Susan Johnson (34 page)

What more, Empress thought, the taste of bitterness in her mouth, can this confident woman disclose … the length of time they make love? She had teased Trey about the stain on his shirt, and he’d negligently dismissed it, like he’d no doubt dismiss whatever she accused him of. Was it possible, a tiny hopeful voice inquired past Valerie’s smooth assurance, was it possible she was lying? In all the awful past moments, nothing was true. Confused and bewildered, Empress was forced to recognize that Trey had always lived an unrestrained, self-indulgent existence with women always about, besieging him, anxious to please him. Was she simply the latest, to be discarded eventually like all the others? Or was he sincere, and Valerie a terrible nightmare that would soon dissolve like a dream?

“If you don’t believe me,” Valerie said, her blue eyes shining, her voice flippant, tearing through the fiction of Empress’s wanting this all to be a dream, “ask Trey, although he won’t be back to the ranch for dinner, since he’s dining with me.” Valerie understood from her father that an addendum to the grazing-rights bill was to be introduced shortly before recess as a political maneuver, and there was a good possibility Trey would be forced to stay late if that occurred. Her ruse was a calculated risk, but she was more certain than not; Valerie prided herself on preparation … she had never been a risk-taker. “Oh, by the way, Trey forgot these,” she added with rehearsed negligence, and slipped a pair of leather gloves from an inside pocket of her cape. With a delicate twist of her wrist she dropped them on the polished mahogany table, and
the beaded black-cougar design embroidered on the fine leather caught the light like a flash of deceit.

If there was some possibility of explanation for all the rest, his gloves resisted efforts to ignore. Trey had worn them to town the day he was dressed in range clothes. Empress stared distraitly at the pale leather gloves, and then up at the exquisitely dressed woman who was calmly shattering her life to fragments. Trey’s wife was more beautiful than she’d imagined, the contrast of her pure white skin and black hair striking, her full-bodied height stunning, her garnet gown and sable cape Paris couturier, the pearls at her neck flawless. Trey’s bounty, no doubt. He’d always casually dismissed Valerie as unimportant, but she wasn’t the style of woman a man would overlook. And he hadn’t, had he? she thought with disquietude. He’d admitted they’d been lovers, and with this dazzling woman standing before her she could see why. According to Valerie, they still were.

She was a liar, he’d said, spoiled and willful and out for his money, and Empress wanted to believe Trey. But powerful credence had to be given to
his wife
(excruciating words) and her intimate knowledge of Trey and his activities the previous week … damning knowledge. If she wanted to ignore all Valerie had said, call it all lies, believe Trey, even her aching heart couldn’t overlook the gloves. They lay on the table like a tossed gauntlet, beautiful Indian gloves still shaped slightly in the fingers where his hands had been. Trey had forgotten them, Valerie said, like you might say, “Would you prefer to hang or be shot?”—with an insufferable self-assertion, and if it would do any good, if it would make Trey irrevocably and absolutely hers, she’d tear Valerie apart limb from limb. But it wouldn’t make him love her or make him faithful, she thought numbly. It wouldn’t help at all.

The frontier west was a world of expediency, blatantly acknowledged here on the raw fringes of civilization, and both Trey and Valerie apparently subscribed to a loose interpretation of ethics. A very thin line existed between a bad man and a good man, between right and wrong in a young country like this, and Valerie, with wifely pragmatism, agreed that “Men will be men.” Trey, obviously, had always lived his life by that laissez-faire dictum.

Stricken and bewildered, Empress thought,
He asked me to
marry him.
Could all those charming, endearing words be lies as well?

“I hope you don’t think he was going to marry you,” Valerie said carelessly, as though she could see behind the blank dumbness and read Empress’s mind. She smiled benignly, like one would to a blundering, artless child. “Really, my dear, Trey is familiar with torrid devotion and adept at the play-love words, the seductive words. You mustn’t think you’re the first … and he’s a heady experience, I won’t deny. But he never would have married you.”

Play-love words, Valerie called them. How appropriate for a man so practiced in playing at love. So he spent his days entertaining himself with his wife and his evenings with the gullible woman he’d bought at Lily’s. She had been naïve, expecting him to perceive of her differently, and he was simply enjoying her in his own fashion, with a smooth charm that showed kindness to the children, casually extended the benefits of his unlimited wealth, soothed her with play-love words when her “torrid devotion” required mollification.

