He wouldn’t think about his earlier admission to his mother. Love wasn’t something he could logically condone with this woman of secrets who
feared his touch and kept so fervently her own council.
Finally admitting defeat, he set the papers aside and turned down the lamp. Darkness made the circumstance sit no more easily. The impenetrable shadows implied a certain degree of intimacy between those taking shallow breaths in hurried tandem. Until Starla’s quiet voice slipped through the silence.
“Are you going with them?”
“With who, where?”
“With your family up North?”
Dodge turned toward her but could only make out the vague silhouette of her figure with its back to him.
“Why would you ask that?”
“I heard you and your mother talking.”
“Oh.” A long pause. “Is that what had you all upset in the kitchen?”
“I wasn’t upset.”
“No.”
“I was not.”
“I meant, no, I’m not going with them.”
The gust of her relief was faint but no less apparent.
He chided gently, “Did you think I wouldn’t consider your feelings?”
Her silence said she hadn’t thought he’d considered her at all.
“Starla, look at me. Look at me.”
Her head turned slowly. It was too dark for him to see her features.
“I married you. You are my wife; your child will
carry my name. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
In a voice so small and frail it knocked a hole in his heart, she said, “I don’t know what it means. I told you, I don’t know anything about how a family’s supposed to be.”
He wanted to hold her so badly his arms ached from their emptiness, but he didn’t dare. “It means I won’t leave you. It means you can trust me to take care of you and the baby. Do you believe me? I don’t want to have to keep telling you over and over again.”
“I believe you.” Her words quivered, but he couldn’t tell if it was from uncertainty or emotion.
“All right, then. It’s the three of us, together—right?”
“Right.” Stronger this time. Dodge smiled.
“Good. Good night, then.”
He could feel her studying him in the darkness and waited for her to say what was on her mind.
“Do you hate your father?”
“What? No. No, of course not. My father’s a good man and I love him. Why?”
“Why are you so angry with him?”
“I’m not.”
Her silence chastened him for that lie.
“I am, I guess. He wanted me to be certain things I didn’t want to be.”
“So you ran away.”
“No; running away doesn’t solve anything. I told him his future wasn’t my future.”
“And he understood?”
“He was hurt. I still don’t think he’s gotten over it.”
She rolled toward him, coming up on the prop of her elbow. “But you did it anyway.”
“I had to.”
“Why?”
He chuckled uneasily. “You don’t ask any simple questions, do you?”
“Just questions. You don’t have to answer them if they’re too personal.”
“I just don’t want to bore you with the details.”
“I’m not bored. Tell me about your family. I want to understand.”
“All right. I promise to stop when you start snoring.”
She pushed at his arm playfully, and somehow her hand seemed to linger there, resting lightly at his elbow. Quivers of awareness tingled from fingertips to collarbone.
“I love my family,” he began, as if to qualify things he might say to suggest otherwise. “And they love me. I’ve never doubted that. Not ever.”
“You’re very lucky.” The weight of earnest in that claim surprised and moved him.
“Yes, I know. I guess I’m going to sound spoiled and ungrateful when I say their love was smothering me to death.”
“Are you? Ungrateful?”
He shook his head. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, walking away. I grew up the youngest of seven, the only son. I never lifted a finger for anything, I never wanted for anything, so I guess—yes, I
was
spoiled, spoiled by the love of my family,
by the certainty of it. I grew up with the comfort of knowing exactly what was in store for me. I’d work with my father and his father to learn wood shaping and furniture making, and someday I’d teach those skills to my own sons. I was safe, secure and soft, never having to make a decision for myself.”
“What happened?”
“Reality. The knowledge that everyone wasn’t decent and honest and caring, like my father. He got swindled by one of his customers and nearly lost everything; the business he’d inherited, the house he’d built with his own hands—everything. I saw fear in my father’s eyes and that shook me out of my complacency. It made me realize that I couldn’t go through life with blinders on, taking what I had for granted.”
