by Diana Palmer
Her green eyes widened. “Do what?” she asked blankly.
“You run it, Kate,” he said, his chin jutting in anger, his eyes glittering blackly. “Let’s see you do your Ms. Macho act down here in Texas. Go ahead. You give the orders. You get the men working. You herd cattle and sell cattle and keep the records and handle the money. After all,” he added with a cold smile, “women can do anything, can’t they? I guess next you’ll want me to get pregnant so you can have me under your thumb completely!”
It was terrible that she should laugh. She didn’t even want to. But the way he said it, and the way he looked, brought her to her knees. She started and she couldn’t stop. The thought of a pregnant Jason made her hysterical.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” he burst out. He threw up his hands and swiped up his hat and stalked toward the front door.
She came to her senses as he opened it, and ran after him. He kept going, right toward the Mercedes, the very quickness of his strides an indication of how furious he really was. It was just plain bad luck that Red Barton and Gabe and a couple of the cowboys chose that moment to come riding by on their horses. Their denim jackets were buttoned against the cold wind that Kate didn’t even notice in her shirtsleeves as she followed her angry husband to the car. It was where he’d left it, just in front of the house.
“Where are you going!” she cried.
“I don’t know!” he shouted. That alone was unusual. He never raised his voice, even when he was the most angry.
“Jason, come back and talk to me!” she pleaded, aware that the cowboys had halted a few yards away and were leaning forward, helplessly intent on the unfolding drama in front of the house.
“I don’t want to talk to you,” he said, whirling. “The way you’re taking over everything lately, you’d have me modeling those damned embroidered skirts you design and wearing high-heeled shoes and petticoats!” He became aware suddenly of the hysterical laughter coming from the direction of the driveway, and turned to find his four men doubled over.
“If I had my rifle, you wouldn’t be laughing half that hard, Barton!” Jason raged at him.
Kate was trying to keep a straight face. “Don’t shout at my men,” she instructed. When he gaped at her, she reminded him, “You said it was my ranch, now. That means I get all the men, too, doesn’t it?”
“You bet, Miss Kate!” Red Barton called. “I’m yours!” And he put both hands over his heart and assumed a pose that doubled the men over with laughter again.
“By God, I’ll break your neck…!” Jason shouted, taking a step forward.
“Save him, Gabe!” Kate yelled, and Gabe grabbed the grinning cowboy’s reins to lead his mount and the other cowboys quickly down the road.
“Now see what you’ve done!” Jason growled at her. “Damn it, Kate!”
“I thought you were leaving home,” she reminded him, lifting an eyebrow. She’d decided that she wanted him to get away for a few days and get his perspective and his temper back. It might do him some good. “And while you’re away, you might think about the fact that most people are human and make the occasional mistake. Then you could join the rest of the human race.”
He clenched his hat in his hand, staring down at her with his lips set in a thin line. “I’ve already made a mistake,” he said icily. “I married you!”
She lifted her chin and smiled sweetly at him. “Thank you. How comforting to know that our marriage has served a useful purpose.”
He was ready to throw something. “It’s your fault that we ever got married!” he accused blackly. “You never had to start saving me from myself and driving me nuts…I’m not through! Where are you going?”
She was going inside, that was where she was going, and she was through even if he wasn’t. She heard him still raging behind her when she went up the steps. By the time she got inside, his language was blue. She heard the furious roar of the Mercedes down the driveway just as she was closing the door. She wondered if he wasn’t already regretting his impulsive offer to leave because now his pride was forcing him to do it. Without even a toothbrush, too.
She prayed that she’d done the right thing. Under the circumstances, she’d done the only thing possible.
Chapter Twenty-three
Jason didn’t know where he wanted to go. He felt betrayed. His pride and his honor were hurt. He couldn’t understand why Kate would do such a thing to him, especially if she loved him.
Considering Kate’s point of view hadn’t even occurred to him. He was in a black mood. All the worries and anguish of past and present seemed all at once to congeal inside him. And all of it, he decided, was because of his mother.
