But he didn’t feel sick.
On the other hand, if that noise coming from the bathroom was any indication, Rose sounded utterly miserable. He wondered if he should go get Beth.
Doubling back to the bed, he picked up the trousers he’d shed last night. Foregoing any underwear for the time being, Matt pulled his pants on and tugged the zipper up as he crossed back to the bathroom door.
He knocked lightly. Abruptly, the noise stopped. Matt leaned against the door. What was going on? “Rose, are you all right?”
Oh, God, Rose thought, he’d heard her.
Thoroughly miserable, Rose covered her mouth to hold back the squeal of distress.
“Fine,” she managed to call as she dragged herself up to her wobbly feet.
As quickly and quietly as she could, she turned on the water and then cupped her hands together beneath the faucet. Rose took a quick drink of the water that pooled into her joined palms. Swishing the water around, she spat it out again.
Her mouth felt terrible, as did the rest of her. But at least she’d stopped throwing up. For today.
He frowned. “You don’t sound fine. Was it last night’s dinner?”
“Yes.” She wiped her face, clutching at the excuse. “I guess so. I mean, well…” she couldn’t force herself to elaborate. “Maybe.”
The next minute Matt opened the door. Beads of perspiration had plastered her hair to her forehead. Just like last night, he recalled. But last night she hadn’t looked this miserable, despite the brave smile she was trying to put on now.
For a second he just stood there, not certain if he was encroaching on her space. He knew that whenever he was sick, he just wanted to be left alone. But he couldn’t just walk out on her.
“Is there anything I can do?”
She shook her head. Slowly. Afraid of beginning the process all over again.
“No, not unless you’d like to throw up for me.” She flashed him as bright a smile as she could muster under the circumstances. “I’m okay now. Really.”
He touched her forehead to see if it was warm. It wasn’t, but it was certainly damp. And her cheeks were flushed again.
Just the way they had been when she’d fainted last week.
The scene nagged at him. As did the question Sister Mary Katherine had asked him when she’d first seen Rose slumped in his arms at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Rose pulled her head back from his hand. “I’m all right,” she insisted.
And then she saw the look in his eyes. It was a strange look, as if he was seeing her for the first time. It made her uneasy and she debated pretending not to notice. But she couldn’t just ignore the question in his eyes. She’d resolved to meet life head-on, and Matt was part of life.
“What?” she said.
Matt felt foolish asking, but he knew it wouldn’t give him any peace until he put it to rest. Amid the uneasiness was an apprehensiveness, as well. What she would say in reply could very well change his life.
Both their lives.
Matt forced the words out before he thought better of it. “Rose, are you pregnant?”
She went deathly pale. He’d asked the one question she’d feared ever since she’d seen him standing on her aunt’s doorstep. She couldn’t lie, but she couldn’t tell him the truth, either.
She stalled. “What makes you ask something like that?”
Rose hadn’t hotly denied his question. If she wasn’t pregnant, she would have. He had his answer. It wasn’t an answer he wanted or knew what to do with.
But she looks so thin, his mind protested. He’d touched her, ran his hands all along her body last night. She didn’t seem any different than she had back home, except perhaps to be even more amorous. She couldn’t possibly be pregnant.
Could she?
“You are pregnant, aren’t you?”
It wasn’t in Rose to lie. Evade, yes, for dear life the way she had her father’s questions, but not lie outright. She never had, to anyone, least of all to someone who meant so much to her. If her father had asked her if Matt Carson was the father of her baby, she would have had no choice but to say yes.
Just as she had no choice here.
But you lied to him when you told him you wanted to go your own way, a small voice inside her head insisted. You didn’t want to, you had to. And that, she knew, had been her way out. Semantics.
There were no semantics to play with here. Only a direct question, a direct assumption.
Squaring her shoulders, Rose looked at Matt, the unwitting father of her baby. She was a soldier facing the enemy. “Yes, I am.”
Despite the fact that he thought he knew her answer, when she gave it, it hit him right in the gut like an exploding torpedo.
“Why didn’t you say something?” he demanded, the numbness giving way to anger.
She didn’t like the tone he was taking. He made it sound as if she owed him daily reports on her activities. “That’s obvious,” she retorted. “Because I didn’t want you to know.”
There was only one reason for that as far as he could see. And it hurt more than that time he’d been thrown from his horse and had cracked three ribs.
“Whose is it?” he asked heatedly.
Her eyes widened so much that they hurt. How could he? “What?”
He was so angry, he didn’t hear the dangerous note in her voice. Didn’t see anything but what he took to be his own betrayal. “I want to know, Rose. I have a right to know.” It took all he had for him not to grab her by her shoulders and shake her. “Who’s the baby’s father?”
Now he sounded just like her father. Except that her father hadn’t all but blatantly accused her of being an unfaithful little whore. But that was exactly what Matt was saying to her.
She felt a flash of fury rise up in her breasts. “How dare you ask me that?”
“How dare I?” he thundered. “How dare I? I’ll tell you how dare I. I ‘dare’ because I’m the poor, dumb fool who came all the way out here to talk you into coming back with him.” The hurt was so bad it threatened to choke him completely. He couldn’t think straight. “Because I’m the idiot who fell for a Wainwright when I should have known better.”
