Authors: Linda Howard
“Well, everything looks normal,” the doctor said, consulting his charts. “You're in good physical shape, Mrs. Duncan. Your uterus is enlarged more like thirteen or fourteen weeks than the nine or ten you think it should be, so you may be off on your conception date. We'll do an ultrasound when you're further along to get a better idea of the baby's maturity. It could just be a large baby, or twins. I see that your maternal grandmother was a twin, and multiple births usually follow the female line.”
Reese sat up straight, his eyes sharpening. “Is there any danger in having twins?”
“Not much. They usually come a little early, and we have to be careful about that. At this stage of the game, I'm more worried about a large baby than I am twins. Your wife should be able to have twins without a
problem, as their birth weight is usually lower than that of a single baby. The total is more, but the individual weights are less. How much did you weigh when you were born, Mr. Duncan?”
“Ten pounds, two ounces.” His mouth was grim.
“I'll want to keep a very close eye on your wife if this baby approaches a birth weight of anything over eight pounds. She has a narrow pelvis, not drastically so, but a ten-pound baby would probably require a C-section.”
That said, he began talking to Madelyn about her diet, vitamins and rest, and he gave her several booklets about prenatal care. When they left half an hour later, Madelyn was weighted down with prescriptions and reading material. Reese drove to a pharmacy, where he had the prescriptions filled, then headed home again. Madelyn sat straight and silent beside him. When they got home, he realized that she hadn't looked at him once all day.
T
HE NEXT MORNING
as he started to leave she asked coolly, “Can you hear the car horn blow from anywhere on the ranch?”
He looked startled. “Of course not.” He eyed her questioningly, but she still wasn't looking at him.
“Then how am I supposed to find you or contact you?”
“Why would you want to?” he asked sarcastically.
“I'm pregnant. I could fall, or start to miscarry. Any number of things.”
It was an argument he couldn't refute. He set his jaw, faced with the choice between giving her the means to leave or endangering both her life and that of his baby. When it came down to it, he didn't have a choice. He took the keys from his pocket and slammed them down on the cabinet, but he kept his hand on them.
“Do I have your word you won't run?”
She looked at him finally, but her eyes were cool and blank. “No. Why should I waste my breath making promises when you wouldn't believe me anyway?”
“Just what is it you want me to believe? That you haven't worked it so you have just as much claim to the ranch as I have? A woman made a fool of me once and walked away with half of everything I owned, but it won't happen again, even if I have to burn this house to the ground and sell the land for a loss, is that clear?”
He was shouting by the time he finished, and he looked at her as if he hated the sight of her.
Madelyn didn't show any expression or move. “If that was all I'd wanted, I could have paid off the mortgage at any time.”
Her point scored; she saw it in his eyes. She could have followed it up, but she held her peace. She had given him something to think about. She would give him a lot more to think about before this was over.
He banged out of the house, leaving the car keys on the cabinet. She picked them up, tossing them in her hand as she went upstairs to the bedroom, where she already had some clothes packed. In the two nights she had spent alone in this room, she had thought through what she was going to do and where she was going to go. Reese would expect her to go running back to New York now that she had a claim on the ranch, but she had never even considered that. To teach him the lesson he needed, she had to be close by.
It would be just like him to deliberately work close by in case she tried to leave, so she didn't, and felt fierce satisfaction when he came home for lunch after telling her that he would be out all day. Since she hadn't cooked anything, she made a plate of sandwiches and put it in front of him, then continued with what she had been doing before, which was cleaning the oven.
He asked, “Aren't you going to eat?”
“I've already eaten.”
A few minutes later he asked, “Should you be doing work like that?”
“It isn't hard.”
Her cool tone discouraged any more conversational overtures. She wasn't letting him off that easy. She had told him twice that she wasn't going to pay for April's
sins, but it evidently hadn't sunk in; now she was going to show him.
When he left again she waited half an hour, then carried her suitcase out to the car. She didn't have far to go, and it wouldn't take him long to find her, a few days at the most. Then he could take the car back if he wanted, so she didn't feel guilty about it. Besides, she didn't need it. She fully expected to be back at the ranch before her next doctor's appointment, but if she wasn't, then she would inform Reese that he had to take her. Her plan had nothing to do with staying away from him.
