Slowly, with deliberate relish, Starla showed him the ring she wore, waiting for him to pale as he recognized it.
“In this case, the dead
do
tell tales. The bones I’ve had moved carry the very distinct marks of your dueling pistols, the ones you were arrogant enough to bury with them.”
Cole observed her through narrowed eyes. “And what do you plan to do with this fantasy you’ve concocted?”
“I could tell Tyler. Do you think he’ll laugh it off as my imagination when he sees the bullet scoring
on our mother’s ribs? Do you think he’ll dutifully return to this house to care for you in your dying days or for the legacy of debauchery you plan to leave him? Or do you think he’ll cut out your black heart and set it ablaze in your distillery? Fairfax Bourbon would make a splendid fuel for your pyre, don’t you think?”
Cole laughed, a grating, gritty sound. “You are very much like her, you know, both of you too smart for your own good. What do you want in order to keep your mouth shut? I assume it’s something, or you wouldn’t be here.”
“I don’t want to hurt Tyler with the truth. He deserves to have this grand inheritance from you without the taint of our mother’s blood on it. He’s earned it. You’ll sign it over to him today.”
“And I suppose you want your fair share.”
“I don’t want anything from you,” she hissed, “except for you to be forever out of my life. You will leave me and my husband alone. There is no kinship between us, and I won’t pretend I feel the least bit of remorse about that. If anything happens to Tony or the bank, I’ll assume you’re behind it, so you’d better be certain your political allies understand that both are off-limits. Is that clear?”
“Is there anything else?” The bitterness in his tone at one time would have gratified her, giving him a taste of how it felt to be helpless. But now she just wanted to escape him and his foul reach forever.
“No. I just want the pleasure of pretending you never existed.”
A vicious smile. “Do you think your precious
little Yankee will ever let that happen? Truth won’t excuse fact, Starla. You did what you did, and he’s not going to ever forget that—or forgive you.”
Those words echoed in her heart and mind as she laid her mother and her unfortunately unnamed lover to rest at Glendower Glade in a service presided over by the county’s discreet pastor. He never asked to know the identity of the souls he sent to the blessed beyond.
At long last, sharing the terrible events of the past with a horrified and consoling Patrice, Starla spent a few hours of restless slumber at the peaceful Glade before heading back into Pride to wait at her husband’s side for him to awake and decide their future in a way she hadn’t imagined twenty-four hours earlier.
“He’s awake,” the doctor told her, then cautioned, “but he’s not very aware of what’s going on around him. He’s heavily dosed with laudanum and may not even know you. Don’t be alarmed if he doesn’t make much sense.”
She was terrified that he’d make complete sense. With her breath suspended, she slipped into the back bedroom, where Dodge was lying under the drape of a clean white sheet.
“Tony?”
His eyes flickered faintly, dark lashes appearing as bruises against the pallor of his cheeks. Starla put her free hand on his brow, stroking it lightly. He looked up and seemed to focus for an instant, then the grogginess stole him away. She was about
to leave him to his rest when he moistened his lips to murmur, “You weren’t here.”
It took a second for her to realize he meant when he woke up. “I’m sorry, Tony. I’m here now and I’ll be staying, if you want me to.”
His head rolled restlessly from side to side, then his attention fixed upon her. She could see him adding up his memories to arrive at some very damning facts. For the first time she cursed the fact that her husband was such a smart man. Slowly he closed his eyes and turned his head away. Whether it was a pointed rejection or merely a meaningless gesture prompted by the numbing drugs in his system, she didn’t know.
But she continued to hope as she waited for Dodge to recover his faculties. Then she would have her answer.
The roar of cannonfire sent him staggering out of his tent and into the slicing rain. The heavens flashed as if an angry God was casting down His censure on brothers who would seek each other’s lives.
Covering his ears against the splitting din, he looked about him in panic, seeing his men on the rain-puddled ground, lying facedown in the reddening water. He waded through the mud, breath chugging in anxious gasps as he approached the first dead man. His fault. He’d killed them. They’d been his responsibility and he’d failed them all. Slowly he bent down, reaching for that first man’s shoulder, readying to turn him face up so he could see the man’s identity. Not wanting to know.
