From This Day Forward

by Victoria Thompson

  From This Day Forward

  Victoria Thompson

  COPYRIGHT

  This ebook is licensed to you for your personal enjoyment only.

  This ebook may not be sold, shared, or given away.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the writer’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  From This Day Forward

  Copyright © 1997 by Victoria Thompson

  Ebook ISBN: 9781625179371

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this work may be used, reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  NYLA Publishing

  350 7th Avenue, Suite 2003, NY 10001, New York.

  http://www.nyliterary.com

  DEDICATION

  With thanks to Anna Fleck, Director of the Blair County Rape Crisis Program,

  and all her dedicated volunteers.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Lori.”

  Adam Ross had called her name, but Lori didn’t reply. She didn’t reply because she knew this was just a dream. She’d often dreamed that Adam Ross was calling her, and every time she answered him or reached out for him, he faded away, leaving her alone again. So she didn’t answer him this time because she didn’t want the dream to end.

  “Lori.”

  She could see him clearly. He was standing in a field, waving to her, and then he started running toward her. In her dreams, he didn’t need his cane, and he could run as well as any man. His hair looked golden in the bright sunlight, and his smile was so beautiful that it nearly stopped her heart.

  She couldn’t let the dream end because in another moment he would be with her. Still, this would only happen in her dreams because in real life Adam Ross would never even look at her. Especially now.

  “Lori!”

  Someone was shaking her awake. No! she thought, fighting to hold the dream, but it was too late. Adam was already fading as consciousness returned. Reluctantly, she raised her leaden eyelids and came face to face with the real Adam Ross.

  Startled, she cried out in alarm and raised her head, not from her pillow, but from the kitchen table. And she realized several very unsettling things all at once: she’d been sleeping at the kitchen table in the middle of the day, and Adam Ross himself was actually standing over her and looking even more handsome than in her dream. And a lot more concerned.

  Dear heaven, what on earth...? she wondered wildly in the instant before the terror took her. Because if Adam was here, then surely...

  She jumped to her feet, desperate to flee, as she glanced frantically around the room for him. The bench she’d been sitting on fell over with a crash, and the wooden bowl she’d been holding in her lap thudded to the floor, sending the peas she’d been shelling scattering everywhere. But she hardly noticed any of that in her relief to find that she was alone.

  Alone with Adam Ross.

  “I’m sorry,” he was saying in a voice as deep as a well. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

  But he did. The fear rose up again unbidden as it had every day for months and certainly every time a man had come near her. What on earth was he doing here? Instinctively, she backed away and almost went sprawling over the fallen bench.

  “Careful,” he cautioned as she grabbed the rough edge of the table to steady herself.

  He bent to set the bench upright, and even as she automatically recoiled from his nearness, she saw the way he kept his left leg straight as he performed the task. Instantly, she remembered his pain and experienced the rush of affection she always felt for him.

  How could she have been afraid? This was Adam, after all. The man she’d known for years. The man she’d admired for as long as she could remember. And the man she’d loved since she had come to understand what love was, even though she knew he would never love her back. Adam, of course, would never hurt her.

  He straightened, and she saw he was frowning. “Are you ill right, Miss McClintock? Should I get your mother?”

  “She’s not my mother,” Lori said instinctively as she always did when anyone made that mistake.

  “I mean your stepmother,” he corrected himself. “If you’re ill—”

  “Of course I’m not ill,” she assured him with false brightness, although her hand went to her stomach as if to prove her a liar. Well, that wasn’t an illness, was it? “Although you’d have every right to think I was when you find me sound asleep over my chores. I don’t know what got into me,” she chattered on determinedly, stooping quickly to pick up the bowl she’d dropped and collect as many of the scattered peas as she could, feeling like a complete idiot. “I must have spring fever,” she told him, glancing up from where he crouched on the cabin’s dirt floor, carefully rescuing the new peas.

  She tried a smile, even though she knew a smile wouldn’t distract him from the rest of it. He’d known that she was poor, certainly. Hadn’t his slaves been bringing her and Bessie food ever since Pa went off to fight in that stupid war? Didn’t he know that she always wore the same dress to church, year after year?

  But knowing and seeing were two different things. Now he was seeing where she lived, the dilapidated two-room cabin with its dirt floor and rickety, homemade furniture, the boxes nailed to the walls for storage of their meager belongings. Her ragged, everyday dress that had long since lost whatever color it had once had. Her bare feet, left unanswered so she could save her one pair of shoes for church.

  Self-consciously, she ran a hand over her hair, as if nothing the unruly curls would somehow make up for everything else. Even more self-consciously, she quickly rose to her feet again and set the bowl back on the table. Then she realized she still held a lone pea in her hand and, her face flaming, she tossed it into the bowl with the others.

  They couldn’t afford to waste even one pea. Then she risked another glance at Adam Ross.

