Fool for Love (Montana Romance) (36 page)

“Don’t you listen to her, darling,” he said so that everyone could hear.  “You know it’s not true.”  He was a damned good liar at that.

“Oh, so you’re going to defend her, are you?” Jacinta raged on.

“I always knew you were sour, Jacinta,” Eric growled, “but this is taking sour grapes too far!”

“Is it?” she said.  “All I’ve ever done is look out for your best interest, Eric!  This harlot has you in her clutches.”

“Like hell she has!  She’s my wife!”  But she wasn’t.  No matter how hard he’d tried, she wasn’t.

“If you believe that then you’re an even bigger fool than half the town takes you for!”

A touch of shame cut through Eric’s anger.  Jacinta was right, about Amelia and about him.  He’d been a fool longer than he wanted to admit.  If she was right about one thing….

No, he rejected the sneaking prick of doubt, she was wrong.  Amelia had good reasons for doing what she’d done.  She’d always been true to him.  Hadn’t she?

He glanced around, meeting the eyes of several of Cold Springs finest.  His friends and neighbors were confused, but he could see plain as day that Jacinta’s revelation didn’t have the effect she wanted it to.  They didn’t believe her.  Of course they didn’t.

Eric pulled himself up to his full height, chest expanding.  “Jacinta, I’m gonna pretend that you didn’t just say everything that you said.  And I suggest everyone else here do the same,” he added, giving the congregation another sweep and ending by meeting Jacinta’s eyes.  “For your sake.”

“But it’s true!”  The light in Jacinta’s eyes had gone feverish.  “I’ll show anyone who wants to see this telegram and others I’ve received.  Everyone in London knows that her father killed himself to escape his debts and that her mother, Sylvia Elphick, and her sisters Eve and Olivia are prostitutes!  Everyone knows!”

Amelia flinched as though each of the names of her family members were blows.  She hid her face in her hands and wrenched herself out of Eric’s arms.  Before he could stop her she ran down the aisle to the church’s back door.  Charlie handed Eloise into Michael’s arms then rushed after her.  Eric was right on her heels.

Before he left he pointed at Jacinta and said, “You wanna know why I never showed the least goddamn interest in you for all those years that you dogged me, Jacinta?  Well you just answered your own question.”

He didn’t wait to see her reaction before rushing through the rows of shocked and humming people and out into the cloudy summer morning.

Amelia was already halfway to the wagon, Charlie on her heels.  Eric caught them at the wagon.

“No one will believe a word Jacinta said,” Charlie was in the middle of reassuring Amelia.  “They know how jealous she is.  They’ll know she’s full of hot air.”

“No, no they won’t,” Amelia gasped, cradling her stomach.  She glanced to Eric.  “Take me home,” she begged.  “Please just take me away from here.”

“I think Charlie’s right though,” he said, fury battling with caution.

“She’s a shrew,” Charlie nodded.

“She’s right,” Amelia whispered, then burst into tears.  She covered her face with one hand and clutched her belly with the other.  “Everything she said was true.”

Charlie huffed with impatience.  When she turned to Eric for support her irate frown blinked to surprise.  She glanced between Eric and Amelia then sucked in a breath.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.

“How could I?” Amelia said, barely a squeak.  “Eric, please take me home.”

“All right.”  He gave her a hand up into the wagon and walked to the front to fetch the reins.

“But … but it doesn’t matter!” Charlie protested.  She tried to reach for Amelia’s hand but Amelia drew it away.  “No one will care one way or another.  I’m no saint either and people here have accepted me freely.”

“I’ve lied to people,” Amelia said from the wagon seat high above Charlie.  “I’ve deceived them.  I’ve been living intimately with a man I’m not married to.  I am not a good person.”

“Is that what you think?”  Eric didn’t think he could be madder at anyone than he was at Jacinta, but Amelia proved him wrong.  “Because if it is, you’re a damned fool!”

“It’s true and you know it,” Amelia turned her reddened eyes on him.  “You know it all.  I’m a filthy wretch.”