Dizzy with the lunacy of Valerie’s arch, malicious words, Empress’s first inherent impulse resisted the accounting, repudiated the innuendo and stark facts, wanted to believe Trey so her world wouldn’t come tumbling down. But the gloves, pale and embellished against the dark wood of the table, kept drawing her eyes like a magnet. He was unfaithful. And then she silently marveled at her singular delusion … unfaithful to whom, or just unfaithful as always? Shame and wounded anger tingled across her skin at her misguided simplicity, her foolish naïveté. Experienced men like Trey frankly and naturally accepted the pleasure of women, simultaneously without scruple or permanence; even Valerie, Empress thought with satisfaction, might find her smugness altered eventually, for while Trey may enjoy her amorous company, he detested his matrimonial status. Or did he? Light-headed with the tangle of lies, she no longer knew whom or what to believe.
What a fool, what an infatuated fool
, echoed dizzily through her mind, and when she looked up, all she saw was Valerie’s crimson mouth smiling at her simple-minded naïveté. Suddenly she felt like vomiting, and before she humiliated herself completely before this cool, decorative woman, Empress
brushed by the smiling mouth and sable cape and fled the room.

Gazing after the small fleeing woman in strawberry wool, her long pale hair streaming in wispy tendrils behind her, Valerie, with a satisfied smile on her lightly rouged lips, murmured, “Good-bye, little farmgirl.”

On the sleigh ride back to Helena, Valerie complacently congratulated herself on an effective round one, her pleasure a tangible thing, smiling on her mouth, shining from her eyes. The gloves were an unexpected stroke of luck; Trey had left them behind the day he and Judd Parker had lunch, and her man, following Trey, had pocketed them. Now it only remained to see how much opposition the fragile, terribly naïve woman would mount. Somehow, Valerie thought with a predator’s instinct, she rather felt the opposition would be minimal.

The only consideration presenting the slightest misgivings was the very strong probability that the young boy was Trey’s. In that case, an attachment beyond his usual transitory commitment might color the situation. Actually, the unusual sight of Trey’s paramour surrounded by young children was startling. Somehow she’d never pictured Trey, the consummate man-about-town in that novel menage. Ever practical, a moment later she discarded needless speculation about Trey’s image and concentrated on more pressing issues. She required a credible story concerning her visit to the ranch should Trey confront her. Like a game of chess, it always paid to plan several moves in advance of your opponent.

Reaching the privacy of the bedroom, Empress locked the door, walked distractedly into the middle of the large room, and stopped, trembling. He doesn’t care, he doesn’t care, repeated itself in her mind, and with each curt phrase her stomach tightened against her urge to vomit. Hadn’t she expected a limit in the rational part of her mind; hadn’t she
known
from the beginning that her joy was too intense to last? Hadn’t she understood Trey’s predisposition for amusement?

You’ll live!
she told herself sharply to still the trembling.
No one dies of unrequited love
, and she forced herself to walk over to a chair and sit. Placing her hands solidly on the chair arms, she held on tightly and fought for control over the sickening feeling in her stomach.

He’d left her for Valerie … he’d left her.

She couldn’t stop shivering, her mind distrait, all thought processes reduced to a standstill, only loss, like a ferocious beast, tearing at her insides.

An hour later she was still in the same position. “It’s over,” she whispered. “All that beautiful feeling is over.”

Trey hadn’t come home for dinner, and the poignant hope that had persisted past the logic and distress was irrevocably crushed; he was dining with Valerie. Empress found it impossible to eat, although she heroically presented a calm facade to the children. They sensed her unhappiness, were shaken themselves by Valerie’s visit, tentatively broached the subject of Mrs. Trey Braddock-Black. The startling revelation couldn’t be casually explained away, although Empress related in a highly edited version the threat to Trey’s clansmen and admitted that Trey was indeed married to the woman who had appeared in the breakfast room that morning.

