Harper lost the urge to confide in Annie Kate. She got off the phone quickly, finished dressing and went down to a breakfast she wasn’t sure she’d be able to eat. She learned from Floretha that both Sam and Leandra were gone already, Sam to the mill and Leandra to the church.
“They said they would meet you at the school,” Floretha told her.
“Oh,” Harper said, taking a biscuit from the pan on the stove and sitting at the old kitchen table. She was glad to miss a meal with her parents; she liked eating in the cozy kitchen with Floretha and her daughter. “Will you and Sandra be there?”
Sandra looked up from her heaping plate of eggs, bacon, biscuit and gravy. “Will we, Mama?”
“Of course we will,” Floretha said, pouring two glasses of juice and placing one beside each girl. “Why, I wouldn’t miss my girl’s big day for any amount of money.”
Harper nibbled at her biscuit, brought her juice glass to her lips but couldn’t swallow. Sandra chattered away about her own graduation, still six years away. But Harper barely heard a word. When Sandra headed to the laundry room to iron her best dress, Harper hadn’t eaten half her biscuit.
“What troubles you, girl?” Floretha asked, dropping into the chair her daughter had just vacated.
“Nothing.”
Floretha sighed. “After all these years, I had hoped you trusted me a little more than that.”
Harper looked up long enough to see the genuine concern—and love—in the housekeeper’s eyes. It came to her that she would find no better confidante than Floretha. Suddenly, the idea of unburdening herself sounded like pure heaven.
Impulsively, she flung herself into her old friend’s arms and said, “Oh, Flo, you were right! I’ve messed up everything!”
“Now, sugar, you tell me what’s wrong and we’ll figure out what to do about it.”
“I think I know what to do,” Harper said, realizing it would take courage to tell Trent the whole story. But she knew it was the first step toward no longer being selfish. She would tell Trent the truth, even if it drove him away forever.
She had no doubt Floretha could tell her what to do about having a baby and raising it all on her own. After all, Floretha was doing the same thing herself. But could the housekeeper tell her what to do with her broken heart, for it surely would be broken after she told Trent what had happened.
But at least he would hear it from her and not find it out the hard way sometime down the road.
TRENT KNEW THAT approaching the back door of the big house was a foolish risk, but he had to see Harper today. He needed some kind of reassurance that she wasn’t going to back out. With a trumped-up excuse for Floretha’s benefit, maybe he could catch a glimpse of her, even catch her eye.
He had never in his life been happier than he’d been these past few weeks, and not because he believed that marrying Harper would gain him any of the things he’d once hoped for. No, he now felt pretty sure that Sam Weddington would send them both packing when he found out about him and Harper, but somehow that no longer mattered. All that did matter was that he and Harper would share a life and that he could make it up to her for all the misery she had suffered at Sam Weddington’s hands. He would make a good life for her and their baby, no matter how much hard work and sacrifice it took.
He walked toward the house, trying not to grin, trying not to whistle. He paused at the screen door, screwing up his courage to knock. Then he heard her voice and paused.
“But it’s not his baby, Floretha. I just know it’s…it’s Red Jannik’s.”
Trent’s heart stopped. And every rose-colored dream he’d had the past week died.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“OH, LORDY, CHILD, how on earth did you get things into such a state?”
The housekeeper’s mournful voice broke through Trent’s rage.
“That’s a real good question, Harper.”
He heard the sharp intake of her breath and the low groan from the older woman as he opened the screened kitchen door. They were sitting at the big wooden table, the old woman’s hand covering Harper’s. Harper stared up at him, stricken.
Seeing her like that, he had to fight to hold on to the rage that had enveloped him when he heard what she’d said about their baby. No, not their baby. Not his baby. Hers and the last poor fool she’d sucked in with her poor-little-rich-girl routine. His first instinct was to ask her why, so he could hear the excuses that might soothe the ache that had already started in his heart.
