“It was always that way. Ash and I never saw much of each other. He was—is—a busy man. He’s diligent and selfless when it comes to his foundation. And it’s important work. That’s part of what I respect and admire him for.”
“Still, if the two of you were separated a lot—well, you know what I think about that. That was why I refused to marry Linc the first time he asked. It must have been awful for you, being married to someone you hardly ever saw.”
“It wasn’t good for either of us,” Beth said, her voice sounding far away even to herself. In the back of her mind she was revisiting that awful moment when she’d announced she no longer wanted to be married to him and he’d so calmly, so matter-of-factly, agreed. “Although I have to admit I didn’t know he was unhappy, too, until I told him I wanted a divorce.” She was surprised to hear herself admit that out loud. “Up until then I thought he was okay with the way things were, that it was just me who the marriage wasn’t working for.”
“And it wasn’t?”
“I guess not,” Beth answered, hating that her voice cracked and she was unable to elaborate, even though it was obvious Kansas was waiting for her to. How could she explain something she didn’t understand herself?
Instead she cleared her throat and went on as if she hadn’t been bothered in the slightest. “So he moved into his grandfather’s house by noon the same day we talked about it and that was that. Quick, clean and easy.” Except that their divorce hadn’t been any of those things, no matter how she’d been able to make it look then or sound now.
“Does that mean that even having the baby doesn’t make you want to go back to him?”
“I wouldn’t ever want to go back to the way things were before, no,” she said sadly. Then, as Kansas had done with Della’s parting emotionalism, she tried to lighten the tone. “If someone promised I could have what you and Linc have together, though, who knows?”
“Babies should have fathers in the home.” Kansas seemed to think she was agreeing with something.
“Like I said, I’m sure Ash will be a good father anyway,” Beth insisted, trying to keep up a positive attitude, although the image of her and Ash and the baby as a small family was achingly appealing. But what kind of lessons would her child learn if it was raised in a loveless marriage? “We were just lousy at being married,” she added firmly, hearing the note in her own voice that said she needed to remember that.
* * *
Ash had arrived at the ranch long before Linc’s bachelor party was set to start, in hopes of having a few minutes with Beth. But he hadn’t known she was going to Kansas’s house for the evening, and by the time he got there she was gone.
As the night wore on, it seemed more and more likely that he wouldn’t see her at all today, and while he nursed a glass of soda water, sitting back from the rest of the guests, he wondered at his own feelings about being away from his former wife these past two days.
It was like old times—his being busy, their both going in different directions so that their paths barely crossed.
But unlike before, now it was bothering him.
And he wasn’t sure why.
Probably, he decided, it had to do with the baby. With this sense he had of wanting to catch up on the five months he’d already lost.
And yet, as much as he didn’t want to admit it, his mind wasn’t really on the baby. It was on Beth.
And that made him begin to analyze his feelings for her.
Because he did still have feelings for her and he was kidding himself to deny it. He cared about her. And not just about her health and well-being because she was carrying his child. He cared about the woman herself.
Maybe more than he had in a long time.
And that realization shocked him.
The only explanation he could come up with, when he thought about it, was that for some reason marriage had buried those feelings.
Was it possible that after three years of being with a woman who kept every emotion under tight wraps, he’d closed himself off, too? That he’d hidden his own feelings even from himself?
Maybe it had been a protective mechanism, he thought as a cheer roared up in the room from a raunchy videotape someone had started in the VCR. Maybe after a long time of never hearing her tell him she loved him, of her never letting him know she felt anything for him at all, he’d locked up his feelings for her, too. Because even though he’d tried to convince himself she must care for him at least a little, the longer he’d gone without a sign, the more he’d begun to wonder. And the more he’d buried his own feelings just in case they really weren’t reciprocated.
But he was seeing different things in her now, in spite of all her attempts to maintain her usual show of imperviousness. He’d actually seen tears in her eyes at the sound of the baby’s heartbeat, and she’d held his hand—hard—and shared that moment with him as much as any loving wife might have. He’d seen regret that she’d insulted him by saying he wasn’t like Robert. And there was a general softening to her, a new warmth that seemed to sneak out when she wasn’t hiding it.
Could it just be related to the onslaught of those pregnancy hormones Linc had talked about? Or was it possible that she might still have feelings for him? In spite of all she’d done to push him away?
He hoped it wasn’t only pregnancy hormones.
Because if he had to face that his own feelings for her might be lurking beneath the surface, close enough to find new life, he wanted to believe her feelings for him were in that same position.
A loud hoot called his attention to the big-screen TV, and he was glad to be drawn from these thoughts he couldn’t be completely comfortable with.
But he didn’t have a taste for the movie, and rather than join the group, he headed for the kitchen. He hadn’t noticed that both Linc and Jackson had slipped away from the festivities, but there they both were, too.
“Need a fresh drink?” Jackson asked.
Ash handed over his glass and popped a few peanuts into his mouth. While he ate them, he craned around the two brothers for a look through the window at the garage. “Is Beth spending the night with Kansas?” he asked Linc, who was clearly feeling no pain as he leaned against a counter with a ridiculous grin on his face at nothing in particular.