“What?” Charlie snapped.  “How can you say that!  You’re one of the nicest people I know!”

“Of course she is!” was all Eric could add.  He felt stupid for it as he climbed onto the wagon’s front seat and adjusted the reins.  He would take Amelia home and sort her out.

“Thank you for your caring,” Amelia sniffled, staring straight forward without seeing either of them, “but I don’t deserve it.  I should never have tried to be someone I’m not.”

“Who you are is my wife,” Eric growled, “and anyone who wants to say anything different, including you, is going to have to have words with me.”

He knew Amelia would have protested if the good people of Cold Springs hadn’t started streaming out of the church to see what was going on.  Eric could hear their chattering before he got a good look at them, and he was certain Amelia could hear them too.

“Sorry, Charlie, but I need to take
my wife
home,” he said, snapping the reins so that the horses backed up.

Charlie jumped out of the way.  “I understand.  But Amelia, you’re wrong if you think you deserve to be shunned.  I just want you to know that I am here for you if you need me, and so is Michael, and Phin too, I’m certain, and Delilah and everyone else in town.”

Not everyone, Eric thought to himself.  Jacinta had stepped out onto the church stairs, a tight pack of old biddies around her.  He could feel her glare across the yard.

Amelia didn’t answer Charlie.  She stared forward, white-faced, tears streaming, and cradled her stomach.  He needed to get her home where he could shake the guilt off of her and talk some sense into her.  She was no whore, no matter what Jacinta said, no matter what Reggie Hamilton had said, no matter what her own mother had said.

A cold rush spilled through his gut.  So many people.  Maybe he was the fool after all.

As he turned the wagon onto the road and urged the horses to the fastest speed he trusted them to go, a dark, new emotion crept up on him.  Hate.  He hated Jacinta Archer.  Hated her for exposing Amelia’s past, hated her for reminding him of things he’d deliberately forgotten, hated her for springing the seeds of doubt that had been sitting deep in his chest since London.

Chapter Twenty-One

As soon as Eric pulled the wagon to a stop in the yard in front of his house, Amelia stood and struggled to find a way to climb down.  She burst into a fresh gale of tears when she realized she was too large to do it without Eric’s help.

“Hold on, just what do you think you’re doing?”  He hopped down and rushed around the wagon, without tying the horses up, to catch her as if she’d fallen.

“I can’t accept your help anymore, Eric,” she said without looking at him as his strong arms lifted her to the dirt.  “I thought maybe….  But no, I can’t.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” he shouted.

She flinched.  He was angry with her.

“I’ve embarrassed you.  I’ve tarnished your good name.  I did it to Mr. Hamilton and now I’ve done it to you.  I just can’t bear it.  I’m sorry, I’m so terribly sorry.”

She tried to walk away, heading to the house, but Eric grabbed her arm to stop her.  His grip bruised.

“The only person who was embarrassed today is Jacinta, and as far as I’m concerned that bitch will get what she deserves.”

Amelia blinked in shock at the curse.  She’d never
heard him speak ill of anyone.

“No one will believe her,” he went on, a fraction calmer.  “Half the town doesn’t like her anyhow, whereas just about everyone likes you.”

“If they do it’s because they don’t know me,” she said.  “Please let me go.”

She tried to yank free of his grip but he held her fast.

“Hellfire, Amelia!  I’m tired of this sad sack you keep trying to put on your shoulders!  The things that have happened to you have been unfair and unjust, but you’ve handled yourself well.  I refuse to listen to you put yourself down for another minute!”

“You don’t understand!” she fired back at him with so much pent-up anger that he dropped her arm.  “My whole life I have been trying to be someone better than my birth!  I have tried to be honest and sober when my father drank himself and the rest of us into poverty.  It was no use, we still lost everything!  I tried to be honorable when my mother dragged my sisters down the opposite path, but I ended up on my back as much as they did!  I tried to love Nick and be everything he could want in a woman, but I ended up disgraced and rejected and called out for what I truly am regardless!  And now I’ve tried to put all that behind me and become the woman you deserve, but it’s no use, Eric, it’s no use!  I can’t run from who I was born to be for another day!  Every time I try, fate catches up with me!  I’m tired of running!  I’m tired of trying to be someone I’m not!”

