by Lind Howard
“But … of course she would live here.” Lucinda looked at him uncertainly. “I never thought that you would make her leave. Oh, dear. That would look funny, wouldn’t it? People would talk.”
“She told me that she plans to buy her own place.”
“Leave Davencourt?” The very idea shocked Lucinda. “But this is her home.”
“Exactly,” Webb said softly.
“Well.” Lucinda sat back, mulling over this change in her plans. Except it wasn’t a change, she realized. It was simply leaving everything as it already stood, with Roanna as her heir. “But … what will you do?”
He smiled, a slow smile that lit his entire face. “She can hire me to handle the financial dealings for her,” he said lightly. Suddenly he knew exactly what he wanted, and it was like a light being turned on inside him. “Better yet, I’m going to marry her.”
Lucinda was truly speechless now. It was an entire minute before she could manage a squeaky “What?”
“I’m going to marry her,” Webb repeated with growing determination. “I haven’t asked her yet, so keep it quiet.” Yes, he was going to marry her, one way or the other. It felt as if a piece of the puzzle had suddenly been placed in its correct position. It felt right. Nothing else would ever be as right. Roanna had always been his—and he had always been Roanna’s.
“Webb, are you sure?” Lucinda asked anxiously. “Roanna loves you, but she deserves to be loved in return—”
He gave her a level look, his eyes very green, and she fell silent in astonishment. “Well,” she said again.
He tried to explain. “Jessie—I was obsessed with her, I suppose, and in a way I loved her because we grew up together, but it was mostly ego on my part. I never should have married her, but I was so locked into the idea of inheriting Davencourt and marrying the crown princess that I didn’t realize what a disaster our marriage would be. Roanna, now … I’ve loved her for as long as she’s been alive, I reckon. When she was little I loved her like a brother, but now she’s all grown up, and I’m damn sure not her brother.” He sighed, looking back over the years at how relationships had gotten tangled up with inheritances. “If Jessie hadn’t been killed, we’d have gotten divorced. I meant what I said that night. I was fed up, through with her. And if we’d been divorced, instead of things happening the way they did, I’d have been married to Roanna for a long time now. The way Jessie died split us all apart, and I’ve wasted ten years because of a grudge.”
Lucinda searched his face, looking for the truth, and what she found made her sigh with relief. “You really do love her.”
“So much it hurts.” Gently he squeezed Lucinda’s fingers, taking care not to hurt her. “She’s smiled at me six times,” he confided. “And laughed once.”
“Laughed!” Tears welled again in Lucinda’s eyes, and this time she let them fall. Her lips trembled. “I’d like to hear her laugh again, just once more.”
“I’m going to try real hard to make her happy,” Webb said.
“When do you plan to get married?”
“As soon as possible, if I can talk her into it.” He knew Roanna loved him, but convincing her that he loved her in return might take some doing. Once she would have married him under any circumstances, but now she would quietly turn stubborn if she thought something wasn’t right. On the other hand, he wanted Lucinda to be at their wedding, so that meant it had to happen quickly, while she was still able to attend. And there might be another, more private reason for a quick wedding.
“Oh, posh!” Lucinda scoffed. “You know she would walk through fire to marry you!”
“I know she loves me, but I’ve learned not to think she’ll automatically do anything I ask. Those days are long gone. I wouldn’t like having a doormat for a wife anyway. I want her to have the confidence to stand up for what she wants.”
“The way she stood up for you.”
“The way she’s always stood up for me.” When no one else had been there, Roanna had been at his side, slipping her little hand into his and offering what comfort she could. She had been far stronger than he, strong enough to make the first move, to reach out. “She deserves the inheritance,” he said. “But besides that, I don’t want her to ever feel that she had to please me in order to stay in her home.”
“She might feel the same way about you,” Lucinda pointed out. “Whenever you’re nice to her, she might think it’s only because she holds the purse strings. I’ve been in that situation,” she added dryly, no doubt thinking of Corliss.
