Sweet Wind, Wild Wind

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Carson said, his voice so controlled that it was toneless. “In the event of a divorce, the Rocking B’s title is transferred to our children, with me retained as ranch manager until the day I die, unless I’m the one who sues for divorce. In that case the ranch simply goes to Larry’s grandchildren and I drop out of sight as though I’d never been born, never lived on the Rocking B, never – “ The words ended in an abrupt silence.

  “And if there are no grandchildren?” Lara asked quietly. Carson went absolutely pale. He tried to speak but could not. Lara saw his agonized fear that she would end the pregnancy, and beneath her anger pain turned and cried out. Why couldn’t he have loved me just a little? Why do I have to feel his pain even now? Will it ever end? Will the child I’m carrying even now grow up only to break its heart on the cruel realities of the past?

  “Don’t worry, Carson,” she said tiredly. “You won’t lose the Rocking B at this stage in the game. I won’t get an abortion just to get even with you. There’s been enough cruelty and vindictiveness in the history of the Rocking B. I won’t be part of it any longer.”

  Slowly Lara closed Cheyenne’s journal and set it aside. As she did, other answers came to her, other pages of history turning and bringing new understanding of her recent past with Carson Blackridge.

  “No wonder you didn’t want me going over all the old Blackridge documents,” Lara said. “You were afraid I’d find out about the will. When were you going to tell me? After the child was born?” She stared at Carson for a moment and understood. “You weren’t going to tell me at all, were you?”

  “You were happy,” he said simply. “What possible good would have come from making you sad?”

  Lara had no answer for that but her own pain radiating through her in waves, threatening to overwhelm her. She couldn’t allow that. She had to think. She had to act. She had to decide how she was going to spend the rest of her life.

  But no matter how fiercely she tried, nothing came to her mind except pain. She closed her eyes and wished again that she could cry. She felt Carson’s hard, warm hands gently circling her face, tilting her up to meet his eyes.

  “Has it been so bad being married to me, little fox?”

  The tears that Lara couldn’t cry raked her throat, all but choking her. “When I thought that you wanted me…that someday you might come to love me.” She swallowed, but it didn’t help. Her mouth was as dry as her eyes. “Living with you was very beautiful. But now that I know you never wanted me – “ A shudder racked her. “Oh, God,” she said hoarsely, “why didn’t you tell me why you wanted me to come back to the ranch?”

  “I’ve wanted you for years. You were afraid of me. If I’d told you, you would have run again, the way you had been running for years. And by the time you were no longer afraid of me.” Carson looked hungrily at Lara’s dark, haunted eyes and the pale, beautiful bow of her mouth. “I liked seeing you happy, little fox. I liked what we had together in bed. I liked having you run toward me, smiling.”

  “Yes,” Lara whispered bleakly. “I can believe that. It meant that you had the Rocking B locked up tight.”

  “That’s not – “ began Carson.

  “Stop it!” she cried suddenly. “The truth is written all over the Rocking B and the Blackridge history!” With an effort Lara controlled herself. “I understand why you did what you did. In time I’ll even be able to forgive it. But what I can’t forgive is the way you let me fall in love with you all over again. Or was that your final revenge on me for being Larry’s bastard?”

  There was a long silence. At the end of it, Carson looked drawn, older, alone. “Can you look at these last few months and believe that?” he asked.

  “Can I look at that damned will and believe anything else?”

  There was another long, taut silence. When Carson finally spoke, it was in a tone that Lara hadn’t heard for months, clipped and hard; his eyes were the deep, icy amber of a February dawn. Yet there was a yearning beneath his words that twisted Lara’s heart.

  “That’s why I didn’t tell you. You said you loved me, but I knew there wasn’t enough love in the world for you to believe that I wanted you with or without Larry’s will. So I said nothing. I wanted to heal you and myself and the past. I wanted – “ Carson’s mouth became a hard, bitter, downward curve. “You weren’t the fool, little fox. I was. I knew more about love than you did, and yet I still hoped. I should have known better. Sharon loved Larry, and she made his life pure hell. Larry loved Becky, and he put her through a different kind of hell. You loved me and I – “ Carson made a sudden, chopping motion with his hand. “Hell of a thing, love.”