“Tony.” She stretched out a slender hand to him. He looked up in confusion, rain skewing his vision. He thought at first that she was an angel; then recognition shocked through him. “I’ve come to take you home with me.”
“But my men … I can’t leave my men. They depended on me and I let them die. I killed them.”
She smiled with the beauty of a sudden ray of sunlight penetrating the gloom of the battlefield. “No. War killed them. They don’t need you any more. Come. You’ve a promise to keep.”
He took her hand hesitantly. For all her fragile looks, he’d never realized how strong she was. She lifted him out of the mud and blood.
“Come home with me, Tony. You don’t need to come back here again.”
Dodge woke with a jerk, blinking his way to complete lucidity after days of hazy shadow. And the first thing he did was look beside him for the one face he needed to see there.
Starla was curled up in a chair at his bedside, her features lovely in repose, yet lined with the strain of her vigil. From her rumpled state, he guessed she’d been there for some time. He started to reach out to her, but something stopped him, some half-realized doubt nagging at the back of his mind.
Christien. Something about Christien, the boy who was going to be his son. His and Starla’s.
Starla’s and … and her father’s….
Remembrance hit him with wind-sapping strength, a truth that, no matter how hard he tried to deny it, became more obvious to him. This boy that his wife brought to him was her son, conceived of the most unholy union imaginable. His soul recoiled, its very pain mocking Dodge for his bold words to his wife, words spoken with the incredible arrogance of one who had no idea—no idea what he was promising to forgive.
There’s nothing you’ve done or could ever do that would make me love you any less
.
How quick he’d been to absolve her for sins he couldn’t have imagined, how quick to refute the feelings that even now overwhelmed him. Feelings that shamed him and scared him and made him wonder if he could ever look at her without suffering from images he couldn’t shut out of his mind, made him wonder if he could touch her without thinking …
“Tony?”
The sound of her voice acted upon him like an unexpected breeze, chilling him into a rash of gooseflesh while warming his anguished heart. There was such vulnerability in the way she said his name, calling upon him to remember his promises.
Trust me
. Now she was testing that claim, and he wasn’t sure he could honor it.
Very slowly he turned his head to look at her. The naked relief in her gaze was quickly shadowed. She gave him a tremulous smile and blinked to scatter the welling anguish pooling in her eyes. “How do you feel?”
“What?” He had no clue as to why she was asking until she placed a pistol ball in his hand. He looked at it for a long moment, trying to equate the piece of lead with the hell he’d carried. Then he reached a hand down to rub the top of his thigh. Feeling nothing. Starla’s hand covered his, squeezing gently.
“Doc Anderson said they’d be swelling, that you shouldn’t worry.”
Yet. Dodge closed his eyes, consumed by grief
and fear and a horrible sense of helplessness. Starla brought his hand up to press her damp cheek into its palm. Her words throbbed with passion.
“It doesn’t matter, Tony. It doesn’t matter. It won’t change anything.” Not his worth as a man, not his ability as a husband. Just as knowing her past had changed nothing.
In a leaden tone, he set her straight.
“It changes everything.”
With a soft cry, she fled the room.
Not believing he could feel more wretched, Dodge tried to summon the will to call her back, but something stopped him, something he couldn’t push aside, something he couldn’t get over. Her father….
“What did you say to her?”
Dodge looked up at the soft question, surprised to see Tyler Fairfax glaring down at him through eyes flashing with green fire and fury.
“You sanctimonious son of a bitch.” Tyler kept his voice pitched low, but there was no disguising the hatred pulsing behind each syllable. “You and your big talk and smooth lies. Who the hell are you to judge us? You don’t know, Mr. Cast-the-First-Stone, what it was like for us, trapped in that house with him. Don’t you dare sneer down at her for what she had to do to survive. And don’t you think for one minute that she asked for any of what she got. It was him, that monster, that—”
“Tyler, don’t.”
He broke off his tirade when Starla placed a gentle hand on his arm.
“Are you all right, darlin’?” He backed down
quickly to slip his arm around her. She looked so pale, so fragile.