Webb shrugged. “I’m not a pauper, Lucinda, as you know damned well, since you had me investigated. I have my Arizona holdings, and they’re going to be worth a goodsized fortune before I get through with them. I assume Roanna read the same report you did, so she knows my financial situation. We’ll be equals, and she’ll know that I’m with her because I love her. I’ll take care of the financial dealings if she really isn’t interested; I don’t know if she’ll want to stay involved with that part of it or not. She says she doesn’t like it, but she has the Davenport knack, doesn’t she?”
“In a different way.” Lucinda smiled. “She pays more attention to people than she does to numbers on a sheet of paper.”
“You know what she really wants to do, don’t you?”
“No, what?”
“Train horses.”
She laughed softly. “I might have known! Loyal has been using some of her training ideas for years now, and I have to say we have some of the best-behaved horses I’ve ever been around.”
“She’s magic with a horse. They’re where her heart is, so that’s what I want her to do. You’ve always had horses just for the pleasure of it, because you love them, but Roanna wants to get into it as a business.”
“You have it all planned out, don’t you?” She smiled fondly at him, because even as a boy Webb had mapped out his strategy, then followed through on it. “No one else around here knows about your properties out west. People will talk, you know.”
“That I married Roanna for her money? That I was determined to get Davencourt any way I could? That I’d married Jessie for it and then, when she died, moved on to Roanna?”
“I see you’ve thought of all the angles.”
He shrugged. “I don’t give a damn about the angles as long as Roanna doesn’t believe any of them.”
“She won’t. She’s loved you for twenty years, and she’ll love you for another twenty.”
“Longer than that, I hope.”
“Do you know how lucky you are?”
“Oh, I’ve got an idea,” he said softly. He was surprised it had taken him so long to get that idea, though. Even though he’d known that he loved Roanna, he hadn’t thought of it as a romantic, erotic love; he’d been stuck in the big-brother mode even after they had kissed the first time and he’d almost lost control. He hadn’t been jolted out of it until she had walked up to him in the bar in Nogales, a woman, with a gap often years between their meetings so he hadn’t seen her grow up. That night was burned in his memory, and still he’d struggled with the misapprehension that he had to protect Roanna from his own lust. God, what a dope. She positively reveled in his lust, which made him about the luckiest man alive.
Now, all he had to do was convince her to marry him, and clear up the small matter of attempted murder—his own.
Roanna was standing out on the veranda watching the sunset when he entered her room. She turned and glanced over her shoulder when she heard the door open. She was gilded by the last rays of the sun, turning her skin golden, her hair glinting red and gold. He came on through and out onto the veranda with her, turning to lean against the railing so that he faced the house, and her. Looking at her was so damn easy. He kept rediscovering the angles of those chiseled cheekbones, seeing anew the golden lights in her whiskey-colored eyes. The open collar of her shirt let him see enough of her silken skin to remind him how silky she was all over.
He felt the beginning twinges of lust in his groin but neverth
eless asked an utterly prosaic question. “Did you finish your supper?”
She wrinkled her nose. “No, it was cold, so I ate a slice of lemon icebox pie instead.”
He scowled. “Tansy made another pie? She didn’t tell me.”
“I’m sure there’s some left,” she said comfortingly. She looked up at the vermillion streaks in the sky. “Are you really going to make Corliss leave?”
“Oh, yes.” He let both his satisfaction and determination come through in those two words.
She started to speak, then hesitated.
“Go on,” he urged. “Tell me, even if you think I’m wrong.”
“I don’t think you’re wrong. Lucinda needs peace now, not constant turmoil.” Her expression was distant, somber. “It’s just that I remember what it’s like to be terrified of having nowhere to live.”
He reached out and caught a tendril of her hair, winding it around his finger. “When your parents died?”
“Then, and later, until—until I was seventeen.” Until Jessie died, she meant, but she didn’t say it. “I was always afraid that if I didn’t measure up, I’d be sent away.”