  Suddenly he turned and walked away. A few moments later Lara heard the sound of the front door closing.

  She lay without moving for a long time, trying to think, unable to do anything, except hurt. Finally she knew that she couldn’t bear being inside the bedroom any longer. She pulled on a light jacket and walked quickly to the only haven left to her, the Chandler homestead. Yet that, too, had somehow changed. Lara looked around the familiar, worn interior of the homestead and wondered why she should feel a stranger in her own home. She knew every seam, every pit, every gouge in the walls and floor. She knew the faded colors of the throw rugs and the threadbare patterns of the chairs by heart. Each crack and chip in the heavy pottery plates was an old friend, as was the mismatched silverware stacked in wooden drawers whose corners were rounded by use. Every room, every window, every fall of light and shadow in the old house called silently to her, Remember me?

  And the answer was always, Yes, I remember you. Then why did she feel adrift, lost?

  Lara’s blue-black eyes searched each room as she paced the small house yet again. She had come to the homestead to think because thinking had been impossible at the Black-ridge ranch. The things she remembered there were too new, too raw with pain for her to do anything but flinch.

  She didn’t want to remember the way Carson had looked before he had turned and walked out of the house. He had the ranch. Wasn’t that what he had wanted? Land, not love? Then why had he looked so sad and angry? Had she missed some vital page in the history of the past?

  Had she interpreted the facts of her own personal history mistakenly or too narrowly, with the result that her conclusions outraged truth in the very act of supposedly discovering it?

  She had had that kind of distorted focus on reality once before. She had been so sure that Carson had walked out on her four years ago because she was Larry’s bastard. So sure…and so wrong. Carson had walked out because he was too decent to seduce a virgin for revenge. That fact hadn’t changed with the revelation of Larry’s will. That fact remained.

  Carson was a decent man.

  In school Lara had read scholarly works whose only purpose had been to distort historical facts in the service of the author’s own prejudices. She had always felt that those works represented the most distasteful sort of trickery, intellectual lies masquerading as enduring truth. But was she doing that very same thing now? Had she remembered only the most damning incidents from the past four months, and had she interpreted them in only the most damning ways?

  Why did the light go out of Carson’s eyes when he knew that I had discovered the truth? He had what he wanted. Didn’t he?

  Didn’t he?

  There was no answer but the wild cry of a Canadian wind flowing around the mountains, wrapping them in clouds.

  Suddenly Lara’s own skin seemed too small for her. It was the same for the room, the house itself. She had to be outside. She had to be beneath nothing more than the untamed sky, had to see nothing smaller than the massive thrust of mountains, had to hear nothing but the long cry of the wild wind.

  At that instant Lara realized why her mother had always walked out alone during the most violent thunderstorms. In the immense, shattering thunder, no one would hear her scream.

  A gust of wind tore the front door of the homestead fro
m Lara’s hand. The door banged against the wall, fully open. The door banged again, as though to remind Lara that she had forgotten to close it. She didn’t notice. As she hurried out into the yard, she pulled on the mountain parka that she had automatically grabbed from its hook beside the door. Behind her the door banged again, then slammed shut.

  Lara scrambled to the top of one of the rolling, grass-covered ridges in back of the homestead and stood for a moment. All around her huge clouds raced and boiled, churned by a muscular wind. Some of the clouds were the color of freshwater pearls. Others were as dark as the mountains whose peaks they concealed. After a glance she hurried on. She knew exactly where she was going. Her mother had taken her there on gentler days, when sunlight rather than thunder poured over the land.

  But her mother had also gone there to drink the wild storm winds, and she had gone alone.

