by Diana Palmer
“I could speak to her,” Jack offered.
“To what purpose? To tell her that divorce is unthinkable? I don’t want a woman who endures me and romances over another man,” he said stiffly. “I must let her go.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Then say nothing, least of all to Trilby. We must work this out ourselves,” he said quietly. “I’ll do whatever she wants. Her happiness is my only concern.”
Jack stared at him. “I thought you didn’t love her.”
Thorn laughed hardly. “I would die for her,” he said huskily.
The older man sighed softly. “I’m sorry.”
“Yes. So am I.” Thorn wheeled his horse. “We haven’t much time,” he added, glancing at the darkening sky. “We’d better hurry the men along.”
Thorn tormented himself with painful thoughts all day. When he got home that evening, it was dark and the house was quiet. He tiptoed in to say good night to Samantha, but she was sound asleep. He stood looking down at her. His child. It seemed so long ago that Sally had presented him with a tiny red infant. He’d adored her, but Sally’s attitude had prevented much contact with the child. Distance had separated them until Trilby had come here to live. Now, Samantha was no longer withdrawn and shy. She laughed and played like a happy child, and her pleasure in her father’s company was very evident.
“She’s asleep,” Trilby said from the door.
He stiffened. “Yes, I know.”
“Are you hungry? There’s some soup that I’ve just reheated, and I made some bread to go with it.”
“I am rather empty. Thank you,” he said. But he didn’t look at her. He took off his hat and tossed it onto the rack near the door, the spurs on his booted feet making sharp little jingling noises as he walked down the hall behind her toward the dining room.
Trilby felt his stiffness, his formality. It puzzled her. Then she remembered quite suddenly the letter she’d found lying on the hall table. Samantha had taken it from her dresser to ask if she could have the stamp for her collection—and then had forgotten it when she found Trilby taking a plate of cookies out of the oven.
By the time Samantha remembered again, and Trilby retrieved it, Thorn had long since left the house. She’d worried that he might have accidentally seen it. Now she was certain that her worst fears were confirmed.
She looked across the table at him, her hands clenched on the back of the ladder-back, cane-bottomed chair. “Thorn, you saw the letter, did you not?” she asked hesitantly.
He lifted an eyebrow, but not one muscle in his face moved. “Surely you meant for me to see it?” he asked. “Write to Bates if you like,” he added, pulling out a chair and dropping into it. “It makes no difference to me…when your body responds so hungrily to mine in bed.” He looked straight into her shocked eyes, his own darkly mocking as the raging pain and hurt inside him found utterance. “I do want your body, Trilby, and perhaps a son,” he added, to complete the deception. “As long as I have you, Bates is welcome to your heart.”
She went paper white. If it hadn’t been for her grip on the chair, she might have fallen. “What?” she asked thinly.
“You heard me.” He shook out the linen napkin and put it in his lap, then helped himself to a ladle of soup from the china bowl Trilby had set at his place. “Is there some butter for this bread?” he asked carelessly.
Trilby fetched it from the icebox, her hands shaking as she placed it on the table and removed the cloth that covered it. She almost dropped the butter knife before she managed to get it beside the dish.
“Thank you,” he said. “Aren’t you eating?”
“I had mine with Samantha. If you don’t mind, could you leave the dishes in the sink when you’re through? I’ll deal with them in the morning.”
He looked at her with veiled anger. “Will you still welcome me tonight, Trilby? Or is your head stuffed with romantic daydreams of Bates? I promise you, if you’re asleep when I come to you, I won’t have any qualms about waking you. He may want to marry you now, but you’re my wife until I decide to send you away.”
She stared at him as if he were a stranger. “You opened it,” she exclaimed. She put a hand to her throat. “You read my letter.”
“Yes, I read it,” he said furiously. “Is that why you’ve been so generous in my arms, Trilby? Are you trying to sweeten me up so that I’ll agree to a divorce?” He felt his temper slipping its bonds, and he couldn’t stop it. “Damn you, how many other letters have there been before this one?”
