by Joan Wolf
“Jay,” she breathed through a throat suddenly closed with fear. “Please don’t.”
He didn’t seem to hear her. He shifted his weight slightly, and she saw his free hand go to his belt. She couldn’t move, couldn’t even speak. She stared up at him, and slow tears formed in her dilated eyes and began to slip silently down her cheeks. She was trembling violently.
Through the haze of anger and lust that possessed him, Jay saw the tears. His hand stilled on his belt buckle and he watched the slow trickle of drops run down her cheeks and drip to the ground. For a brief moment he struggled to hold on to his anger. He wanted to hurt her, to force her to submit to him, to thrust his strength and his maleness on her whether she desired it or not. But the tears were too strong. He took one deep shuddering breath and then another. He dropped his grip on her hands and moved back, taking his weight off her, allowing her freedom to move. He got to his feet and turned his back. “Get out of here,” he said in a harsh, frightening voice.
Caroline scrambled up and fled as if all the hounds of hell were after her.
She didn’t stop shaking for an hour. She had had her share of scuffles with overeager escorts, but she had never faced anything as savage or as deadly serious as that brief, terrifying episode in the barn. She had escaped by the skin of her teeth, and she knew it.
Why had he done it? What had made him so angry that he had wanted to take by force what was his for the asking? What had turned her ardent, passionate lover into the brutal, ugly stranger she had just encountered in the barn?
When she had calmed down a little she thought of the things he had said to her. Your Irish boyfriend. Slut. It came to her in a flash of understanding: He had seen Gerald kissing her in the carriage house. She remembered that shadow at the door. It had been Jay.
Tears began to slide down her cheeks again. He had seen them and he had assumed ... “Oh, Jay,” she whispered to herself. Jay.
There was nothing to be done. It was over. Nothing she could say or do would ever convince him she was not the kind of girl he thought she was. The kind of woman he thought his mother had been. Nothing she could say or do would ever make him trust her. It was over.
She arose the following morning, leaden-eyed, and packed her bag. She walked down to the barn to find Joe and ask him to drive her to Sheridan to the airport. Jay was nowhere around. She had known he wouldn’t be.
Joe was upset by her abrupt decision, but Caroline was adamant. “Did you and Jay have a fight?” he asked as they drove along the now familiar mountain road.
“Yes,” said Caroline.
“I see.” Joe didn’t say anything more, but when Caroline glanced at him his craggy profile looked grim. “You liked it here on the ranch, didn’t you?” he asked after a while, seemingly changing the subject.
“I loved it,” Caroline said sincerely. “You’re so lucky, Joe, to live surrounded by such beauty.”
“The winters are hard. Snow and storms and wind. You can go a little crazy here in the winter. It was the winters Nancy hated. And they last from October through April.”
Caroline sighed and leaned her head back against the headrest. She closed her eyes. “At least snow is clean,” she murmured. “All you get in Washington or New York is slush and filth and dreariness. And in the summer you steam.”
Joe gave her an assessing look and grunted. He waited until she had bought her ticket, then kissed her warmly. “Take care of yourself, Caroline. I’ll be seeing you.”
“Goodbye, Joe.” She smiled mistily at the big rancher. “Thank you for everything.”
She sank into her airline seat and stared out the window, her eyes unfocused. What she was seeing was an image in her mind’s eye, the image of a man’s face, and in her heart she was saying goodbye.
* * * *
Caroline did not go to Maine. For the first time in her life the wounds were too deep to be cured even by Maine and her uncle and aunt and cousins and the family life there she so loved. She found she perfectly understood the instinct of the wounded animal to be alone.
She went to Washington and threw herself into her job. All through the dog days of August and the months of autumn, she submerged herself in work. It didn’t help. No job would ever be a substitute for what she had lost. But it filled up her days. She needed to be busy, for when she wasn’t, when she had time to remember and to feel, then she was filled with such loneliness that it was like a sickness.
She ached for Jay. It was like a physical hollow in her, the longing that she felt. But there was nothing she could do. She tried going out with other men, but they only made it worse. She worked. After a while she even stopped jumping every time the phone rang and her heart stopped thumping every time she opened her mailbox. It was finished, and she must close the door and walk away from it. She worked.
She was coming home late on a Tuesday before Thanksgiving. It had been a gray day and damp, and she felt chilled in her tailored gray suit, so she hurried along the pavement. She stopped at the corner store for some bread and milk and was shifting the bundle of groceries from one arm to the other when she noticed the figure of a man leaning negligently against the lamppost in front of her building. He was looking the other way, and she stopped and stared at the thick brown hair illuminated by the glow of the lamp. It was as neatly brushed and as shining as a little boy’s. Her throat suddenly hurt. It couldn’t be, she thought. She was hallucinating. The brown head turned and she saw his face. “Jay?” she said in a high, thin, unrecognizable voice.