  Before the first vague forerunners of thunder trembled through the air, Lara reached her destination. A long, rocky spine rose from a grassy ridge. In some places the layered rock had been worn to little more than a jumbled mass of boulders. In other places, a cap of harder rock jutted out over the ridge where softer rock had already been worn away. The result was a low, shallow cave overlooking the valley of the Big Green.

  Lara ducked beneath the overhang, sat with her knees pulled up against her chest and waited for the storm to break. And as she waited, thoughts shivered and twisted like clouds called by the raging wind, thoughts escaping her control, reminding her of the very things that she had fled from the Blackridge house in order to forget. She fought the seething memories, throwing back cold truths to take the warmth from a remembered time when she had believed in love. Like the wild wind, the arguments raged in her mind.

  Sometimes Carson’s hands had trembled when he touched her. Lust, nothing more. Simply lust. A biological reflex having nothing to do with tenderness and caring and love. He didn’t love her. He had let her fear fade before he touched her. He hadn’t pushed her sexually in any way at all. He had kept his promise even when passion had made his whole body hard with need.

  If he had pushed, she would have run away and he would have lost the Rocking B.

  He had let her undress him. Let her touch him. Had made himself naked and utterly vulnerable to her. Had given himself to her. He had taken all the risks. He hadn’t been forced to do that by her fear because her fear had faded with each of his smiles, his deep laughter, his amber eyes approving of her. He could have seduced her much more quickly if he hadn’t tied his own hands. After the first weeks she wouldn’t have been afraid to make love with him. He must have known that. Yet he had held back. He had kept his word. He had let her come to him.

  Lara sat very still, waiting, but there was no cold refutation to take away the warmth of that memory. If seduction had been Carson’s only goal, he had acted foolishly by being so restrained. Carson wasn’t a foolish man. Therefore, seduction hadn’t been his only goal. With that realization came another memory. It shook Lara like the wind, just as it had shaken her that night in the library when Carson had looked at her with such agony and regret in his eyes for having hurt her years ago: Oh, God, little fox. There are times when I wish I could crawl out of my skin and die.

  Lara shuddered violently and made a broken sound that was swallowed up by the long howl of the wind. She remembered something else that he had said: Love is a lie, a trick played on the unwary. She had been easy prey. She had walked into his arms as trustingly as though he had never betrayed her in the past. But he hadn’t betrayed her years ago. Not really. He had stopped short of the cruel, unforgivable act of seduction and revenge.

  And then came the cold, undeniable refutation of warmth and companionship. In the end he had tricked her. He hadn’t told her about Larry’s will.

  Wind howled and moaned through the valley, bringing an icy foretaste of the storm to come. Thunder rolled in the distance, a vibration more sensed than heard. Below her, scattered at the edge of the wide green valley, was the Blackridge ranch and the Chandler homestead. Her home.

  Even as the sight of home reassured Lara at some deep level of her mind, she realized that Carson had never had that kind of reassurance. But he had wanted it. He had needed it. A home. A place that was his own after a lifetime of being told that he didn’t belong on the Rocking B because he wasn’t a child of Larry’s body. How would Lara have felt if she hadn’t had the certain knowledge that the Chandler homestead waited for her when the storms of life threatened to tear her apart? How had Carson survived without the silent, enduring presence of home and love to give him strength?

  No wonder he had hungered deeply for the Rocking B. It represented the security he had wanted and never gotten from life. With Larry’s death the ranch should have become Carson’s. He had earned it. It should finally have become the home where he belonged beyond argument or the ability of man to alter. And the ranch had belonged to him – until Larry’s will was opened, and Carson was told that, if he wanted the ranch, he had to seduce Lara into marriage and motherhood.

  Silently Lara asked herself if she really expected Carson at that point to risk everything he had ever wanted on the goodwill and sympathetic understanding of a girl whom he had hurt so badly that even four years later she ran from the slightest chance of meeting him face-to-face.