As he drove, he thought about her. He thought about her desertion and how it had almost killed his father. How her leaving had brought about the horrible corruption of the father he’d adored, and turned him into a drunken tyrant. His adolescence had been the purest kind of hell. That, too, was his mother’s fault.
The more he thought about it, the madder he got. He’d ignored her pleas to come and see her, all these years. Now he was going to take her up on her invitation. With cold fury he turned the car onto the highway that led, eventually, to Arizona. She was going to pay, by God. For every anguished year of his life, he was going to make her pay.
Back at the Spur, Kate was reconciling herself to the fact that Jason wouldn’t be home that night. She had a lonely supper, ignoring Sheila’s pointed questions, and then she went to bed alone.
How different it was from the night before, when she’d slept in Jason’s arms with the sound of his heartbeat at her ear. Everything had seemed unbearably sweet, and the future had held such promise. She couldn’t be sure, because it was too soon, but her period was almost three weeks late now. And she was regular as a rule. They’d taken no precautions at all, and Jason was potent. But she was glad now that she hadn’t mentioned her suspicions to him. After that nasty crack he’d made about her career, he could just wait and find out along with everybody else.
Kate wished he’d go see his mother. She had a feeling that his anger at the older woman was responsible for a lot of his problems. If he could hear her side of it, he might be able to get his own life into focus. Jason was so afraid of failure, of becoming like old J.B. He didn’t realize that Kate loved him too much to care if he failed, and that she’d never leave him. Which brought to mind the fact that Nell Donavan had run instead of trying to help her husband. Why?
She turned over in the big, lonely bed with a sigh. She wished she had as many answers as she had questions. Most of all, she wished that Jason would call. But he didn’t.
The second day after he left the Spur, Jason arrived in Tucson, Arizona. The huge, jagged Santa Catalina mountains ringed around the far-flung city on its desert plain.
He had the address on Nell Donavan’s letter memorized, after having seen it so many times. Two days of lazy travel had made him angrier about the whole thing. He felt murderous. That cold, hard woman had made his life and his father’s and his brother’s hell. He wanted nothing more than to pay her out for it.
He turned onto the street and looked for the number. Odd, the only building with that particular number was a facility of some kind. A retirement village of a sort, but it had a strangely medical appearance.
He parked the Mercedes, now covered with dust from his journey, and got out. There was only one door, and it led into a lobby with a reception desk, and nurses.
He frowned. This was like a hospital. Perhaps he’d gotten the address down wrong.
“I’m looking for Nell Donavan,” he told the white-capped woman at the desk.
“Oh, yes,” she said pleasantly. “One of our nicest patients. Are you a relative? She doesn’t have visitors.”
He ignored the question, because it irritated him. He was girded for battle. He didn’t want to hear any kind words about his icicle of a mother.
“Has she been here long?” he asked instead.
The woman looked puzzled. “
Why…yes. This is an intermediate care facility. Much like a retirement home, you see, except that we have round-the-clock nursing staff and a resident physician. Mrs. Donavan has been with us for quite some time. Here we are.” She stopped in front of a door, the number that had been on the return address of her cards. It wasn’t an apartment number. It was a room number.
Jason hesitated. He frowned. Well, this was why he’d come, wasn’t it? To tell her what he thought of her. He thought about all the long, wasted, cruel years. His eyes began to glitter. Damn her!
He pushed open the door, oblivious to the slow retreat of the white-capped woman, who was curious about his odd behavior.
Inside the room there were two beds, but only one of them was occupied. There was a small, frail-looking woman in it. A woman with silver hair and odd-looking dark eyes. She was propped up, wearing some kind of plain cotton gown and robe. She had a look on her heavily lined face that combined resignation with faint good humor. Not the woman he remembered at all. Of course, she would have changed in the fifteen years since he’d seen her.
“Yes?” she asked, her voice as soft as Kate’s. She smiled quietly. “I know you aren’t the nurse. I know her step. You have a heavier one, and hard-soled, as if you wear boots. I think that you must be a man.”