“Yes,” he said gravely and came toward her. She stood stock still, incapable of moving. He stopped two feet in front of her. “I had to see you.” Then, as she didn’t say anything, “May I come upstairs with you for a moment?”
“Y-yes, of course.” She tried to get her voice under control. “I’m just so surprised to see you.”
“I can imagine you must be.” He took the groceries from her, and she shot a quick look up at his still face. They walked together to the front door of her building, and the doorman smiled and said, “Good evening, Miss Carruthers,” and let them in.
There was another tenant sharing the elevator with them, a girl who lived on the floor above Caroline’s: Caroline saw her give Jay a long admiring look as he held the elevator door for the two women. He asked for the floors and pushed the buttons, and Caroline found herself trying to see him with the eyes of a stranger, to see what her neighbor was seeing.
In a city of civil servants who were all meticulously attired in suit and tie, Jay’s muted plaid wool sports coat and wool flannel slacks looked perhaps more casual than was quite usual but not at all out of place. Caroline, who had an unerring eye for such things, knew that his jacket alone had cost far more than most of the men she worked with paid for their three-piece suits. It wasn’t his clothes that told you he didn’t belong to this city. It was something about his face.
The elevator stopped. He said to Caroline, “Our floor.” As she moved past him her neighbor gave him a brilliant smile. He looked right through her.
Caroline switched on the lamps in her living room and, taking the groceries from Jay, said, “Sit down. I’ll just put the milk in the fridge.”
When she came back into the room he was standing by the window wall looking out at the lights of the city. He was not that big a man, she found herself thinking; certainly he was not built on the epic proportions of his father. So why did her room suddenly look so small, so confining?
He turned at the sound of her step. “Thank you for letting me come up.” His face looked very somber. “You had every reason in the world not to.”
“Oh, Jay,” she said helplessly. Then, “Can I get you a drink?”
“No.”
She moved into the room and sat down on the oyster-white love seat. She gestured to the matching sofa that was placed at a right angle to the love seat. “Sit down, Jay. How have you been? How is Joe?”
He came across the room, looking somehow like a panther in a cage. He sat down o
n the sofa, and his eyes devoured her face. “Dad’s fine,” he said. “I’m not.”
“Oh?” She would have to be blind to miss the message in his eyes. “W-why is that?” she managed to ask.
“Nothing’s any good anymore,” he said tensely. “I miss you like hell. Cara, I love you. Would you consider marrying me and coming back to Wyoming?”
Caroline stared at him in absolute astonishment. She was not sure she had heard him correctly. “What did you say?” she asked faintly.
“I asked you to marry me.” He thrust his hand through his neatly brushed hair and rose again to his feet. “Listen, Cara, you wouldn’t have to stay on the ranch for the whole year, you know. We could go somewhere else for part of the winter—somewhere warm. California—the south of France—wherever you want.” He had reached the windows again and turned once more to look at her. “You can call the shots. Nothing’s any good for me if you’re not there. I found that out these last few months.”
Very, very slowly, Caroline stood up and crossed the room to stand in front of him. His face was still very tense-looking, and she couldn’t quite decipher the expression in those dark-blue eyes. He met her gaze fully, and quite suddenly she saw that he was braced to meet her rejection. He didn’t think she would say yes. Yet he had come all the way from Wyoming to ask her. Happiness, like a sudden sunburst, began to glow inside her.
“Jay Hamilton,” she said softly, “you idiot. I would live in an igloo on an iceberg with you if you asked me. I love you. I would adore to marry you.”
His whole face had altered as she was speaking. “Do you mean that?” he asked in wonder.
She put her hands around his neck and raised her face. “Every single solitary word,” she said firmly.
“Oh, Christ. Cara.” His arms were around her and she was crushed against him. She held him back quite as tightly, and for a long minute they just stood there, locked together in wordless urgency. Finally his hold loosened a little, and she looked up into his face. To her own surprise, she started to cry.
He went very pale. “Cara! Honey, what’s wrong?”
“I—I’m so happy,” she sobbed. “You bastard. I hate you. Why did you wait so long to come to me?”
His smile was both tender and wry. “Because I thought you’d throw me out. You should, you know. All I’ve ever done to you is hurt you.”
Caroline wiped the tears off her cheeks with her fingers. “I’m a masochist, I suppose.”
He gently took her hands away and began to dry her face with his handkerchief. “You’re an angel,” he said. “And I’m a goddam fool for ever letting you get away from me.” He put his handkerchief back in his pocket. “I was so jealous,” he said intensely. “I saw you in the carriage house with Clontarf, you see, and I just went wild. But nothing can excuse the way I behaved to you afterward. Nothing.”
He looked so grim. She touched his cheek and said softly, “It’s all right.”