“None,” she said hurriedly. “None, Thorn, I swear!”
He got up, overturning the chair as he went around the table and took hold of her, his eyes blazing, his body taut and shivering with an excess of emotion. “By God, Trilby, you won’t think of him tonight. I swear you won’t!”
His mouth went down to cover hers, devouring it. He lifted her roughly from the floor and carried her down the hall, his lips clinging to hers, demanding, insistent with desperate passion.
Trilby tried to protest, but his strength was frightening. He carried her into their bedroom, locked the door, and threw her onto the bed.
“Bates thinks I’m a savage,” he said, standing over her with a face like carved stone. “You’ve never thought of me any other way. Perhaps it’s time I lived down to your low image of me.”
And even as he finished speaking, he knelt over her, his hands determined, his eyes blazing with passion. Trilby’s last thought was that he acted much more like a hurt and jealous lover than a man making the most of a second marriage.
FIRST LIGHT CAME in through the lacy curtains, and Trilby opened her eyes with a grimace. There wasn’t one tiny spot on her body that hadn’t felt Thorn’s hands and lips. Their passion had always been sweet and satisfying, but this morning she felt positively ravished, and she blushed remembering some of the things he’d done to her.
He might have meant to be brutal, but it hadn’t been that way at all. He’d been totally abandoned when his powerful body had overwhelmed her.
The shameful thing was that she’d experienced the most powerful surge of pleasure he’d ever given her in the process. His anguish—and her need to appease it—had created a tension that had built to the point of madness before his violently thrusting body had exacted ecstasy for both of them. She remembered sobbing brokenly as she went over the edge, her entire body blazing with heat as completion made her mindless with the sweetest kind of anguish.
It had been that way for him, too. She knew it had. But once hadn’t satisfied him. He’d taken her again and again, his passion endless, tireless, his voice breaking as he felt the world explode under them time and time again through the long night. Only when exhaustion made it impossible to go on any longer did he roll away from her, finally, to sleep. Trilby had drifted off immediately, her nude body on top of the covers shamelessly as she slept. She looked around the room, but Thorn was nowhere to be seen. One of the wardrobes was standing just a little ajar. And as she sat up, she noticed writing on a pad on the table. She stared at it, wondering uneasily what she was going to find there.
SHE COULDN’T KNOW that Thorn had cursed himself the minute he awoke that morning, long before she did, and kept cursing himself as he dressed. His eyes swept over Trilby’s prone body and he saw the marks his fingers and mouth had left on her alabaster skin. Guilt, and jealousy, and hopelessness, and anguished grief consumed him. He’d shocked and shamed himself with his abandon, his vulnerability. It had begun with temper—and ended in a loss of control he’d never experienced before in his life. He knew that a woman of her gentility would—could—never forgive what he’d done to her in the night. He could never forgive himself. She couldn’t help it if she loved someone else.
It was only that he wanted her love so much, he thought miserably. He’d loved her endlessly, until his heart hurt at just the sight of her. And now he knew the hopelessness of it. She loved Bates. She would never be happy with him because Bates had finally admitted h
is love and need of her. It would destroy their marriage.
The only honorable thing he could do now, to make amends for his unacceptable behavior, was to let her go—to send her back to the man she really loved. Yes, he decided finally, with bitter resignation, that was the only thing left to do.
He took some paper from the writing table and sat down at the window, scribbling a few words on the pristine white tablet. He read them over, signed his name, and with one long last look at Trilby, left the room.
He was taking the coward’s way out, but he couldn’t help it. The contempt and distaste he knew he would see on her face would have destroyed his manhood. He simply could not face her after what he’d done to her the night before….
“Good morning, señor,” Jorge greeted him. “You are much earlier than usual.” He frowned at the packed valise Thorn was carrying as he started toward the car. “Señor, you are going somewhere?”
“Yes. To Tucson. I’m going to look at some cattle I was contacted about last month.”