She sobbed and ran toward the house, but even as grief overwhelmed her, an odd lightness filled her chest.  She’d said it aloud.  She’d spoken the truth and let it out into the open, and like magic the truth was evaporating around her.

She charged up the porch steps as gracefully as she could and into the house.  Eric didn’t follow her.  Out of the corner of her eye she saw him stride back to the wagon, shaking his hea
d, to take care of the horses.

Eric’s bedroom was exactly as they’d left it that morning before heading to church.  She couldn’t call it her bedroom anymore.  She wasn’t married to Eric and no amount of pretending would change that.  She needed to separate herself from him, at least until she decided what she wanted to do next.

She rushed to the bureau and gathered an armful of her clothes.  The house was three stories tall with enough rooms for a small army.  One of them would have to suit her for now.  It would be too much of a temptation to stay on the same floor with Eric, so she took her armful of clothes up the stairs to the third floor.  If she was truly about to start a new life, as she’d been telling herself she wanted to all this time, she needed to start it right.

The rooms on the third floor were smaller and simpler, like the attic room she’d lived in at the Hamilton’s.  It was fitting for her to take one of them, a return to the point where she had started this journey.  She opened the door furthest from the stairs.

The room was already furnished and untidy.  Curtis’s clothes lay over a chair and on the unmade bed.  Several bottles and mugs and a plate or two were scattered across the bureau along with an inordinate amount of papers.  Amelia started backing out of the room until something caught her eye, a telegram.

She inched closer to the bed.  The first line of the telegram read “To Ms. Archer, Re. your recent inquiry.”  Holding her clothes with one arm, Amelia snatched up the telegram and read it.  It held an account of her mother and sister’s activities in London and the prices they were charging.  Amelia’s name was mentioned only briefly when the correspondent stated that she was not involved in her mother’s activities and had not been seen for months.

Heart beating in her throat, Amelia looked for other telegrams on the bed.  What she saw made her discard Jacinta’s telegram and drop her clothes.  The deed to Eric’s ranch sat out in plain sight.  In Curtis’s bedroom.  Every instinct flared to alarm as if she’d discovered the key to a secret that had burned too long.

She picked the deed up, scanning it quickly.  She knew nothing about legal jargon or property ownership in America, but something about her first pass didn’t sit right.  She went back to the beginning and began to read more carefully.

Then she caught it.

She blinked rapidly and turned the paper over to be sure there was nothing written on the other side or no second page.  But no, there wasn’t.  The deed was simple and straightforward.  It defined the boundaries of the property and assigned it clearly to Eric’s ownership.  There was not one mention of the name Curtis Quinlan.  Curtis didn’t own half of the ranch after all.  He didn’t own so much as a blade of grass.  So why did Eric think the deed divided the land equally?

“He never read the deed,” she whispered.  The answer was as plain as day.  Eric had avoided reading anything as long as she’d known him, menus, telegrams, train station signs, everything.  Curtis must have known Eric found reading difficult and lied about the terms of the deed.  At last the pieces were fitting into place.  She needed to show Eric the deed, ask if her hunch was correct.

Forgetting her clothes, she turned to leave.

“Well look what we have here.”  Curtis leaned in the doorway, watching her with wolfish eyes.  “Is Eric back too?”

“Yes he is!”  Amelia
hid the deed behind her back.

“So he could show up at any minute, could he?  Find us together?”  The spark of inspiration joined his predatory glow.

“I’ll just be going.”  Amelia stuffed the deed into the waistband at the back of her skirt and tried to leave.

Curtis stalked closer, blocking her.  “My, my, Cousin Amelia, you are the last person I expected to find in my bedroom.”  He approached her with slow, deliberate steps.  “But then, considering what I so recently learned, should I be surprised?”