. "Wife," she breathed, stunned. Though, of course, the thought had been there all along. Thirteen—the magic year. And the ring. "How can that be?"

He looked at her curiously. "You don't remember?"

Honestly she didn't, didn't remember anything other than preparing for her father's return, the sketch, the cake, but nothing else.

She turned her head away from him, refusing to believe, telling herself it was all a bad dream and that soon she would wake and be at home, safe and secure in her own bed. By now the despair that had become a constant companion much as the pain had, was crystallized into something different, though what she couldn't say. She only knew that she had begun to feel differently. Blue Belle Holly had ceased to exist. The little girl who danced in her father's arms across the rough-hewn floorboards of

288 Linda Francis Lee

their tiny cabin was gone, extinguished like a fragile yellow flame. And when she turned her head and found finely wrought furniture and expensively woven rugs, she knew it was true. Her mind seemed to shift and change. Old, familiar thoughts took on different hues, became unfamiliar.

And as the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months, whenever she woke, she woke in the farmer's house, in the farmer's bed.

Wife. Her young budding chest clenched as the word snaked through her head. Her mother had been a wife. Mrs. Wilmont who ran the mercantile was a wife. But they were old. She wasn't. She was supposed to be in school, learning sums, reading books. How could she be a wife? Wives didn't play in the fields or swim in ponds in the spring and summer.

She tried to comprehend, but couldn't, or wouldn't perhaps. And though she didn't know exactly what it was, there was some other hushed something that had to do with being a wife that loomed over her head like a feared monster under her bed, never seen, but there. And she had no one to ask what that something was, no one to talk to. The farmer was never around long to ask questions, not that she would have asked him anyway.