Married for only a temporary period of time, she added when their agitated questions exploded, in a voice that held little conviction and less hope. And for the first time since she’d met Trey, she brought up the possibility to the children of returning to France to reclaim Guy’s patrimony. “This might be a good time during this temporary marriage of Trey’s to settle the question of Papa’s estate,” she forced herself to say in a moderate tone, as though her world wasn’t disintegrating around her, as though an immediate trip to France was the most sensible of plans.

The children were silent when she mentioned the trip, the young ones having only known the wilderness, Guy and Emilie indecisive when their own memories of France were so dim. No one spoke of Trey, but he was in their thoughts, important and influential.

“We’ll think about it,” Empress insisted into the silence, the idea her lifeline to sanity. Thoughts that she had to leave, had to get away, ran continuously through her brain, away from this unorthodox situation, away from the deception. If she had the luxury of only herself to consider, maybe
she’d contemplate staying to sort out her feelings, sort out the lies and the pain. Maybe she could even think of staying until Trey didn’t want her anymore. But each day the children became more attached to Trey, so she couldn’t regard only her own wanting; she had to plan for their future. They deserved more than living in limbo in a household where their sister was a rich man’s paramour.

She had enough money now to return to France, thanks to Trey. At least you couldn’t fault him on generosity, although she was only one of many, she was sure, when it came to female recipients of his largesse. And then she thought wistfully, like a young child might wish for a miracle,
If he does love me, if all the shattering revelations were false, if Valerie by some remarkable twist of fancy could be explained away, if everything was some dreadful mistake … then he would come for me.

After the children were settled in bed, she sat alone, her thoughts intentionally directed to planning her return to France. The reasons all seemed sensible, practical; she shouldn’t stay, the children needed a secure future, but the hurt overwhelmed the logic, the aching sadness brought tears to her eyes, and she found herself about to burst into weeping at the slightest provocation.

If Trey did return home that night, she had every intention of calmly explaining to him that she and the children had decided to return to France, but by the time Trey walked in, it was very late, and her calm intentions had been slowly evolving in the course of the evening into a resentful anger. Images of Trey and Valerie had been superimposed over her initial hurt and sadness, and her mood had altered from a melancholy sense of loss to affront.

Trey was shedding his leather jacket as he walked toward her, a smile on his handsome face. “Missed you terribly,” he said, and bending, kissed her lightly on the cheek.

Empress tried to smile, tried to appear normal, but all she could think of was the cozy evening he’d spent with Valerie. “It’s late,” she said tranquilly, but she really felt like screaming.

“The opposition brought in a surprise amendment at five o’clock, when most everyone had gone home or started home. They were hoping to pass it with their supporters on the floor,
but we managed a delay and rounded up everyone again. They lost by two votes. It was damn close. They almost managed to lop off five hundred thousand acres of reservation.” Flinging the jacket he held in his hand on the nearest chair, Trey collapsed on the bed, boots and all, and exhaled wearily. There were times when he felt the burden heavy on his shoulders. “We held them off,” he said with the mocking irony of a man who had spent the day in heated debate and was not feeling his best,
“one more time.”

When one was cynically inclined, as Empress currently was, explanations like Trey’s sounded too perfect, as though they’d been rehearsed.

“Valerie was here today,” Empress said, and if Trey hadn’t dashed by Timms in his hurry to see Empress, waving hello and good-bye in one casual gesture, he would have been informed of her visit downstairs.

He sat bolt-upright. “Making trouble, no doubt,” he said gruffly.

“She had some interesting information about—”

“Don’t believe anything she says,” Trey interrupted. “She’s a consummate liar. As I well know.”

“She said you’d been over to …” Empress paused, uncertain of her choice of words. “… visit,” she finished, and felt the hot surge of her temper.

Trey frowned. Damn. Valerie was getting tiresome. “I haven’t seen her since the wedding. I told you.” More cruel and dangerous than he’d considered, Trey thought. He’d warn her off tomorrow.

“She says otherwise,” Empress snapped, and both her tone and her words startled him.

Throwing his legs over the side of the bed, Trey rose. “Are you telling me,” he said, his voice suddenly quiet with deliberate inquiry, “that there’s some doubt in your mind?” Leaning against the massive carved bedpost, he watched Empress’s face.