  Dear heaven, he was tall. Why hadn’t she remembered him being so tall? Or so imposing. He was wearing the dark suit he always wore to church, and the fingers of his left hand curled tightly around the head of his ornately carved cane. He looked every inch the successful planter and as out of place in the McClintock cabin as a pig in school.

  What could he want here? Lori swallowed nervously.

  “If you’re here to see Bessie, she’s out in the fields,” Lori told him, referring to her stepmother. She wished he wasn’t standing quite so close and fought the urge to step bad again.

  “I’m not here to see Mrs. McClintock,” he informed her solemnly. “I came to see you.”

  “Me?” she asked in surprise, and for one second a spark of hope flickered in her heart. Could he really have come to call on her? Was it possible that he had finally noticed her after all these years? Then, just as quickly, the tiny spark died. Even if he had, it was too late—way too late. “Whatever for?” she asked with more false cheer, desperately concealing the painful emotions roiling within her. “If you want to talk business, you’d best see Bessie. She’s the one who—”

  “I already saw her,” Adam said his expression even more solemn, if that was possible. “She called on me this morning. She told me about... about your situation.”

  No! It wasn’t possible! Shame washed over her like a tidal wave. Shame and humiliation and mortification so thick that she couldn’t breathe and she couldn’t even see. But that was all right because she certainly didn’t want to see the contempt on Adam Ross’s face, and s
he didn’t want to draw another breath, either, not if it meant she would live for another moment.

  But she wasn’t going to be that lucky.

  “Miss Lori?” Adam cried summoning her back. “Are you all right? You’d better sit down. I can call your mother for you..:.

  “She’s not my mother!” Lori repeated through gritted teeth as she fought the nausea that threatened to choke her. Too many times had she reminded people of that fact, yet never had she felt the truth of it more than at this moment. Even though Bessie had been thoughtlessly unkind to her many times, she had never been cruel, not until now. Bessie had betrayed her, and worse, she had betrayed her to Adam Ross. How could she?

  “I really think you should sit down,” Adam was saying. He reached out to her, perhaps instinctively, perhaps out of concern, but Lori flinched from him as if he were a leper. How could he stand to touch her? How could he stand to look at her?

  She didn’t know, but she did sit, bending her knees out of habit when they bumped up against the bench. She sank down wearily and wrapped her arms around herself since no one else would. The darkness of her own personal horror hadn’t quite receded, and she could still see it lurking at the edges of her vision when she finally lifted her gaze to Adam toss again.

  To his credit, he revealed nothing of his disgust for her. His fine features, the result of centuries of good breeding, wore only an expression of deep concern with perhaps a touch of alarm. What could he possibly be alarmed about?

  “Can I get you something? Some water perhaps?” he asked solicitously.

  For an instant, she pictured him wielding his cane about the cabin as he made his way awkwardly to where the water bucket sat to fetch her a dipperful. Then she shook her head and dropped her gaze again, too ashamed to look at him any longer.

  “I didn’t come here to judge you, Miss McClintock,” he said in what he must have intended to be a kindly voice.

  Lori looked up in surprise. “Judge me?”

  His expression tightened, and she glimpsed a trace of the disgust he was trying so hard to disguise before he was able to control his expression again. The shame twisted in her like a knife, but she managed to hold his gaze.

  “I’m here as the head of the Ross family,” he explained patiently, as if he thought her too stupid to understand unless he spoke slowly. “When my father died, that left me as... well, as the oldest son. Eric and I may be brothers, but I’m still responsible for him and for his... his indiscretions.”

  Indiscretion? Is that what she was? She felt an insane urge to laugh. Instead she said, “So what do you think you can do about this? ” She could hear the bitterness in her voice and wondered if he could, too.

  He shifted uneasily, moving his cane, and she wondered if his leg bothered him. For no reason, she suddenly remembered how he’d come to injure his leg in the first place. That had been Eric’s doing, too. They’d both been hurt by him. Terribly hurt. In ways that would never heal.

  Tears she couldn’t allow herself to shed burned behind her eyes as she forced herself to listen to what Adam Ross was saying.

  She thought the color had risen in his face at her question but he did not flinch. “I’m not certain what I can do,” he said. “You probably know that Eric has run off to join that bunch of misfits that Rip Ford is getting together to stop the Yankees from invading.”

  Lori nodded gravely. Everyone knew that the Yankees were, in this year of 1864, finally coming to invade Texas. “Rip” Ford had been a famous Texas Ranger in the old days and while he had long refused a commission in the Confederate Army, he was more than willing to lead a force of Texans against the “abolitionists, negroes, plundering Mexican and perfidious renegades” he said were coming to slaughter them all in their beds. After years of avoiding the draft, Erin Ross had answered this call.

  “I can try writing to him,” Adam continued, “but I’m not sure where he is, or if he’d get the letter, or even if he did, if he could get back here in time.”

  Lori didn’t want him back here at all. “In time for what?” she asked warily.

  Now she had no doubt. Adam Ross’s finely constructed face was scarlet. “In time to marry you.”