But he couldn’t let that happen. He couldn’t allow himself to be any more gullible than he’d already been.
“Trent, no—”
“Save it,” he snapped. The last time he’d felt this crushed, this betrayed, this much the damned fool, had been the day Freddie Benton told him what his mother really did with Farrell Landen up at the big house. That day, he’d felt murder in his heart. And he felt it now, too.
But just as he’d wanted to blame everyone but his mother, he now wanted to blame everyone but Harper. And that made him angrier than anything else. What a fool he was.
“I don’t want to hear any more of your lies,” he said with a sneer, all the bitter blackness in his soul tumbling out. “They won’t help. I see you for what you are now, Harper. I can see now this whole routine of yours was one big scheme to give you someone to take the blame for your little bastard brat.”
“No, I—”
“At least I have the satisfaction of knowing you’ll rot in hell for it.”
He wheeled and stalked out of the house, ignoring Harper’s tortured voice as she called after him.
HARPER FELT AS IF all her vital signs had shut down the moment she heard Trent’s voice and realized what he had overheard. Her heart must have stopped, her blood must have frozen, her brain went on hiatus and her limbs ceased to function. And now, all she could do was watch him disappear out the back door, disappear with all her hopes and dreams.
Just as she had known it would be once he heard the truth.
Why, oh, why hadn’t she told him herself? Maybe…But no, that was foolish. The result would have been the same no matter when or how he heard the facts. He would still have believed exactly what he’d said to her. That she’d used him.
He was right.
“Girl, you love that boy?”
Harper looked at Floretha. Still unable to talk, she simply nodded.
“Then get after him. Make him listen.”
“But—”
“Now, child, before he does something foolish.”
Harper rose slowly to her feet and walked toward the door. By the time she reached the yard, urgency gripped her. Floretha was right. She had to explain. He couldn’t stop loving her just like that, could he? And if he still loved her, even a little, she could make him understand. She could…
She reached the parking area behind the barns in time to see the cloud of dust left behind as Trent’s Chevy roared toward the lane. She ran after it, calling his name, mindless of the dust on her new graduation dress.
The dress that was to have been her wedding dress.
She stood in front of the big, columned mansion until the cloud of dust died and the angry sound of the car’s engine faded in the distance. Floretha came up behind her and put an arm around her waist, murmuring something comforting. But Harper knew with certainty that she had gotten exactly what she deserved.
If anything, knowing it made the pain even sharper.
PART TWO: AUTUMN
CHAPTER EIGHT
Collins, South Carolina, 1997
THE SOUNDS AND SMELLS of WedTech’s spinning room enveloped Harper Weddington. The deafening clatter of the equipment, coupled with the sharp scent of processing cotton, had become her life.
Some women craved mood music and twenty-five-dollar-an-ounce perfume. For Harper, WedTech was her love.
Earplugs firmly in place, she nevertheless distinguished the shouted greetings of the workers who depended on her to keep their families in shoes, supper on the table
. As Harper yet again examined the aging, inefficient equipment, she wondered how much longer she would be able to keep her end of the bargain. But she smiled at her co-workers and kept her worries to herself.
“How’s that grandbaby?” she asked one of the grizzled women who worked nonstop to feed the spinner.
Ollie Hunt shook her head. “Not so good. They say he needs another operation if he’s ever going to see right. But…”
Ollie shrugged and Harper knew what the gesture meant. But who had the money for another operation? These days, lack of money was a frustration Harper understood all too well. She put her hand on Ollie’s stooped shoulder. “You come see me after your shift. We’ll work something out.”
“Oh, Miz Harper, I couldn’t—”
“No arguments, now. If that baby needs something, we’ll figure out a way to see he gets it.”
Ollie pursed her thin lips, then nodded. Harper smiled at her and continued her rounds. She didn’t have the foggiest notion how to help Ollie’s grandbaby, but she would do something. Call that doctor friend of Sam’s in Charlotte, maybe, and see if he knew an eye surgeon with a big heart.