But it was Jackson who answered. “Nah, she got home a few minutes ago. She was sneaking up the stairs when I came in here.”
Ash had been trying to keep a pretty close eye on the front door so he’d know if she arrived, but clearly he’d been so lost in his own thoughts that she’d managed to slip past him.
“Hold off on refilling my glass,” he said in a hurry just as Jackson was about to. “I think I’ll go up and say good-night.”
Linc began to chuckle at that but Jackson only shrugged and set the bottle of soda water back in the refrigerator.
“Hers is the second door on the left,” Linc offered.
“Thanks.” Ash went back into the living room, heading for the stairs. Leaving the cleaner air of the kitchen, he noticed for the first time that the celebratory cigars had left the rest of the house thick with smoke that drifted to the second level.
If he had his way, he thought as he took the steps two at a time, he’d pack up Beth right then and take her to the lodge with him, away from the smoke and noise and bawdy movies playing in her living room.
And alone with him for the night...
But of course, he wouldn’t have his way, so he curbed the idea as he knocked on her bedroom door.
She must have seen enough of what was going on downstairs to be wary, because she called a cautious, “Who’s there?”
“Just me,” he answered, half wondering if she’d let him in or tell him to go away.
But then he heard the sound of her lock clicking back and she opened the door.
She wore a loose-fitting sundress that left her shoulders bare, and it shot through Ash’s mind to press hot kisses to one and work his way across to the other.
He fought the ur
ge just as he’d curbed his thoughts.
What he did do, though, was surprise her, by moving her out of the way so he could step inside and close the door behind him.
“The place is full of smoke. Don’t let any more of it in here than there has to be,” he said by way of explanation as he looked down into her wide blue eyes. Then he released her and crossed the room to the two large windows on the facing wall, opening them both. “I don’t want you sleeping in it, either, so leave these open all night, even if it does waste the air-conditioning.”
He waited for her to argue, to get mad at him for giving her orders, but it didn’t happen.
Instead, in a congenial voice, she said, “The party seems like a success. Are you having a good time even though you don’t know anyone but Linc and Jackson?”
“Sure. Elk Creek is a lot like the reservation—everybody’s friendly,” he answered as he turned from the windows, thinking that no matter how friendly the partiers downstairs, he’d rather be up here in this room with Beth. But he didn’t say that.
She was standing in the middle of the room, her hands in the two front pockets of her dress, her feet bare, one perched atop the instep of the other. She looked fresh and beautiful, and something hard clamped his heart at the thought that she wasn’t his anymore.
He told himself to leave the room and escape the feelings, but his desire to spend a little time with her was stronger. He crossed his arms over his chest to keep them from reaching for her, shifted his weight to one leg and searched for something to talk about.
The party—she’d asked about the party and his feeling like an outsider...
“Actually, I’ve been downstairs watching Linc get toasted into a stupor, and thinking that it isn’t too far from some Indian purification rituals that prepare a man for marriage. So I don’t feel too far from home.”
She laughed lightly and he let the sound wash over him like cool spring water over sun-warmed skin.
“He’s getting polluted, not purified,” she amended.
“Before a wedding ceremony, some tribes give the groom a drink that makes him violently ill to purge and purify him. I don’t know how Linc handles his liquor, but at the rate this is going, I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t get sick. Other tribes take the man into the sacred underground kiva, turn it into a sort of sauna and sweat the impurities out of him. With all the bodies, and the cigars burning, the living room is about twenty degrees hotter than it is up here—not quite a sauna but close.”
“I see your point.”
Ash glanced around the room, taking in the single bed without so much as a headboard, the tall bureau on which several pictures rested, the desk that was stark enough to have come from a military school, the small television he’d bought her the Christmas before. The single item that could be considered either feminine or pretty or anything more than purely functional was a cheval mirror in one corner.
“Was this your room as a kid?” he asked.
“This was it,” she confirmed.
Glancing around again, he assumed she’d stripped the place now that she’d taken up residence in it again, and hadn’t begun to redecorate yet. Not that he had anything on which to base that. He’d never seen the room before. When they’d come back here for the few visits they’d made during their marriage, Beth had always insisted they stay at the lodge, in spite of the fact that this house had plenty of room for guests. But her father had been alive then and this had been his house....
Samuel Heller. Shag.
Not a nice man.
He hadn’t liked the fact that his daughter had married an Indian.
“Have you cleared your little-girl things out since you moved back or were they gone already?” Ash asked now.
She laughed again. “Little-girl things?”
“Ruffled bedspreads and curtains, a dollhouse, dolls, stuffed animals, a dressing table—those kinds of little-girl things.”
She pointed to the mirror in the corner. “I bought that last week. With the exception of it and the TV you gave me, this is exactly the way my room was the whole time I lived here.”
Ash could feel his eyes widening at the thought. “I know you were a tomboy, but—”
“I did have a rag doll my mother bought for me before she died, but you’ve seen that.”