There was a room above Floris's café that was always for rent, because there was never anyone in Crook who needed to rent it. It would do for her for as long as she needed it. She drove to Crook and parked the car in front of the café. The idea wasn't to hide from Reese; she wanted him to know exactly where she was.
She went into the café, but there wasn't anyone behind the counter. “Floris? Is anyone here?”
“Hold your water,” came Floris's unmistakable sour voice from the kitchen. A few minutes later she came through the door. “You want coffee, or something to eat?”
“I want to rent the room upstairs.”
Floris stopped and narrowed her eyes at Madelyn. “What do you want to do that for?”
“Because I need a place to stay.”
“You've got a big house back on that ranch, and a big man to keep you warm at night, if that's all you need.”
“What I have,” Madelyn said very clearly, “is a pigheaded husband who needs to be taught a lesson.”
“Hmmph. Never seen a man yet wasn't pigheaded.”
“I'm pregnant, too.”
“Does he know?”
“He does.”
“He knows where you are?”
“He will soon. I'm not hiding from him. He'll probably come through the door breathing fire and raising hell, but I'm not going back until he understands a few things.”
“Such as?”
“Such as I'm not his first wife. He got a dirty deal, but I'm not the one who gave it to him, and I'm tired of paying for someone else's dirt.”
Floris looked her up and down, then nodded, and a pleased expression for once lit her sour face. “All right, the room's yours. I always did like to see a man get his comeuppance,” she muttered as she turned to go back into the kitchen. Then she stopped and looked back at Madelyn. “You got any experience as a short-order cook?”
“No. Do you need one?”
“Wouldn't have asked if I didn't. I'm doing the cooking and waitressing, too. That sorry Lundy got mad because I told him his eggs were like rubber and quit on me last week.”
Madelyn considered the situation and found she liked it. “I could wait on tables.”
“You ever done that before?”
“No, but I've taken care of Reese for nine months.”
Floris grunted. “I guess that qualifies you. He don't strike me as an easy man to satisfy. Well, you in good health? I don't want you on your feet if you're having trouble keeping that baby.”
“Perfect health. I saw a doctor yesterday.”
“Then the job's yours. I'll show you the room. It's nothing fancy, but it's warm during the winter.”
The room was clean and snug, and that was about
the limit of its virtues, but Madelyn didn't mind. There was a single bed, a couch, a card table with two chairs, a hot plate and a minuscule bathroom with cracking tile. Floris turned on the heat so it would get warm and returned to the kitchen while Madelyn carried her suitcases in. After hanging up her clothes in the small closet, she went downstairs to the café, tied an apron around her and took up her duties as waitress.
W
HEN
R
EESE GOT
home that night he was dead tired; he'd been kicked, stepped on and had a rope burn on his arm. The cows would begin dropping their spring calves any time, and that would be even more work, especially if a cold front moved in.
When he saw that the car was gone and the house was dark, it was like taking a kick in the chest, punching the air out of him. He stared at the dark windows, filled with a paralyzing mixture of pain and rage. He hadn't really thought she would leave. Deep down, he had expected her to stay and fight it out, toe-to-toe and chin to chin, the way she'd done so many times. Instead she'd left, and he closed his eyes at the piercing realization that she was exactly what he'd most feared: a grasping, shallow woman who wasn't able to take the hard times. She'd run back to the city and her cushy life-style, the stylish clothes.
And she'd taken his baby with her.
It was a betrayal ten times worse than anything April had done to him. He had begun to trust Maddie, begun to let himself think of their future in terms of years rather than just an unknown number of months. She had lain beneath him and willingly let him get her pregnant; for most of a year she had lived with him, cooked
for him, washed his clothes, laughed and teased and worked alongside him, slept in his arms.
Then she had stabbed him in the back. It was a living nightmare, and he was living it for the second time.
He walked slowly into the house, his steps dragging. There were no warm, welcoming smells in the kitchen, no sound except for the hum of the refrigerator and the ticking of the clock. Despite everything, he had a desperate, useless hope that she'd had to go somewhere, that there was a note of explanation somewhere in the house. He searched all the rooms, but there was no note. He went into the bedroom where she had spent the past two nights and found the dresser drawers empty, the bathroom swept clean of the fragrant female paraphernalia. He was still trying to get used to not seeing her clothes in the closet beside his; to find them nowhere in the house was staggering.