“That would never have happened,” he said firmly. “This is your home. Lucinda wouldn’t have made you leave.”
She shrugged. “They were talking about it. Lucinda and Jessie, that is. They were going to send me away to college. Not just to Tuscaloosa; they wanted me to go to some women’s college, in Virginia, I think. It was someplace far enough away that I couldn’t come home regularly.”
“That wasn’t why.” He sounded shocked. He remembered the arguments. Lucinda had thought it would be good for Roanna to be away from them, force her to mature, and Jessie, of course, had egged her on. He saw now that, to Roanna, it must have seemed that they didn’t want her around.
“That’s what it sounded like to me,” she said.
“Why did it change when you were seventeen? Was it because Jessie was dead and wasn’t there to keep bringing up the subject?”
“No.” That remote look was still in her eyes. “It was because I didn’t care anymore. Going away seemed like the best thing to do. I wanted to get away from Davencourt, from people who knew me and felt sorry for me because I wasn’t pretty, because I was clumsy, because I was so socially graceless.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, as if she were discussing a menu.
“Hell,” he said wearily. “Jessie made a career out of making you miserable, didn’t she? Damn her. It should be against the law for people under the age of twenty-five to get married. I thought I was king of the mountain when I was in my early twenties, so damn sure I could tame Jessie and turn her into a suitable wife—my idea of suitable, of course. But there was something missing in Jessie, maybe the ability to love, because she didn’t love anyone. Not me, not Lucinda, not even herself. I was too young to see it, though.” He rubbed his forehead, remembering those last horrible days after her murder. “Maybe she did love someone, though. Maybe she loved the man whose baby she carried. I’ll never know.”
Roanna gasped, shock running through her. She turned to face him. “You knew about him?”“ she asked incredulously.
Webb straightened away from the railing, his gaze sharpening. “I found out after she was killed.” He caught her shoulders, his grip urgent. “How did you know?”
“I—I saw them together in the woods.” She wished she had controlled her reaction to finding out he knew about Jessie’s lover, but it had been such a shock. She had protected that secret all these years, and he’d known anyway. But she hadn’t known that Jessie was pregnant when she was killed, and that made her feel sick.
“Who was it?” His tone was hard.
“I don’t know, I’d never seen him before.”
“Can you describe him?”
“Not really.” She bit her lip, remembering that day. “I only saw him once, the afternoon of the day Jessie was killed, and I didn’t get a good look at him. I didn’t tell you then because I was afraid …” She paused, a look of unutterable sadness crossing her face. “I was afraid you’d fly off the handle and do something dumb and get in trouble. So I kept quiet.”
“And after Jessie was killed, you didn’t say anything because you thought I would be arrested, that they’d say I killed her because I’d found out she was cheating on me.” He’d kept his silence on the same subject and nearly choked on his bitterness. It made him ache inside to know that Roanna had kept the same secret and for the same reason. She had been so young, already traumatized by finding Jessie’s body and briefly being suspected of murder herself, hurt by his own rejection of her, and still she’d kept quiet.
Roanna nodded, searching his face. The sunlight was fading fast, and the shades of twilight were veiling them in mysteriously shadowed blues and purples, wrapping them in that brief moment when the earth hovered between day and night, when time seems to stop and everything seems richer, sweeter. His expression was guarded, and she couldn’t tell what he was thinking or feeling.
“So you kept it to yourself,” he said softly. “To protect me. I’ll bet you nearly choked on it, with Jessie accusing us of sleeping together when you’d just seen her with another man.”
“Yes,” she said, her voice strained as she remembered that horrible day and night.
“Did she know you’d seen her.”
“No, I was quiet. In those days I was good at sneaking around.” The glance she gave him was full of wry acknowledgment of what an undisciplined handful she had been.
“I know,” he said, his tone as wry as her look. “Do you remember where they met?”