  Lori gaped at him. “Marry me? Why would he marry me?”

  “Because…” He gestured vaguely with the hand that wasn’t holding his cane. “If there’s going to be a child...”

  A child? Lori had never thought of the thing growing inside of her as a child. It was more like a cancer, something that was going to destroy her, to finish the job that Eric Ross had begun. She never should have told Bessie she was sick. If she hadn’t told her, no one ever would have known. Lori could have just killed herself the way she should have done last winter when Eric Ross had shown her just how worthless she really was.

  Instead, she had to face his brother, the only man whose opinion really mattered to her, and now Adam knew how worthless she was, too.

  “I’m not going to marry him,” she told Adam, still incredulous. How could he ever have thought such a thing?

  He pressed his well-shaped lips together so tightly that the blood drained out of them, but only for a moment before making himself smile again. “I know you must be angry with him for leaving you, but—”

  “Angry!" she spat furiously. “I hope some Yankee blows his brains out!”

  As she might have expected from a man like Adam, he was a little shocked by her vehemence, but he was also too well-mannered to react. “As I said, I know you’re angry now, and hurt,” he continued, just as patient as before, “but you can’t let a lover’s quarrel prevent you from—”

  “Lover’s quarrel?” she echoed in outrage, jumping to her feet and almost knocking the bench over again. “Is that what you think? That we were lovers? That I loved him?”

  “Well,” he allowed uneasily, plainly uncomfortable with the subject. “Surely, you had some feelings for him, considering what happened between you...”

  “What happened between us was that he forced me! He held me down and put his hand over my mouth so I couldn’t breathe and he...”

  For a second she was back there, pressed against the cold hard ground, and she was so certain she was going to die that drawing another breath hadn’t even seemed worth the effort. Her throat closed on a sob, and she clamped both her hands over her mouth to hold it back. She couldn’t cry ii front of Adam Ross, not if she wanted to hold on to what little remained of her dignity. Dear Lord, why hadn’t she died that day?

  “Miss McClintock, please,” Adam Ross begged her, although she wasn’t exactly sure what he wanted. Probably he just wanted her not to cry. Pa had never liked to see a woman cry, either. “Should I get your moth... your stepmother? Maybe she could...”

  But Lori was shaking her head. She didn’t want Bessie. She didn’t want to see Bessie ever again. This was all Bessie’ fault. If she hadn’t gone to see Adam Ross, he wouldn’t be here now, would he?

  Lori drew a steadying breath and lowered her hands. “Don’t bother writing to him,” she said, as calmly as she could. “Even if he was willing, I’d rather die than marry Eric Ross.”

  He studied her for a long moment, his eyes as blue as rain washed sky, as if he was trying to see inside her head. Finally, he said, “I see. I had no idea. Of course, I thought that you and Eric... Well, that changes everything, doesn’t it?”

  Lori blinked in surprise. She wasn’t sure what kind of reaction she had expected, but she knew it wasn’t this one.

  Probably, she had expected him to call her a liar, the way Bessie had done.

  “That’s what every girl who ever got caught says,” Bessie had scoffed. “ ‘He held me down and had his way.’ Ha! I know what you was thinkin’. You was thinkin’ ’bout his big house and the silver they got buried so the Yankees don’t find it and his mama’s jewels and all that land and how this war can’t last forever and someday he’s gonna be rich again. Set your cap for him, then you spread your legs for him, and now you got a baby in your belly and h
e’s long gone. I figured you for smarter’n that, Lori.”

  And she was smarter than that, only not much smarter, because Eric had tricked her another way. And all because she really loved Adam Ross. What a fool she was!

  But when she glanced up at Adam again, suddenly she didn’t feel like a fool any longer because of the way Adam was looking at her. He was looking at her as if she was a respectable human being and not the piece of worthless trash she had felt herself to be for these past few months. As she gazed into his beautiful blue eyes, she realized something else, too: he believed her. Not only hadn’t he called her a liar outright, he really believed her when she said that Eric had forced her.

  The relief of it sent the blood rushing from her head and for a moment she thought she might actually faint.

  She must have looked like she was going to faint, too, because Adam reached out for her and took her arm. This time she didn’t shrink from his touch, and she let him ease her back down onto the bench again. His fingers felt so strong on her arm, strong but gentle, too. Adam Ross would lever hold a woman down and take her against her will.

  She had to blink against tears as she gazed up at his face. He was so good and kind. He bore his own pain with saintly patience and never once complained. And he believed her.

  She was lying, of course, Adam thought as he gazed down into her lovely face. Women always lied in this situation. What else could they do? Admit they had surrendered themselves willingly to a man who was not their husband? Admit they had given away the only commodity they had of value, the one thing of worth they could use in the eternal barter between male and female?

  Not that he blamed her, of course. What other choice did a girl like this have? What other chance? And, he supposed glancing around the pathetic dwelling, she would have done most anything for an opportunity to escape this life. Erie must have seemed like the perfect way out.