It was like pouring salt into an open wound, but he went into the other bedroom where she had stored her “New York” clothes. It was as if he had to check every missing sign of her inhabitance to verify her absence, a wounded and bewildered animal sniffing around for his mate before he sat down and howled his anger and loss at the world.
But when he opened the closet door he stared at the row of silk blouses, hung on satin-padded hangers and protected by plastic covers, the chic suits and lounging pajamas, the high-heeled shoes in a dozen colors and styles. A faint hint of her perfume wafted from the clothes, and he broke out in a sweat, staring at them.
Swiftly he went downstairs. Her books were still here, and her stereo system. She might be gone now, but she had left a lot of her things here, and that meant she would be back. She would probably come back during
the day, when she would expect him to be gone, so she could pack the rest and leave without ever seeing him.
But if she were going back to New York, as she almost certainly had been planning, why had she taken her ranch clothes and left the city clothes?
Who knew why Madelyn did anything? he thought wearily. Why had she paid off the mortgage with her trust fund when she knew that was the one thing, given his past, that he would be unable to bear?
He'd never in his life been angrier, not even when he had sat in a courtroom and heard a judge hand over half his ranch to April. He hadn't expected anything better from April, who had given him ample demonstration of just how vindictive and callous she could be. But when Maddie had blindsided him like that, she had really hit him hard and low, and he was still reeling. Every time he tried to think about it, the pain and anger were so great that they crowded out everything else.
Well, she was gone, so he'd have plenty of time to think about it now. But she would have a hell of a time getting back in to get her things while he was gone, because the first chance he got he was going to change the locks on the house.
For now, however, he was going to do something he hadn't done even when April had done such a good job of wrecking his life. He was going to get the bottle of whiskey that had been in the cupboard for so many years and get dead drunk. Maybe then he would be able to sleep without Maddie beside him.
He felt like hell the next day, with a pounding head and a heaving stomach, but he dragged himself up and took care of the animals; it wasn't their fault he was a damn fool. By the time his headache began to fade and
he began to feel halfway human again, it was too late to go to the general store to buy new locks.
The next day the cows began dropping their calves. It was the same every time: when the first one went into labor and drifted away to find a quiet place to calve, the others one by one followed suit. And they could pick some of the damnedest places to have their calves. It was an almost impossible task for one man to track down the cows in their hiding places, make certain the little newborns were all right, help the cows who were in difficulty and take care of the calves who were born dead or sickly. Instinct always went wrong with at least one cow, and she would refuse to have anything to do with her new baby, meaning Reese had to either get another cow to adopt it or take it to the barn for hand-feeding.
It was three days before he had a minute to rest, and when he did he dropped down on the couch in an exhausted stupor and slept for sixteen hours.
It was almost a week after Madelyn had left before he finally got time to drive to Crook. The pain and anger had become an empty, numb feeling in his chest.
The first thing he saw as he passed Floris's café was the white Ford station wagon parked out front.
His heart lurched wildly, and the bottom dropped out of his stomach. She was back, probably on her way to get the rest of her things. He parked next door in front of the general store and stared at the car, his fingers drumming on the steering wheel. The familiar anger exploded into the numb vacuum, and something became immediately, blindingly clear to him.
He wasn't going to let her go.
If he had to fight her in every court in the country, he was going to keep his ranch intact and she was going to stay his wife. He'd
been glad to see the last of April, but there was no way he was going to let Maddie just walk out. She was carrying his baby, a baby that was going to grow up in his house if he had to tie Maddie to the bed every day when he left.
He got out of the truck and strode toward the café, his boot heels thudding on the wooden sidewalk, his face set.
He pushed open the door and walked inside, standing in the middle of the room as he surveyed the booths and tables. There was no long-legged blonde with a lazy smile at any of them, though two lean and bandy-legged cowboys straddled stools at the counter.
Then the kitchen door opened and his long-legged blonde came through it, wrapped in an apron and carrying two plates covered with enormous hamburgers and mounds of steaming French fries. She flicked a glance at him and neither changed expression or missed a beat as she set the plates in front of the cowboys. “Here you go. Let me know if you want any pie. Floris baked an apple cobbler this morning that'll make you cry, it tastes so good.”