“And that’s it?” He couldn’t keep his surprise out of his voice.
“Shag wasn’t big on toys, and especially not dolls or stuffed animals. He said he might have gotten stuck with a daughter, but he sure as hell wasn’t having a prissy little miss in his house.”
No, his late father-in-law had not been Ash’s favorite person. He’d always resented the older man’s intolerance toward him as a Native American. But Beth had never said much about what kind of a father he’d been, just that after her mother had died, she and her brothers had lost what “rounded his sharp edges.” And though Ash had assumed Shag Heller hadn’t been overly kind or loving, he hadn’t known the details. Hearing some of them now did not endear the man to him.
“What did you get for gifts?” he asked, his curiosity roused.
Beth shrugged. “The same things Linc and Jackson got—a hunting rifle, a new saddle, new boots, fancy belt buckles, expensive cowboy hats, things like that. He was generous—he just wouldn’t allow anything froufrou, as he called it, anything that would make me a sissy.”
“But you were a little girl. Little girls are supposed to be sissies and have things that are froufrou.”
“Not with Shag as their father. I had to be as tough as my brothers. Sometimes tougher, and if I let him see anything less—” she rolled her eyes “—I’d pay dearly for it.”
“How?”
She laughed as if she found the reminiscence funny even though the reality hadn’t been. “How? Let’s see, double chores, worse chores or maybe I’d find myself sleeping in the barn for a month. One time he caught me crying over something—I was about ten and I don’t even remember what I was bawling about. He sent me out in a torrential downpour to herd cows from one pasture to another, in the dark, late that night, by myself, knee-deep in mud and muck.”
“Just for crying?”
“Especially for crying. Or letting him know how I felt about anything—he read that as a weakness. That time he said I was flooding his house and he didn’t want to look at such a sorry, soggy sight, that I might as well be out where everything was already wet so I’d fit right in.”
She was still smiling wryly, but Ash found nothing in what she’d said funny. “I can’t imagine that.”
“No, I can’t imagine your grandfather doing something like that to a little kid, either. But Shag? Well, he was nothing like Robert.” She shook her head. “He had an answer for everything. If we complained we were tired, he’d show us what tired was—he’d have us baling hay until our backs broke. Gripe that none of our friends had to milk cows by hand just to keep in practice, and instead of not using the machines for a day, we wouldn’t get to use them for six months. Whine that just once we’d like to sleep in on a Saturday morning, and he’d have us up at four instead of five every day. Complain about anything, and he taught us a lesson for it. We learned to keep our mouths shut about whatever was going through our heads.”
Or their hearts. “Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t get to know your father any better than I did,” Ash muttered through a tightness in his jaw muscles at the thought of someone treating his kids like that.
“He was a hard man,” Beth agreed. “That’s why I told you it wouldn’t do any good for you to try overcoming his prejudice. But he was still my father, and there were good things that came from his being a taskmaster. Just think of what a sniveling woman I might be if it weren’t for Shag.”
Or maybe she wouldn’t have to hide when she needed to cry, or get fighting mad at anyone who caught her at it, Ash thought.
But he didn’t say it. He just wondered why he hadn’t known these things about her before. Might understanding what made her do the thing
s she did have helped him to be more accepting of them? Of her? Could it even have given him the chance to break down some of the walls her childhood had built?
“How come we never talked about this before?” he asked, moving to the bureau to look at the photographs there.
“I guess for the same reason we never talked much about your growing-up years as a welder and carpenter—we just plain never talked much.”
He had the sense that she could have said more on that subject, but she didn’t, and he didn’t pursue it. He didn’t know why she was being open with him now, but he was glad and didn’t want to scare her away from more of it.
He took a picture from the bureau top and studied it. In it, Beth was eight or nine years old, covered in mud, holding an equally grimy piglet under one arm and displaying a blue ribbon in the other hand. The grin on her face was so big, so proud, it helped to dispel some of the harshness she’d just shown him of her childhood. It hadn’t been all bad.
Or maybe not so much bad as tough. Or toughening.
“This is great,” he said, smiling over the photograph.
She came up beside him to see which picture he was looking at. “Cheyenne Frontier Days. I was the fastest kid to catch and keep a greased pig. I even beat out my brothers.”
Still holding the photograph, Ash glanced at the others. There were two of her mother—one just a portrait, the other of her feeding a baby he presumed to be Beth. There were pictures of Beth and Linc, of Beth and Jackson, of the three of them, of her graduation. “Why didn’t you bring these with you when you moved in with me?” She hadn’t brought anything besides clothes.
“It was your house,” she said simply.
“We were married. That made it your house, too.”
Again she shrugged. “It always just seemed like your house.”
He stared at her, at her delicate profile and the shine of her dark hair, and realized in that moment just how little he really did know about her. “If you didn’t feel comfortable there, why didn’t you tell me? What did you think would happen? That I’d make you live in the garage until you could appreciate it?”
Baby My Baby (A Ranching Family) Page 12