If she weren’t already robbing Peter to pay Paul, she would take the money out of WedTech’s coffers and pay for the operation herself. But she was barely meeting payroll as it was. And her personal finances were even worse. The garage had already waited two months for the money for the brake job on her old station wagon. And she’d talked to Dillon twice about renting out the stables. The last thing she wanted was another head-butting session with her son.
Harper sighed, feeling the weight of the financial problems that had started before her father died and hadn’t let up in the half decade since.
Preparing to chat with another worker, she spotted her office manager waving at her from the catwalk leading to Harper’s office. Harper nodded and headed for the stairs, wondering what was up.
The expression on Dessie’s face was grim when Harper reached her office. Dropping the earplugs onto her cluttered desk, she asked, “What?”
“You’d better get out to the house.”
With a start, Harper thought of her granddaughter. Or Floretha. The very old and the very young. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s that SOB Burton Rust over at the bank,” Dessie said. “He’s sent some woman out to Weddington Farms.”
Another start, this one for a very different reason. Guilt, maybe? “What woman?”
“Some rich woman who’s looking for a farm to buy.”
Rage washed over Harper, the old rage that had been so unmanageable when she was younger. She managed it better these days, but this was too much.
“Who gave him the right to do that?” she said, snatching her blazer off the back of her chair. “I never told that…that…”
“SOB.”
“Exactly. I never told him I was ready to sell.” Although she knew, in her heart, that she was up against the wall. “I told him to put out some feelers. That’s all.”
Harper was out the door and headed for her car, all the way calling out instructions to Dessie for the rest of the day. But her mind had already left WedTech behind, was already zipping down the highway to the farm.
She could only pray she could waylay this rich woman before she ran into Dillon. There would be hell to pay if he met the woman who wanted to buy his home before Harper could get to her.
“MRS. STUART DOESN’T want you to help me!” seven-year-old Christine Winthrop shouted at her father. “She doesn’t like you!”
Clutching a very large Madame Alexander doll to her chest, she backed away from Dillon and the pair of riding britches he held out toward her. Her agitation caused her blond pigtails to gyrate wildly. Her sky blue eyes glistened with the hint of tears, but Dillon could also see fear in their depths.
“You can’t dress yourself.”
“Mrs. Stuart doesn’t want to go riding. She hates horses!”
Christine backed away from Dillon, around the huge four-poster bed in which she slept, around the table holding her dollhouse, around a chair crowded with dolls, until she backed up against the front window of her corner bedroom.
“Mrs. Stuart isn’t going riding,” Dillon said, trying to sound patient and calming. “You are.”
He fought to control the hopelessness that nearly overwhelmed him every time he was around his daughter. He kept reminding himself she hardly knew him, that she’d never seen Harper until he moved back home. When Evelyn divorced him, her lawyers had managed to whittle his annual visitation down to two weeks. Determined not to repeat his own personal history, Dillon had taken a job close enough to see his daughter every day.
The effort had been futile. Evelyn wouldn’t allow him five extra minutes with Christine.
When Evelyn died a year ago, Christine told him she wanted to live with the Stringfellows, Evelyn’s parents. That had hurt, but he refused to let it show. Instead, he’d put as much distance as possible between him and the Stringfellows’ divisive influence by moving himself and his daughter from California to South Carolina and the farm where he’d grown up. He’d been certain it was only a matter of time before they developed a warm, loving relationship.
But no matter how he tried, he couldn’t seem to break through the barrier the child—with the help of her mother and maternal grandparents—had erected between them. She grudgingly accepted her new grandmother, but she flat-out didn’t like her father.
“We don’t have time to argue,” Dillon said. “Mrs. Owens will be here in fifteen minutes.”
“Mrs. Stuart wants Floretha to help,” Christine said.