She inched closer to him, intrigued by his story, unaware of the way her nearness catapulted his heart into his throat.
“Did he lose everything?”
“Almost. We went to a banker, our neighbor. He sat in my father’s office while my mother and sisters cried in the other room, night after night, working on ways to save what we had. He worked numbers like he was doing magic, pulling loans and collateral out of a hat in ways that amazed us. But what struck me, really struck me, was the way he took away the fear, the way he gave my family back their sense of security.”
Her hand rubbed along his arm in an absent caress. “And that’s what you wanted to do for others.”
The admiration in that statement warmed all the way to the soul.
“Yes. I couldn’t think of anything more worthwhile than working those same kinds of miracles. I got a job in the bank the very next day.”
“And your family disapproved? Why? Couldn’t they see what you were trying to do?”
“They saw what I was leaving behind, and they thought that included them. I was turning my back on family tradition. I was taking a risk with my future. My father yelled. My mother cried. My sisters were furious with me for refusing to see reason, for not doing the right thing.”
“But you were. You were doing what was right for you.”
“And doing a damned good job of it, too. I’d become a partner in the bank when the war started up. Then that became another right thing to do that they couldn’t understand. They haven’t forgiven me—for enlisting, for endangering the family line for four long years, for coming home just long enough to make them angry and hurt all over again when I got a telegram from Reeve asking me to come to Kentucky to save his neighbors’ security, for getting shot, then for not coming back home to let them fuss over me. That’s what they don’t understand, why I’d chosen to make things hard for myself.”
Her fingers pressed the swell of his forearm. “I do. You needed to feel free.”
It was that simple, and that complicated.
“I can’t go back with them, not as a failure.”
“You’re not a failure.” Her indignation
squeezed his chest the way her hand did his arm, with a fierce, reaffirming pride. “You’ve done good things here for the people of Pride. You’ve given them the chance to keep what they have, whether they know it or not. Another man might have taken over the bank and stripped them of everything right down to their dignity. Someday they’ll realize that and thank you.”
“Well, that someday isn’t tomorrow or the day after. And I’m nowhere near on my feet, either businesswise or personally.”
“Am I supposed to feel sorry for you, then? Are they?”
Those were just the right words to summon his determination as he growled, “No. I won’t tolerate anyone’s pity.”
“Then what about your wife’s help?”
His silence was steeped in wariness and reluctant pride. Starla rushed on before her courage failed her.
“I can’t cook or clean house, but I know my numbers. I could help at the bank—”
“No.”
“I could help with the filing and the accounting while you talk to the people to let them get to know you. We could have parties and invite those who wouldn’t dare spurn a Fairfax—”
“No.”
“Why not? I could help you get back the strength in your legs with exercises, and—”
“No!”
That escaped him fiercely in a strangling of fear and stubbornness—at the thought of her subjecting herself to the daily dangers associated
with the bank and its enemies, of her exposing herself to the frailty of his body and its failings. “No.”
“But I can help you. Together, isn’t that what you said?”
“I’m saying no, now. I don’t want—”
“You don’t want my help. I see.”
She obviously didn’t see, but he couldn’t explain without stripping himself bare to the insecurities of self. To the lingering fear that he’d lose her if she knew just how helpless he really was. That she’d lose respect for him as a husband, as a man, if she knew he couldn’t respond to her as one. So he let her roll away from him, balling up in a knot of unwarranted hurt and dismissal, letting her believe that he didn’t value her offer, when in fact it worked upon his heart as nothing had before.
But he couldn’t soothe away the pain without admitting the whole truth: he was afraid and he was in love with her. And by hiding both things for the wrong reasons, he was unknowingly destroying what he’d hoped to preserve: their marriage.