That was when he realized why her eyes looked odd. She was blind.
He moved closer to the wall, for support. She was blind. Blind. Blind! The word echoed in his mind until he felt as if he were going mad.
“Are you still there?” she asked. She sat up slowly. “Please. Can I help you?” She stretched out a hand. “Shall I call the nurse?”
“When…” He cleared his throat and tried again. He had something stuck there, he could hardly get words out. “When did that happen?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Your eyes,” he bit off.
She took a slow breath, because the sound of that voice was oddly familiar. Her eyes searched helplessly, but she was long past the ability to see anything. “About fifteen years ago,” she began, and she tried to smile because she had a faint suspicion about her unexpected caller’s identity. Please, God, she thought. Please God, let it be him this time!
“What made you…like that?” he asked hesitantly.
“There was an automobile accident. I was going to my brother’s house, to get help. My husband…” She paused for a minute. It was hard to talk about it. “We’d had a terrible fight, and he’d hit me, for the first time ever. I was frightened. I ran and got into the car and started for Tucson, where my brother lived.” She smiled sadly. “It was a crazy idea, but I had a concussion and didn’t know it. I wasn’t thinking straight. On the way there, I blacked out at the wheel.”
Jason was barely breathing. Nightmare images were fogging his mind. He remembered the night she left. He’d blocked it out for years, forbidden himself to think about it. But he remembered a scream just before she came running down the staircase with blood streaming from her face. His father had been just a few steps behind, white-faced and raging…crying. His eyes closed. It hurt to remember. His father had been crying. That was something Jason had never done in his life. He’d never been weak, as his father had…
“You wrecked the car?” he prodded, when she didn’t continue.
“Yes.” Her sightless eyes closed. “When I came to, I was blind.” She laughed softly, bitterly. “You can’t imagine how I felt. I had two sons.” Her voice broke on that last word. “I couldn’t persuade my husband to get counseling, so I was going to bring my boys out to Tucson with me and force J.B to choose between his family or the past.” She drew in a slow breath, and her age sat heavily on her then. “But I was blind. To make matters worse, my brother had just had a heart attack and was in the hospital himself, so I had nowhere to turn. I couldn’t go back home. Blind, I would have been helpless, I couldn’t have done any of us any good. So I went to my sister-in-law, just until I could be placed here.”
Jason was staring at her, trying to reconcile what she was saying with all the horrible things he’d thought. He’d hated her. He stared at her frail, helpless figure with eyes black with pain. “You didn’t contact…your husband?” He almost said “Dad,” but he changed his mind. He didn’t want her to know who he was, not just yet.
“He’d thrown me out,” she replied. “He’d hit me and told me he didn’t want me anymore. I was afraid of him, then.” She smiled softly. “But I would have gone back, even then, if I’d been sighted so that I wasn’t at his mercy. I never really blamed him, you see. I understood him. He was part of me. When he died…” She swallowed, because her voice had broken, “when he died, a woman I knew called and told me, because she’d read it in the San Antonio paper. I don’t think I’ve stopped grieving since. For him. And for my poor boys.”
This wasn’t what he’d expected. She wasn’t what he expected. He didn’t know what to do.
Because of the odd silence, her dark eyes began to search aimlessly for him again, with such loving anguish in them, such pain. Her voice trembled a little as she added, “I know that it’s you Jason,” she said suddenly. “I don’t even know how, but I know it. And I prayed that some day you’d come. Even if it was only to tell me how much you hate me.” She clenched the sheet over her body, gnawing her lower lip, wrinkled with age and pain.
He didn’t move. His boots were fixed to the floor. He just stared at her, helpless. She wasn’t the medusa of his dreams. She was a tired old woman who’d lost everything, and had to suffer the mercy of strangers because she’d had none from her children.
It suddenly occurred to him that she’d called him by name. His head lifted, his eyes faintly clouded. “What did you call me?” he asked huskily.