Dillon wanted to jerk the doll from her hands and rip it into a thousand pieces. Christine never defied him directly. She let her dolls do it. She looked ready to cry. If he forced her now, she’d probably run away again.
“Okay, but if she’s busy, you’ll have to let me help.”
Hoping Floretha was up to her elbows in cake batter, Dillon called downstairs.
“Hold on. I’ll be there in a minute,” she called back. “These old bones don’t climb stairs like they used to.”
The old housekeeper never was too busy. She had watched over mother, son, and now granddaughter. Dillon wished he knew some of what she seemed to know by instinct. He wondered if all men lacked such instincts.
Or maybe it was heredity. His own father hadn’t stayed around for Dillon’s birth. He’d just disappeared without a trace twenty-nine years ago. Maybe Dillon’s failure with Christine proved he was like his own father.
Dillon directed a foul curse at the faceless man he’d hated for so many years. He also cursed the guilt he felt at being forced to allow his own daughter to be reared by a mother who changed lovers with the calendar.
But all of that was over now. Despite a battery of lawyers hired by Evelyn’s parents and a custody challenge that had depleted every penny of his own savings, he had his daughter, and he meant to keep her. He didn’t know what it would take, but somehow he would learn to reach her. He wasn’t going to do to her what his father had done to him.
“Now what’s wrong that I had to leave my kitchen and climb all those stairs?” Floretha asked from the doorway.
Christine emerged from behind the curtains and threw herself at Floretha. “Mrs. Stuart wants you to help me get dressed.”
“Why can’t your daddy do it?” Floretha asked as she took the pants Dillon handed her and held them for Christine to step into. “No sense in old Floretha having to climb all those stairs.”
She gave Dillon a questioning look. He shrugged and turned to the front window. “I see dust up the lane. It must be Mrs. Owens.”
Christine thrust her arms into her shirt, tossed Mrs. Stuart on the bed and reached for her hat.
“I’ll never get these buttons done up if you don’t stand still, child,” Floretha said.
“Hurry,” Christine said, dancing with impatience. “I’ll be late.”
“There,” Floretha said as she handed Christine he
r hat. “You look pretty as a cotton blossom.”
But Christine was gone too quickly to hear the compliment. Dillon turned back to the window to avoid staring after her.
Floretha began to pick up and fold the discarded clothing, stopping to pat his shoulder. “She’ll come around. She’s still missing her mother.”
Dillon hadn’t meant for the housekeeper to see how much he hurt. “That’s not Mrs. Owens’s car,” he said. “Who the hell is it?”
“You shouldn’t be cussing,” Floretha scolded as she folded a pair of bright pink shorts. “That’s no kind of example to set for Miss Christine.”
“She’s not here.”
“I still don’t like cussing,” Floretha said. “It’s not right for a gentleman to go around using dirty words.”
“They’re just words, Floretha. They’re not dirty.”
Floretha favored him with the intractable expression he knew so well. “They were dirty when my mama was bringing me up almost seventy years ago, and they were dirty when her mama was bringing her up.”
Dillon didn’t respond. He’d spent the first eighteen years of his life under her benevolent dictatorship. But after living away from home for nearly ten years, it was difficult to adjust to being viewed as one of her wayward children again. He turned his attention to the black Mercedes careening up the long drive, hitting every pothole dead center, no doubt sending the driver bouncing against the roof.
“Are we expecting visitors?” Dillon asked.
“No, and it’s a good thing, with you dressed like a field hand. When I started keeping house here, your grandfather never came out of his room without a coat and tie and a freshly ironed white shirt. Starched.” She smiled at the memory. “Mean as a snake, Mr. Sam was, but he sure looked like a gentleman.”
Floretha left the room, but Dillon’s gaze followed the car as it emerged from the lane and reached the long, curving drive that led through a lawn dotted with overgrown azaleas and rimmed by a row of pines. After disappearing behind a group of towering magnolias, the dust-covered car came to a stop before the front steps.
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