Waking beside her husband, Starla had never felt such tearing loneliness, because everything around her was an illusion. She had no marriage, not the kind she dreamed of. That was her fault, her failing. That would have been all right if she’d had a partnership, the kind Dodge had promised. But he’d taken
that
hope from her, too. He wanted nothing from her but a child to promote his family’s lineage. And even that was a lie. There was nothing else he would take, nothing she could give. Not
comfort, not companionship, not cooperation. They were strangers and he seemed to prefer it that way.
Wasn’t it better that he didn’t truly know her?
She’d met members of his family. If these good and decent people couldn’t understand their own son’s decisions about his life, how would they ever come close to accepting the choices she’d had to make? And Dodge, having been raised surrounded by security and love—how could he ever see justification in what she’d done in her past? In her acceptance of what had been done to her? He might give lip service to tolerance, but if the truth were told, he’d pull back in blank horror just as his god-fearing family would.
She was living a lie. And the longer she stayed, the more she wanted to remain, to believe the pretense that he would care for her; that the child she carried would be his in name, if not in fact; that she would be safe to explore emotions long bottled up inside for her own self-preservation; and perhaps that they could build a relationship strong enough to weather the truth so she could relieve her arms and heart of the emptiness that grew more intolerable each day.
Seeing him with his sister’s children had filled her with both anguish and hope.
In the pale silvery light of morning, she gazed at her husband’s face. He might not be gloriously handsome, but she liked the even symmetry of his broad brow, squared jaw, and lean cheeks. Such an honest face: strong, firm, appealing. She stopped her hand just shy of touching that rough cheek, fearing she’d wake him.
How different things would be if the child she carried was shared between them. Then perhaps he’d view the two of them as a blessing rather than a bargain.
Deep inside, she knew from experience that that wasn’t necessarily true.
If she were different, she could wrap her arms about him and lay her head upon his chest and be the affectionate wife he deserved. She was cheating him, out of a real wife, out of a true heir. And because she couldn’t give him those things, she couldn’t share the benefits of wedlock with him, the cherished benefits of love and belonging.
Or could she?
Cautiously she placed her palm on his slow-rising chest, and when he didn’t stir, she was emboldened to rest her head there as well. With a quiet mutter, he moved his arm, opening a hollow in which she nestled with a disturbing ease—disturbing because it felt so right.
She closed her eyes to absorb the confusion of contentment and conflicting alarm as his elbow bent and his hand fell big and warm upon the cap of her shoulder, securing her against him. The movement of his lips along her brow put the edge back in her demeanor, forcing her to back away, but only until he snared her with the intensity of his gaze.
He didn’t say anything, but his eyes conveyed a multitude of messages from blatant desire to hopeful communion; She started when his hand fit to the back of her head, but her resistance was only a token one as he guided her back down to him.
Her breath blew fast and faint against his mouth, halting at the first light brush of his kisses, once softly, again briefly, a third time with a lingering determination that finally loosened the tight seal of her lips. Though her fists remained clenched against his shoulders and her breaths continued in jerky gasps, her mouth yielded sweetly, parting for his ever-deepening claim. When her tongue touched shyly to his, flares of urgency streaked through his blood, pounding in his temples, blotting out thought and cautious reasoning with the roar of passion.
She met the thrust of his tongue with an uncertain moan and a slight stiffening, but she allowed it and even encouraged it by taking his face between her hands, rubbing his stubbled jaw restlessly. Desire burned hotter, brighter, more fiercely than Dodge could control with any degree of moderation. He wanted her madly, with a mindlessness that overrode restraint, with a wild tangle of love and longing that drove him toward one goal: to move within her as deeply as she’d managed to burrow inside him. It was a goal he had thought impossible until the fire racing through his veins had begun to build and curl in his loins, beginning to push for a response that had him trembling.
Anxiously he gripped the curve of her rib cage, hands spreading wide, thumbs cutting in beneath the plump of her unfettered breasts. He heard her sharp inhalation but was too far gone with the feel of her cushiony bosom as he filled his palms.
When she moved against him, his body read encouragement even as his mind refused to interpret
the frantic sounds he devoured with his kiss as ones of panic or protest.