“Jason,” she whispered brokenly. She pulled herself up against the pillows, her face open and vulnerable. “You are, aren’t you? You’re my son…!”
Her voice broke and he couldn’t bear it. He went to her without hesitation and dropped down onto the side of the bed to scoop her roughly into his hard arms.
She clung to him weakly as he held her, rocked her, feeling her frailty, her helplessness, hearing the sobs and feeling the hot tears against his skin.
“My boy,” she whimpered, her thin body shaking. “My son.”
He couldn’t have answered her to save his life. His throat felt parched with emotion, his eyes were swimming in moisture. What a waste, he thought. What a horrible, ironic waste. He’d never asked about her side of it. Just as Kate had accused him, he’d never seen her side of it, he’d never thought of forgiveness. He’d never allowed for complications. He’d wanted perfection, and there wasn’t any. Not even in himself. He’d made one horrible mistake after another, and this poor, tortured creature in his arms was the biggest of his life.
The nurse, who’d been concerned by the subdued anger in the tall man’s face, had come to the door to peek. But what she saw touched her. That man wasn’t going to hurt anyone. She turned quietly and left the room.
“I know how much you must hate me,” she was whispering, her voice thick with tears. “I can’t blame you, I left you, I deserted you.”
“My God, shut up,” he breathed, holding her closer. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know!”
“I was too proud to tell you,” she whispered. She sniffed, rubbing a sleeve across one red eye. “I didn’t want you here out of a sense of responsibility. You owed me nothing, and I knew that you and Gene most likely hated me, blamed me. It must have been a nightmare. I tried to get in touch with you, but as long as he was alive, he made it impossible. He never understood how far gone he was, Jason. He hurt me, so badly, when he drank, and I couldn’t make him get help. I was coming back for you and Gene, oh, Jason, I was. But I had nothing. I was blind. I didn’t even have a place to live. I couldn’t work….” She sighed. “What good are words?” she asked with a sad smile. “They won’t erase the years, or the misery I caused.”
He patted her back awkwardly. “Gene paints,” he said after a mi
nute. “He’s damned good. He’s doing portraits now. I wanted him to be a cattleman, but he’s as stubborn as I am. He’s married. She’s nice. Young, but sweet, and they’re expecting a child.”
She sat back up, dabbing at her eyes with the handkerchief he’d given her. “And you, Jason?” she asked gently. “Are you married?”
“Just recently,” he said on a heavy breath. “Although I may not be by the time I get home. I’ve given her a lot of trouble. It amazes me that she hasn’t murdered me in my sleep.”
She laughed a little, hiccuping. “You should be at home. Christmas is only a few days away. I could have waited.”
He felt a heavy weight of guilt for the years when he’d ignored her existence. “You mentioned in your last letter that there might not be much time,” he said, recalling those words now with faint terror.
“Oh, yes,” she recalled. “They’d just done some tests, and I hadn’t had the results. But the tumor was benign. I’m a tough old bird.”
“That’s the O’Hara side, I guess,” he remarked to lighten the atmosphere. “Sheila always said you had spirit.”
“Sheila! Is she still at the Spur?” she asked. “Lord, she was good to me. And to the two of you. She helped me to keep you out of his way. That was the only consolation I had, knowing that Sheila was with you. He didn’t fire her?”
“Oh, no. She ran interference. She’s still doing it, but for Kate now, not for me.”
“Kate is your wife?”
He smiled faintly. “She was, until I shot my mouth off. I don’t know if she’ll want to live with me anymore now.” He sighed. “She’s young and tenderhearted, and she loves me. I didn’t really want her to, but I’ve kind of gotten used to it.”
“She sounds very nice.”
“She designs clothes. I didn’t like that, either. I didn’t want her to have a life apart from me.” He touched the silver hair gently, amazed at how easy it was to talk to her, as if all the years between had fallen away with his need for revenge. “She accused me of wanting to own her, and maybe I did. I was so afraid I’d lose her.”