The short young Indian, who wore a red
flannel band around his long hair and a khaki shirt with military
trousers, should have been the center of attention, since it was
his paintings that were being exhibited. But it was Sheila who
caught everyone’s admiring gaze. She had swept her tawny mane atop
her head in an elegant knot, and the blue-green chiffon designer’s
dress, which matched her eyes, swirled about her lovely long legs.
Julie estimated the dress had to have cost the woman a tidy
sum.
She felt Nick’s hand at her elbow as
Sheila, with Paul at her side, moved across the room toward them.
“I was so glad you could come this afternoon,” Sheila said, taking
Nick’s arm. Her hungry gaze caressed Nick’s spare, sun-browned
face. “Your presence here, Nick, will do a lot to support your
upcoming campaign.”
For the first time Sheila looked at
Julie. “Have you two had any champagne yet? Paul, do be a doll and
get Julie a glass while I talk to Nick about his
campaign.”
Helplessly Julie let Paul propel her
toward the punch table as Sheila possessively took Nick’s arm and
led him'away. “Are you interested more in my abstracts—or maybe one
of my portraits, Mrs. Rafter?” Paul was asking, and she forced her
attention back to the young Indian.
She hardly tasted the champagne he
handed her and only half listened as he pointed out some of his
favorite paintings. The downstairs lobby was rapidly filling, and
she was beginning to feel lost. She knew none of the people, and,
to make matters worse, Paul was starting to make calf eyes at
her.
Where was Nick? And Sheila?
Quietly Julie excused herself from
Paul’s smitten attention. She really was developing the headache
she had almost feigned earlier. She didn’t know if it was the
champagne she had drunk or an empty stomach or just the sight of
seeing Sheila with Nick that made her head throb so, but she was
ready to go home.
She made her way through the press of
people, looking for Nick, but he was nowhere on the lower floor.
The second floor, which contained an array of paintings not
currently on exhibition, was darkened and deserted, and she had
almost turned back to the staircase when she saw a light from a
room toward the rear of the gallery floor. It was with a sick
feeling in her stomach that she made her way toward the light. She
wanted to turn back, afraid of what she might find, but her
footsteps took her ever nearer.
The door was partially open, and she
had nearly knocked when she heard Sheila’s sultry voice. “With me
at your side, Nick, the governor’s mansion is ours. But that little
country hick of yours will only stand in your way. Oh, darling, I
can’t imagine whatever made you want to marry her!”
There was a silence that hurt her
worse than Sheila’s words ever could have, for she could only too
well imagine Nick holding Sheila in his arms at that moment, his
mouth bruising Sheila’s in a passionate kiss. Then Nick’s voice,
husky with laughter, broke the long silence. “Let me tell you about
my little country hick, Sheila . . .”
But Julie did not wait to hear. The
pain in her heart was great enough as it was. She fled down the
stairs and pushed herself through the crowd in the lobby. Outside,
she leaned against the pink stucco building and gulped great
quantities of air, trying to choke back the sobs that rose to her
throat.
Why had she not admitted sooner that
Sheila and Nick were made for each other? As Sheila had pointed
out, she would only stand in the way of Nick’s rising political
career. But, dear God, she loved him so much! It would be so hard
to give him up!
A young couple getting out of a cab
looked at her strangely as they entered the gallery, and she knew
she must be making a spectacle of herself with the tears streaming
down her face. Quickly she hailed the vacated cab, wanting only to
get away, to run from Nick and Sheila’s mocking
laughter.
“Where to, miss?” the cabbie
asked.
Where, indeed? Where could she go?
What would she do? She knew she could no longer stay in the same
vicinity as Nick. It would be too heart-wrenching to see his name
in the newspapers, to hear it on the radio, and to see his wickedly
handsome face on the television.
She would see his face often enough
the rest of her life in her dreams. Every waking hour would be
filled with thoughts of Nicholas Raffer.
Chapter Eleven
J
ulie laid her forehead on the top of the computer screen and
took deep breaths. Soon, she told herself, the nausea would pass.
Her fingers trembled so much that she had hit all the wrong keys.
And one finger was bare of a wedding ring.
Her mother came into the bedroom.
“Julie, are you feeling all right?”
She looked up at her mother’s
concerned face, which was finely sculptured like her own but framed
by short, stylishly cut brown hair streaked with gray. She managed
a smile. “I guess I’m just tired, Mom. I stayed up late last night,
trying to finish the third chapter of the book.”
Mary Dever’s brows knitted in worry.
“Are you sure that’s it?” She crossed over to the desk and sat on
Julie’s bed across from it. “You haven’t been yourself, Julie. In
the six weeks you’ve been here, you’ve been walking around the
house like someone who’s been told she has only a month to
live.”
She had to smile, though she indeed
felt as if she had died six weeks before. She had returned
home—Nick’s home, she reminded herself—half in fear of Nick’s
returning before she could pack her luggage. Within half an hour
she had quickly loaded the few belongings she possessed in her
station wagon.
It had been difficult to drive away
without a backward glance, without hoping that Nick would suddenly
materialize and order her to stop. But she had done it; she had
driven straight through to Little Elm, Texas, a twelve-hour
trip.
“No, Mom, I’m not dying,” she
reassured her mother.
Mrs. Dever put out her hand to touch
Julie’s. “Honey, whatever argument you and Nick had can’t be as
terrible as all that. The love you two have can bridge
anything.”
Julie looked out her second-story
bedroom window. A late February snow blanketed the lawns outside
and decorated the trees that were as barren of leaves as her heart
was barren of hope. She knew she would have to tell her parents
sometime. They deserved that much.