It was the final blow. She thought the feud was absurd, but no one, not even Matt, was going to throw rocks at her family.
“‘The idiot who fell for a Wainwright’?” she echoed. “You make it sound as if being a Wainwright is only second to having leprosy,” Rose shouted at him. “Is that how you feel?”
He knew he’d made a mistake, knew he should apologize, but he was too hurt, too stunned to make amends. “I don’t know what the hell I feel anymore.”
“Well, I do. I feel angry. Damn angry that I wasted any time thinking about you, worrying about you—” Worrying about the way knowing that she was going to have his baby would affect him.
“Worrying about me?” He scowled at her. Now what was she talking about? “Why the hell would you be worrying about me?”
She grasped the ends of her robe and tied them together. “Because I’m the idiot here, not you, that’s why.” She wasn’t about to explain anything to him, not when he took that tone with her, not when he thought what he thought. Marching out of the bathroom, she pointed toward her bedroom door. “Now get the hell out of here. I mean it. Now!”
He wasn’t about to go anywhere, not until he found out what he needed to know. “Not before you tell me the name of the snake I’m supposed to kill for crawling into your bed and making love to my woman.”
Her mouth fell open. Now he was talking about her as if she were some kind of a possession, to be locked away with his precious rifles and the other inanimate objects that he collected.
“Your woman? Since when was I ever ‘your’ woman? All you ever said was that what we had between us was casual, that it was just a fling.”
Those were the words that echoed in her head as she’d packed up to leave Mission Creek. You didn’t burden a man who wanted no ties with the advent of a baby.
Not unless you wanted to imprison both of you.
He snorted. “Well, you sure took me at my word, didn’t you?”
Her chin shot up defiantly. “The word of a liar,” she jeered. “Yes, I guess I did at that.”
He wanted to take her and shake her. Wanted to press her to him and to demand to know why she was so bent on breaking his heart.
But he couldn’t.
He couldn’t make himself weak in her eyes and let her see that he still loved her even after she’d gone to someone else’s bed.
The best thing would be if he just walked out of her room now and kept on walking. But he couldn’t. Not while this fury raged through him.
Unable to help himself, Matt caught her by the shoulders, struggling not to give her at least one good shake. “Tell me who the bastard is and I’ll cut his heart out and give it to you on a platter.”
Her eyes narrowed into slits. For two cents she’d spit the answer at him. But she knew he’d given her the way out. If she still wanted it. If he believed that the baby belonged to someone else, he’d leave. They’d never see each other again and that would be the end of it. Just as she’d originally planned.
So why the hell did it hurt worse than if someone had just put a red-hot poker against her heart?
“You have no right to talk to me like that, no right to question me. Now get the hell out of my room!” she ordered. When he didn’t move, she smacked the flat of her hand against his chest and pushed him through the door.
Right into Aunt Beth.
Summoned by the sound of raised voices, Beth looked at the two with confusion and concern etched into her well-moisturized face.
“You two are so loud, St. Patrick’s Cathedral just called and asked if we want a priest to come and perform an exorcism.” Beth looked from one angry face to the other. “What in heaven’s name is going on here?”
“Ask him.” Rose jerked a thumb at Matt. “He seems to have all the answers.”
With that, Rose slammed the door on both of them and walked away.
The second the door closed, Beth saw Matt’s shoulders lose their rigidity. Empathy flooded through her like Hurricane Andrew through Florida. She gave him an understanding smile.
“Would you like to come into the kitchen for a cup of coffee?”
He sighed. Matt shrugged carelessly, turning. “Sure. Could you lace it with some arsenic?”
“Now, now, it can’t be as bad as all that—” And then she confided, “Although I have to admit it did sound pretty bad there for a minute.” She walked into the kitchen, flipping on the overhead cam lights. “Woke me from a sound sleep.”
“Sorry,” he apologized.
“No apology necessary. At least,” she amended, “not to me.”
She laid her hand on his shoulder and gently forced him down into a chair at the kitchen table.
“Stay,” she ordered humorously, then turned to the business at hand. Ada wasn’t due in until almost ten, which coincidentally was around the time she got up in the morning. But coffee wasn’t about to get itself. If she wanted it, she was going to have to find the coffee filters.
Selecting a set of cupboard doors, Beth began her quest. She hadn’t a clue where most things in her kitchen were shelved.
“All right,” she said cheerfully as she continued her search. “Do you want to tell me what that shouting match back there was all about?”
Staring down at his hands, he said darkly, “I found out that Rose is pregnant.”
Beth halted her search for a second, glancing over her shoulder at Matt. “Oh.”
“You knew?” he asked, stunned. Did everyone know? The thought only succeeded in making him feel that much more of a fool.
She waved a vague hand, dismissing the fact. Not bothering to tell him that she’d read it in Rose’s face within the first half hour of her arrival. Sooner, actually. “Anyone with eyes would know—” She looked at him again, then smiled benevolently. “Except maybe a man,” she amended.