She smiled at his concern. “Fine. Just a little dizzy is all. From the worrying, I guess.”
“I’ll take you home.” He glared at Dodge, daring him to protest, growing even more furious when he didn’t.
“No, Tyler. My place is here.”
“But—”
“I’ll be all right. You go on home. I’ll be fine.”
He balked but finally gave before her quiet strength. Placing a tender kiss on her brow, he whispered, “If you need me, you let me know.”
She touched his cheek and managed a frail smile before resuming her chair next to the bed. Sitting there with the husband who stared at her as if she were a stranger to him, acting as if the coward deserved the faith she placed in him. Tyler smiled back grimly, making plans to see the banker dead if he didn’t carry through on his vows to his sister.
When they were alone, Starla gave Dodge a wan smile.
“I warned you, didn’t I?”
Dodge couldn’t respond with a smile of his own. He was too numb inside to give her the assurance she desperately needed from him. All his feelings were as numbed as his legs, as the fact kept pounding at him, a barrage of terrible truth battering him down.
“Yes, you did,” he answered quietly. But he hadn’t listened to the gravity of her claims. And he hadn’t believed that anything she could tell him could shake the foundations of his soul.
He’d been wrong.
He was shaken beyond the power of clear thought.
“I don’t know what to say,” he confessed at last.
Starla laughed softly. “I’m sure you don’t. Tyler was right. There’s no way you could understand.”
Dodge wet his lips, forcing the words. “I want to.”
Starla shook her head slightly, her cynical gaze rimmed with diamond-bright anguish. “No, you don’t.” He was already reeling under the shock of what he’d discovered. Why compound the trauma?
“I need to, Star, if I’m going to get over this. Right now, I don’t know if I can.”
He was honest. But then, he’d always been honest with her, almost always, and if she’d been the same, things wouldn’t have gone so far, and the impact of the truth wouldn’t be so devastating.
So with head bent, with gaze fixed upon the hands she’d folded demurely in her lap, she told him how it had been for two lost and frightened children, their mother suddenly abandoning them, taking with her the only love they’d known, their father continually steeped in drink and given to roaring rages. They’d both pretended nothing was wrong inside their home of wealth and privilege, because while they wore those masks of frivolousness, they could push the horror away for a time. But it was always waiting for them, just on the other side of the front door.
Fair Play. Tyler drank to escape it. Starla detached herself from the emotions that screamed inside
her. Because they had roles to play and no one could suspect that their lives were anything less than golden. Though many did. At first, they didn’t know how to ask for help from those who might have given it. Then pride wouldn’t allow them to. A Southern family kept its unpleasant secrets at home, where they belonged, while presenting a smiling face to a society that didn’t want the burden of knowing.
It started with verbal abuse heaped upon their mother. Cole Fairfax roamed the halls all day and night, ranting about his faithless wife, about the whore he’d married who’d shamed him in front of his peers within his home. When those angry slurs against an absent victim would no longer serve his boiling rage, he turned it upon the two children who had the misfortune to resemble the object of his ire. With words, then with his hand, he battered them incessantly while they struggled to find ways to please him in order to lessen the punishment. But as Starla grew into the image of her mother, there seemed no way to circumvent his displeasure.
“I think he began to confuse us, to think I was her. He’d come to my room smelling of whiskey and call me by her name. He’d sit at the foot of my bed for hours, weeping, raving about things I couldn’t understand. He told me I was his curse, that I was to blame for his unhappiness because I was his reminder of his foolishness and his shame. He’d say it was my duty to fulfill the promises my mother had made him, that I was his reward for what he’d endured, that no one could love children
whose own mother didn’t want them. We believed him, Tony. He was our father.”
Dodge closed his eyes briefly, unable to say anything for a long minute, then asking hoarsely, “Did Tyler know what he was doing?”
“No. Not until just before he put me on the train. And even then, I-I couldn’t tell him everything. It was the night after Father decided that it was time we—you know.”
She said it so emotionlessly, her features a doll-like blank. Dodge’s gut clenched in fury and outrage. He wanted to reach out to her then but was afraid to startle her out of her trancelike reflections until all the poison of her past was purged.