Her gaze moved back to her mother’s
face, with its fine lines of age about the eyes put there by years
of joy, sorrow, disappointment, and laughter. “Mom, Nick—when he
married me, well... he didn’t really . . .” She sighed. “I guess I
had better begin again. It starts with an accident I had last
year.”
A faint smile touched her mother’s
lips. “And Nick rescued you?”
She gave her mother a suspicious
glance, but the woman’s soft face wore a serene, patient look.
Encouraged, she proceeded to tell her mother the entire story,
holding nothing back. “So you see, Mom,” she finished, “Nick
married me to save my honor. And his,” she added
bitterly.
After a moment her mother said, “Do
you really think that Nicholas married you to keep you from writing
any further disparaging articles? I’m sure that as a politician in
the public eye he has faced scurrilous attacks before and will
again, no doubt.”
“You don’t understand Nicholas Raffer.
He’d stop at nothing to have his way.” she sighed again. “But it
makes no difference. We disliked each other before we ever met. And
now—now he thinks I’m interested in another man.”
“And are you?”
“Of course not! There could never be
an¬one but...”
“Then you’re in love with Nicholas
Raffer, aren’t you?”
She rested her head on the computer
screen again. She had never felt so miserable in all her life.
“Yes,” she admitted at last. “I love him. But I’m not right for
him, Mom,” she whispered. “There’s another woman.”
“Oh?” she thought her mother would be
shocked, but she merely said, “Do you know that he has been seeing
her since your marriage?”
“Well, no—not exactly.”
“Has he told you that you’re not right
for him?”
She raised her head. “No—but, Mom, I
have my pride. I wasn’t going to wait around for him to tell me to
leave.”
“Pride—such a foolish thing for God to
give us humans! I don’t suppose you’ve told Nicholas how you feel?
I think you owe it to him, Julie. He not only helped you out of the
accident and took care of you afterward, he married you. You owe it
to him to tell him you love him.”
The memory of him dancing with Sheila
came back to Julie, her vision of how perfect they had looked
together, and she said abruptly, “Never!”
“And your marriage? At some point—if
you don’t intend to return to Nicholas—you’ve got to communicate to
him your intentions of ending it.”
“I know.” She rose from her chair and
began pacing her bedroom. “I know I’ve got to do it, and I don’t
know why I’m waiting. I ought to get it over with . . . but I
can’t, not right now. It’s too soon. Perhaps within another month
I’ll have the courage, Mom.”
Her mother stood up and went to the
door. “I think you ought to listen to your heart. It may be warning
you that this marriage shouldn’t be ended at all.”
“This marriage should never have taken
place to begin with,” she said listlessly as she stood at the
window looking out on the winter wasteland. Was the high desert in
New Mexico covered with snow at that moment?
Her grandmother was more voluble than
Mrs. Dever on the subject of Julie’s shattered marriage.
“Poppycock! What a lot of rot, as I’ve heard you young’ns say often
enough!” The old woman never missed a stitch on the sweater she was
knitting as she rocked before the roaring fire in the living room’s
hearth. “I gave you more credit, child, than being one of those
pups that tuck their tails and run. You gonna let that hussy have
your husband without a fight?”
At times Julie was fighting mad. She
told herself she was a fool to have given up Nick without a fight.
Even if she could never make him love her, she would have had what
most women dream of—a handsome, successful, and famous husband.
What difference if he did not love her? She could console herself
with her husband’s substantial checking account.
But she knew she was a fool. She
wanted Nick’s love, not his money. And though she might have fought
for that love, she could not bring herself to stand in the way of
his becoming governor. She loved him too much to hold him
back.
She worked the rest of that month and
on through March on her novel. She told herself that she was happy,
that she was doing some-thing she had always wanted to do, write a
book. But she was not happy, and she felt sick all the
time.
Her mother tried to get her to go out
with old friends, and her father tried to persuade her to go
fishing with him. “The bass are really biting good right now,” he
coaxed her. But she preferred to remain alone.
“You have to get out of the house,
Julie!” her mother told her one afternoon when the northwesterly
winter winds had let up and the sun peeked through the gray
clouds.
For once she agreed with her mother.
Surprised at Julie’s capitulation, her mother said, “Wonderful!
Perhaps you’d like to do some shopping. We could drive in to
Dallas, have lunch in the Zodiac Room at Neiman’s, then spend the
afternoon—”
“Mom,” she said, not knowing exactly
how to begin, “I’d like to go into town by myself.”
Her mother cast her a quizzical look
but did not appear to be hurt by Julie’s rejection of her
suggestion. “All right, darling. I’m just relieved you’re getting
out. Try to forget about everything for a while and have a good
time.”
Having a good time was not on her mind
as she made the hour-long trip into Dallas. Only one thing occupied
her mind that day, and the doctor confirmed her suspicion after she
had waited another hour to get in to see him.
“I’d say around the middle of
September, Mrs. Raffer,” he told her as he polished his thick
glasses. “As narrow as you are through the pelvis, we’ll want to
keep a close check on your pregnancy during the last few weeks. But
I don’t really anticipate any problem, since you’re in excellent
health.”
“I see,” she said tonelessly. But she
really did not see. She really could not understand how it could
have happened to her. She could count the number of times Nick had
made love to her on one hand . . . and she had had to
conceive!
She did not remember the drive back to
Little Elm that afternoon. She did not recall how she got there,
but for almost an hour she sat out in front of Hickory Creek at her
father’s favorite fishing spot. Great willow and hickory trees
arched over the creek, which was high with the melting of the snow.
A squirrel, returning from some winter foray, scurried up a live
oak denuded of leaves, and a cottontail bounded into the underbrush
that edged the creek.
But she noticed none of this. She felt
as if she were caught up in one of Texas’s terrible tornadoes,
whirled in the vortex until she was dizzy with the strain of her
dilemma.