Men were a whole different breed than women, she thought. They didn’t pick up on sensitive things such as this, at least not easily.
Matt didn’t know if that was supposed to make him feel better or not and made no response. He was suddenly too miserable. How could Rose do this? How could she? he silently demanded.
“Here we are,” Beth announced, breaking into his thoughts. She held the filters up like a trophy. Placing the box on the counter, Beth turned toward the refrigerator. At least she knew where the coffee was kept. “All that shouting couldn’t have been because you found out she was pregnant. How did you find out, by the way?”
Matt shrugged. What did it matter how he found out? The point was that Rose was pregnant. “Rose was in the bathroom, throwing up. I woke up and heard her.”
“That’ll do it.” Beth nodded absently as she measured out what she hoped was the proper amount of coffee grinds. “What made you think she was pregnant in the first place? I mean, she could have just been sick, right?”
“She fainted last week in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The nun that came out to help us asked me if Rose was pregnant.”
Rose had failed to mention the fainting spell to her. Beth frowned. That girl needs to be taking more prenatal vitamins, she thought.
“I see. So now you know.” She poured water into the coffeepot and deposited that in turn into the coffee machine. “Why were you shouting at her?”
A fresh surge of fury went through him. “Because it’s not mine.”
Beth turned from the coffeemaker, stunned at his deduction. “Why wouldn’t it be yours?”
He thought that was rather obvious. He’d come to his conclusion the only way he knew how. “She didn’t tell me, so I thought…”
All Beth could do was shake her head. “Matt, Matt, Matt.” She ruffled his hair. “You know, for a bright young man, you can be awfully stupid. Even for a Carson.” He jerked his head up, indignant at the unexpected slam, only to see her smiling at him in satisfaction. “See? Doesn’t feel very good when the arrow’s piercing your hide, does it?” She saw that he was confused. “I came in on the argument when you made that remark about falling for a Wainwright.”
Embarrassed, ashamed for being caught and for saying it in the first place, he shrugged.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it. Just my temper getting the better of me. I thought she’d found someone else,” he explained helplessly. The thought had instantly eaten away at his stomach. “That maybe she was seeing the two of us all the time and found out she was pregnant with his baby.”
Beth sighed, setting down the two cups she’d taken from the cupboard. She held up one finger. “Number one, my boy, Don’t jump to conclusions so quickly.” She peered at him, trying to get at the truth without revealing anything she shouldn’t. “Did Rose say there was another man?”
“No,” he said miserably. “But she didn’t say there wasn’t. Wouldn’t she have denied it if there wasn’t another man?”
The secret was Rose’s to disclose, not hers. Her hands were tied. Or, in this case, her lips. It was going to be hard to maintain the peace and still convince Matt to stick around. Sometimes she thought she could just shake that girl.
She held up another finger. “Number two, never assume anything. Wait to be given evidence. And number three, even if there had been two of you and she found herself pregnant after being with each—and I’m not saying that there is or was another man—there’d be no way of telling whose the baby was until afterward when the tests were performed, now would there?”
Feeling both betrayed by Rose and angry at himself for losing his temper Matt dropped his head into his hands.
“I guess I’m just not thinking clearly,” he said.
“No, I guess you’re not.” Realizing she’d forgotten one of the more important components in coffee-making, she quickly placed the coffeepot beneath the spout just in time. The black liquid began to flow. Content, Beth turned to look at him. “So now what are y
ou going to do next?”
Logically, he should leave. He knew that. But logic gave way to a sense of wanting to protect Rose. It shot his common sense all to hell.
“There’s only one thing I can do next,” he told her. “I’m going to ask Rose to marry me. She can’t come home as an unwed mother. I don’t care how sophisticated the times are, there’s still a stigma attached to an unwed mother where we come from. I can’t let her go through that. Rose deserves better.”
Yes, Beth thought, she does. And she had a sneaking suspicion that her niece was about to get exactly what she deserved—as long as Rose wasn’t too stubborn and messed it up.
Twelve
“Keep your nose out of it, unless you want to find yourself looking at a price tag that’s too high for you to pay.”
As suddenly as it came, the voice disappeared. Judge Carl Bridges found himself listening to a dial tone droning in his ear. He realized that his hand was shaking visibly. They were getting to him.
He forced himself to replace the receiver. Early evening shadows were beginning to drift into his study. He stood alone in the encroaching darkness.
What did that make now, three calls? No, four. Four phone calls to his Mission Creek home with vaguely worded threats that no one but he could understand. He didn’t have to ask what the “it” the gravelly voiced man on the other end of the line had been referring to. He knew.
He was being warned to stay clear of anything that had to do with the Texas mob. He supposed they thought that judges weren’t immune to fear.
They were right.
It was obvious to him that someone had to have seen him visiting Isadora Mercado, Haley’s mother, in the hospital just before she was murdered. There was no doubt in his mind that the woman he had once loved, the woman he loved still, had not expired because of complications due to the beating she’d received at the hands of someone affiliated with the mob. She had been murdered in her bed. Smothered. As a warning to her husband Johnny. You never walked away from the mob. It wouldn’t let you.
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