“Those. Sí. But I understood that you had decided not to buy them…?”
Thorn glared at him from bloodshot eyes. “And now I have,” he said curtly. “Come on. You’ll have to drive me in to the station and bring the car back.”
“Sí, señor.” Jorge smiled in a conciliatory way. He knew the patrón’s temper too well to risk provoking it.
“Look out for Mrs. Vance as long as she’s here. I’ve already told her that she can leave Samantha with her people if she—if she needs to, for any reason.”
Jorge frowned, puzzled. “Yes, señor.”
“I’ll be back in a few days.” He cranked the car, put his valise in back, and waited for an uneasy Jorge to get in beside him before he drove away. He didn’t look back. If he had, he was certain that he wouldn’t have the strength to leave.
TRILBY PICKED UP the pad with trembling hands and read it. Her breath drew in painfully.
“I beg your forgiveness for last night,” Thorn had written,
even though what I did was unforgivable. The only amends I can make is to give you your freedom. You can leave Samantha with your parents. It will be all right. I have put some money on your vanity table so that you can buy a ticket home on the train. It will be easier if you divorce me. Tell your attorney that he may send me his bill. I deeply regret the pain I have caused you. I know that you will be happier with Bates than you have ever been with me.
It was signed with his black scrawl, and left starkly revealed where he’d put it.
Trilby sat down unsteadily in the chair he must have occupied while he wrote it. He was letting her go. He was sending her away. He thought she loved Richard, that she wanted to go!
She put her face in her hands and wept brokenly. Why hadn’t she told him the truth? She loved him with all her heart. She hadn’t been making the most of a bad situation. She stayed with him because he was her whole world. Nights in his arms were as close to heaven as she’d ever been. And yesterday, when the letter from Richard came, she’d just been out behind the house losing her breakfast for the third day in a row. She was almost certainly pregnant, and had apparently been that way for some weeks. It all added up; her fainting spells, her lack of appetite, her unusual fatigue…. She’d been so happy, so radiant. She’d started out to tell Thorn when her father had ridden up on his horse and prevented her.
The two men had ridden away. Trilby hadn’t been upset, because she could tell Thorn when he came home. She was certain that he’d be pleased with her news. He spoke much less of Sally these days, and he was all tenderness and consideration in bed and out of it. She had begun to hope…
Why? Why had Richard suddenly decided to love her, just when she knew she cared nothing for him, when she loved her husband and was carrying his child? It was so unfair!
She got up and dressed, barely making it to the back porch before she lost the coffee she’d just swallowed. The thought of a long train trip to Louisiana was unpleasant and unwelcome. But Thorn’s note had made it clear that he expected her to leave, wanted her to leave. He’d even gone away himself to make the break easier, giving her instructions about his daughter to ease her way.
She could stay in spite of the letter, she knew. She could refuse to go. But what if she did? He’d told her last night that what he felt for her was desire, not love. Even though he might regret his abandoned passion of the previous night, he was more than willing to let her get a divorce and go to Richard. If he loved her, surely he’d have fought to keep her. It wasn’t Thorn’s way to back off from a fight, to give up something he wanted without a struggle.
It was that thought that decided her to leave. She was convinced now that Thorn was telling her to leave. He was giving her away, like a gun he’d tired of using.
She dashed at the hot tears. Well, she had his child, she thought. It was some consolation to know that. He wouldn’t know. She grimaced. She’d go away and have his child and he’d never know. Of course he would, she thought miserably, because her parents would surely know and tell him. She could hardly marry Richard, either. She didn’t love him at all.
With resignation, she went to pack. She could worry about it all when she got back to Louisiana. She would take Samantha to her parents on the pretext of shopping, she thought, working it out. Then, from the train station she could telephone and let them know she was leaving, at the last minute. That way, there would be no danger that they might try to sway her. It was impossible to stay with Thorn, knowing that he felt nothing for her except desire and perhaps pity. But she didn’t really know how she was going to manage without him. He’d already become the center of her life.