“It was just a clearing in the woods. I could take you to the area but not to the exact spot. It’s been ten years; it’s probably grown over by now.”
“If it was a clearing, why couldn’t you see the man?”
“I didn’t say I couldn’t see him.” Feeling uncomfortable, Roanna moved restlessly under his hands. “I said I couldn’t describe him.”
Webb frowned. “But if you saw him, why can’t you describe him?”
“Because they were having sex!” she said in stifled exasperation. “He was naked. I’d never seen a naked man before. Frankly, I didn’t look at his face!”
Webb dropped his hands in astonishment, peering at her through the fading twilight. Then he began to laugh. He didn’t just chuckle, he roared with mirth, his entire frame shaking. He tried to stop, took one look at her, and started again.
She punched him on the shoulder. “Hush,” she muttered.
“I can just hear you telling Booley about it,” he chortled, almost choking with laughter. “S-sorry, Sheriff, I didn’t notice his f-face because I was looking at his—Woof!” This time she punched him in the belly. The breath rushed out of him and he bent over, clutching his stomach and still laughing.
Roanna lifted her chin. “I was not,” she said with dignity, “looking at his woof.” She strode into her room and started to close the veranda doors in his face. He barely slipped through the rapidly shrinking opening. Roanna set the alarm for the doors, then pulled the curtains closed over them.
He slipped his arms around her before she could move away, pulling her snugly back against him. “I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I know you were upset.”
“It made me sick,” she said fiercely. “I hated her for cheating on you.”
He bent to rub his cheek against her hair. “I think she must have been planning to have the baby and pretend it was mine. But first she had to get me to have sex with her, and I hadn’t touched her in four months. There was no way in hell she could pass it off as mine as things stood. When she caught us kissing, she probably thought all her plans had gone up in smoke. She knew damn well I wouldn’t pretend the baby was mine just to prevent a scandal. I’d have divorced her so fast her head would spin. She was crazy jealous of you anyway. She wouldn’t have been nearly as furious if she had caught me with anyone else.”
“Me?” Roanna asked incredulously, turning her head to stare at him. “She w
as jealous of me? Why? She had everything.”
“But you were the one I protected—from her, most of the time. I took your side, and she couldn’t stand that. She had to be first in everything and with everybody.”
“No wonder she was always trying to talk Lucinda into sending me away to college!”
“She wanted you out of the way.” He brushed her hair to one side and lightly kissed her neck. “Are you certain you can’t describe the man you saw her with?”
“I’d never seen him before. And since they were lying down, I couldn’t really see his face. I got the impression that he was older, but I was only seventeen. Thirty seemed old to me then.” His teeth nipped at her neck, and she shivered. She could feel him losing interest in his questions; quite literally, in fact. His growing erection pushed at her bottom, and she leaned back against him, closing her eyes as warm pleasure began to fill her.
Slowly he slid his hands up her body and put his palms over her breasts. “Just what I thought,” he murmured, moving his love bites to her earlobe.
“What?” she gasped, reaching back to brace her hands on his thighs.
“Your nipples are already hard.”
“Are you fixated on my breasts?”
“I must be,” he murmured. “And assorted other body parts, too.”
He was very hard now. Roanna turned into his arms, and he walked her backward to the bed. They fell down upon it, Webb bracing his weight on his arms to keep from crushing her, and in the cool darkness their bodies came together with a fire and intensity that left her weak and shaking in his arms.
He held her close to his side, her head cradled on his shoulder. Left weak and boneless, utterly relaxed, Roanna felt drowsiness begin to ease over her. Evidently he was right about her insomnia: tension had kept her sleepless for ten years, but after his lovemaking she was too relaxed to resist. But sleep was one thing; the sleepwalking was something else entirely and disturbed her on a much deeper level. She said, “I need to put on my nightgown.”
“No.” His refusal was instant and emphatic. His arms tightened around her as if he would prevent her from moving.