  And then she remembered that Carson had been trying to see her or lure her to the ranch for more than a year. He had called her faculty advisor and suggested the topic of the Rocking B history while Sharon and Larry Blackridge were still alive. Carson couldn’t have known about Larry’s will at the time. The will hadn’t been drawn up until Sharon died.

  I’ve wanted you for years, dreamed of you until I woke up sweating and tied in knots.

  That was why he had tried to get her to the ranch. Lust. Just lust. Yet even as the cold thought came, Lara found herself unable to believe it. Lust was too simple to explain the complex emotions Carson had shown her. Did a man in the grip of wild lust take such tender care to arouse and then wholly satisfy an inexperienced partner? Did a man who knew only lust sit by a woman’s bedside for days while she lay in the grip of a fever that had nothing to do with sex? Did lust drive a man to break his workday and take a woman up to a remote pond – not for a quickie in the grass but to count baby ducks? Did lust make a man cry at the thought of a woman wanting his child?

  No.

  Then a cold thought came, threatening the warm memories. A man who was worried about getting a woman pregnant and keeping her content might do those things. Marriage was only the first step in securing the Rocking B. The ranch wouldn’t be within Carson’s control until a child was born.

  Lara shivered suddenly, though the wind rarely reached beneath the sheltering overhang. She couldn’t believe that Carson was so cold, so calculating, that he would plan and carry out an intricate campaign of gentleness and sharing simply to assure himself of his hold on Lara and the ranch. She just didn’t believe it. She didn’t know why, but –

  She frowned suddenly, reaching back to the blurred time of fever for a memory that was eluding her. She stared out across the land as though the answer were there rather than in her own memory. As sudden lightning stitched across the darkening sky, words came to her, Dr. Scott’s and Carson’s voices echoing in what Lara had thought was a fever dream but realized now was reality.

  I want Lara well. I… need her.

  Don’t you want the baby, too?

  Hell, yes, I want it. But I want Lara more.

  Carson couldn’t have known that she would hear and remember those words. They couldn’t have been the result of calculation rather than emotion. He wanted her more than he wanted the baby that would give him control of the Rocking B.

  Yet she had believed that he wanted the land more than anything else.

  What if Carson wanted what the ranch represented rather than the land itself? A home. A place to live that was his own. A place where he would be welcomed
when he was worn and hungry and cold. A place where he could go to sleep at night and know that someone would smile on seeing him in the morning. A place where he was accepted no matter who his parents were or were not, a place where he was loved whether or not he was perfect in every way. I’m not perfect. Remember that, and try to forgive me when I fail you.

  Had he failed her?

  “He doesn’t love me!”

  Lara didn’t know that she had cried out until she heard her own words echoing back from the overhang. “Love me. Love me. Me. Me.” She put her head in her hands and trembled, but her thoughts drove on relentlessly, searching out another page of reality, a different understanding.

  Did the fact that Carson didn’t love her prove that he had failed her? How would her life have been different or more complete if Carson had loved her? Would he have been a more thoughtful, passionate lover? Would he have taken better care of her when she was sick? Would he have given her small caresses as he passed her chair at night? Would he have surprised her with wildflowers and shiny river stones and a mother duck with a raft of fluffy babies?

  Would he have fought tears at the realization of how badly he had hurt her four years ago? Would the light have drained out of his eyes when her bitterness poured over him, slicing through his hopes of home and happiness until he –

  “Stop!” Lara cried out, as though it were something other than her own words battering her. “Oh, stop – “

  But it didn’t stop. Ruthlessly Lara’s memories and intelligence worked together, pages turning, reality slowly shifting, presenting a new view of its complex truths. Understanding raked through her, forcing her to look at Carson and herself, forcing her to realize that truth came from looking at what a person did rather than what he said or did not say. Carson hadn’t said he loved her, but he had treated her as though she were the most precious thing on earth to him. If that wasn’t love, what was?

  And she, who had cried out her love for Carson, had stripped him of his dreams in a single, bitter torrent of words. Was that an act of love?