It was Thursday the thirteenth of April, but it felt more like Friday the thirteenth, she thought with black humor. She had Jorge, more puzzled than ever when the señora decided to leave on the heels of Señor Vance, drive her to town. She didn’t tell him they were going to the train depot. She only said she was going to shop and that Samantha must stay with Jack and Mary and Teddy while she was away.
“I like Teddy,” Samantha said brightly as they pulled up at the Langs’ front steps. “He’s so nice to me.”
“He’s a nice boy,” Trilby replied. She kissed Samantha’ s cheek and gave her a long, sad look. “And you’re a nice girl. I do love you, Samantha.”
“I love you, too, Trilby,” the child said, frowning. “You look very pale. Are you all right?”
“Certainly.” She forced a smile to her tight lips. “Be good for Grandma and Grandpa, won’t you? I shouldn’t be too long.”
Samantha got out of the car with Trilby and went into the house, but she was worried.
“Thank you for looking after her,” Trilby told Mary.
“She’s no trouble at all, you know. And Teddy adores her. Look.”
Teddy was teaching Samantha how to play marbles, his voice excited and kind. Samantha was laughing at the way he squinted and stuck his tongue out when he shot the lone marble at the group of them.
“I’m glad they get along so well.”
Mary frowned. “You look unwell,” she said. “Shouldn’t you sit down?”
“I’ll be fine. I’m only going to buy some fabric for new summer dresses. Shall I get something for you?” she added to cover her retreat.
“No, dear. I’ll go in myself and look, thank you just the same. You should have on a hat,” she added.
“It’s in the car,” Trilby said. “I shouldn’t be too long. I’ll be back by dark.”
“Good. Good. Drive carefully, Jorge!”
“Sí, señora.” The small man grinned, holding his hat over his heart as he opened the door for Trilby. Thank goodness, she thought, her valises were in the floorboard, where Mary couldn’t see them. Jorge had, though, and he frowned all the way to Douglas. Something very serious was going on. He could feel it in his bones.
Trilby hadn’t wanted him to have to take her to the train, but the streetcars in Douglas didn’t run all the way to the depot. She had no choice
. The walk, in the heat and considering her condition, would have been intolerable. Odd how many people were in town, she thought absently, and how many soldiers were around. If she’d been less upset, she might have paid more attention to the industry that heralded trouble.
As she’d expected, when she told Jorge to drive to the train station, he was upset. But he didn’t speak until she was standing on the platform with her luggage beside her, waiting for the porter. “Señora, you must not leave,” he pleaded. “Señor Vance will be so unhappy.”
“I don’t believe he will, not at all,” she said stiffly. “He told me to go,” she added, almost choking on the words.
“But he adores you,” he protested. “Señora, he speaks of you as if you are the moon in the night sky, with such tenderness and need. If he sent you away, it was in bad temper, which he will regret soon enough. You must not go!”
“I must, Jorge, you’ll see—”
Neither of them had noticed the sudden proliferation of khaki uniforms and the assembling of many citizens on the streets. But the shouts and the sudden sound of gunfire froze them where they stood.
“Take cover!” a soldier yelled. “It’s started!”
Trilby tried to ask what had started, but Jorge herded her into the train station and closed the door. The glass shattered at once, and little Jorge caught his chest and fell. He lay on his back, his eyes open and horrified, as blood began to stream from his shoulder.
“Jorge!” Trilby screamed.
She started toward him, but no sooner had she taken a step than a party of ragged, armed Mexicans stormed the door and surrounded the shocked passengers.
Rapid-fire Spanish echoed around her. One man grabbed her by the arm. Two other passengers were also pulled along, both elderly.
“You come with us and no get hurt,” one of the men managed in heavily accented English. “¡Rápidamente!”
A terrified Trilby was pulled along with the men and dragged into a car that was brimming over with Mauser rifles and ammunition. Seconds later, it sped toward the Mexican border.