“No. It isn’t all right. And it’ll never happen again. I can promise you that.” He looked at her out of troubled eyes. “It frightened me almost as badly as it did you.”
“Jay,” she said earnestly, “about Gerald ...”
“No.” He shook his head. “You don’t have to explain to me.” He put his arms around her again, and she nestled against him. “Dad put me straight on that,” he said, his mouth against her hair.
“Your father?”
“Yes. Evidently you told him we’d had a fight, and he deduced what it was about. He knows me pretty well.” She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. Oh, the wonderful smell of him.
“But Joe didn’t know anything about us,” she protested softly.
“He knew more than he let on. And he knows what a jealous, possessive s.o.b. I am. So he gave it to me straight, about how Clontarf was following you around like a puppy dog and how you were being as pleasantly discouraging as was humanly possible. He made it pretty clear that if I made a scene with you about Clontarf then I was a damn fool.” His arms tightened. “Well, I couldn’t tell him just what kind of a scene I had made, but I knew damn well that I had blown it. I never thought you’d come near me again after that.”
“But you came to see me anyway,” she said softly.
“I had to. At the last, I had to try.” He smoothed her hair back and looked searchingly into her face. “I meant what I said before, Cara. We’ll do what you want to do.”
“Oh, darling.” She felt dizzy with happiness. “I love the ranch. It’s the kind of life I’ve always wanted. I tried for weeks to get you to ask me to marry you.” She put her hand over his on her cheek. “Why didn’t you?”
She felt the lean hand under hers go rigid. “I had you all mixed up in my mind with my mother,” he said after a minute. “Part of me saw just you, but part of me kept saying, but she’ll change, just as your mother did. She’ll be unfaithful. She’ll hate it here. She’ll run out on you.” He shook his head in bewilderment. “It sounds crazy, I know.”
“I thought perhaps that’s what was happening.” She moved his hand to her mouth and kissed it. “I hated Mary Anne with a passion,” she added.
“I had to talk to Mary Anne.” He looked very grave. “Do you know, that was when I first understood how you felt about Clontarf? I hurt her, and she didn’t deserve to be hurt.”
But Caroline was too happy to worry about either Gerald or Mary Anne. “How many children do you want?” she asked.
“Six,” he answered promptly.
She looked utterly astonished. “Do you know, that is the exact number I have always set my heart on?”
He began to smile, the smile that always made her knees go weak. “You are amazing,” he said. “You look like the most successful, not to say the most beautiful, career woman standing there in that awful gray suit, and you tell me you want six children.”
“It is not an awful suit,” she said serenely. ‘It’s very smart. And I don’t intend to work another day in my life. I shall be perfectly content to sit back and let you support me. And my six children, of course.”
“I’ll be happy to oblige, ma’am,” he drawled. “The Hamiltons may not be in the same class as the Carrutherses, but we’re not poor.”
She looked absolutely affronted. “Do you think I’d marry you if you were poor?”
He put his two fingers lightly on her mouth. “Would you?” he asked.
“Yes.” She kissed his fingers. “Oh, yes.” And for the first time desire was in the air between them. “Did you bring a suitcase?” she whispered.
“I left it at the airport.”
“Do you want to go get it and bring it here?”
“Yes.”
“All right.”
“What I really want,” he said, “is to get into bed with you right now.”
“All right.”
He put his hand up and touched her hair. “No,” he said. “We’re going to go out and have a terrific dinner somewhere, then we’ll both go to the airport and collect my suitcase, and then we’ll come back here.”
She smiled. “All right.”
“And tomorrow we’ll go get a license and get married as soon as we can.”
“All...”
“You’re not going to get a chance to change your mind about this fiancé,” he went on ruthlessly.
“Are you going to give me an engagement ring?” she asked as she followed him toward the door.
“My, my.” He held the door open for her. “You’re an acquisitive little thing, aren’t you?”
She ignored that. “Because if you are, I know the ring I want.”
He closed the door behind him and stood looking down at her. “My mother’s,” he said.
“Yes. Would you mind?”
“No. It’s what brought us together in the first place.” They began walking down the hall. “I think she’d be happy about us,” he said a little awkwardly.
She felt quick tears behind her eyes. “Oh, darling, I’m sure she would be.” She pressed her c
heek against his shoulder for a minute. Then, “There’s the light!” she cried and, hand in hand, they both ran down the hall toward the elevator.
Copyright © 1984 by Joan Wolf
Originally published by Signet/Rapture Romance [ISBN 0451129113]
Electronically published in 2013 by Belgrave House
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No portion of this book may be reprinted in whole or in part, by printing, faxing, E-mail, copying electronically or by any other means without permission of the publisher. For more information, contact Belgrave House, 190 Belgrave Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94117-4228
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This is a work of fiction. All names in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to any person living or dead is coincidental.