Matt could only sigh and remind himself that he was no longer young and stupid enough to strip her down in a hundred-mile-an-hour wind. Besides, right now Perri looked so mad he was thankful she hadn’t brought the hatchet. Feeling extremely noble, he shifted into drive.
In silent agreement, they headed around to the front for a quick look at the graveyard. It raised a unified sigh of relief to see that it would survive. Projectiles that once upon a time had been children’s play equipment had tangled in the fence. The leg of a child’s swing set was stuck in the graveyard gate.
“Condo litter,” Matt grumbled, as he circled back around. But he was satisfied. The spare little arch had held; and the graves were as they had been for over a hundred years. They endured as a silent reminder of others who had witnessed winds tear apart the Plains.
The storm sounded even louder in the silence between them. For a man who had so recently determined that he really did love the woman by his side, Matt was remarkably hesitant to speak up. He glanced away from the pasture he was cutting through to look at her.
“You okay?” he asked, puzzled by her pensive expression.
“I’m fine, thanks,” Perri answered politely. After a pause, she continued. “I’ve been thinking about what you said yesterday, of course. thinking about reality. Reality, Matt, and the past,” she said wearily. “I am so tired of butting heads with the past.
“I found some of Gannie’s diaries stored in a trunk down in the basement Did you know she fell in love with Ray Deepwater just before the war?” Perri asked.
“Ray Deepwater? Nor,” Matt replied with surprise.
“I guess Ray must have been John’s grandfather’s brother. I’m a little hesitant to ask John, but I might just do it,” Perri declared. “From what I can tell, her father didn’t approve and Deepwater’s father absolutely forbade their marriage. No wonder she refused to go back East to school,” Perri mused. “No wonder she worked so hard to support herself.”
“I’ve never heard any of this,” Matt answered. “What happened?”
Perri fought back tears. “She waited out World War II for him. But he never made it back from the Pacific. And she never married. I think that is so sad. Gannie had waited for him to come home,” Perri said somberly, “expecting to be disowned by her family when they married. She was fully prepared to help make a living when it happened,” Perri murmured, once again lost in the past.
“I suppose that explains some things,” Matt said, “like her special affection for John. It must have seemed peculiar at the time for Olivia Gledhill to set about learning how to support herself,” he added, “instead of working toward making an ‘appropriate marriage.’ I always wondered why she never married.”
Perri had found an entry in one of the diaries that had just about torn her heart. “I went out to the Fort Remount cemetery today,” Gannie had written, “just for the quiet. Ray used to love to walk that hill. Now, to go through life without him, to never bear his children—to never build a life together—nor to ever be buried side by side, these things I must endure. I will never many. But I will go there, often. To remember.”
“No wonder she tried to guide my mother and me,” she said unhappily.
“No wonder she became so focused on the past,” Matt put in.
“Well, she made a best effort and lived with her choice,” Perri said firmly. “So will I. I am sick to death of knuckling under to the past and being reasonable and polite.” Perri looked away, disgusted with herself.
“You hurt me, Matt.” She paused, as if weighing the consequences of words never spoken. “Why has that been so very hard to say?” she asked. “Why have I been protecting that one fact for so long? I wanted you to believe I was grateful I got out. I learned a lot and I’ve changed because of it. But I’m not grateful to you, Matt
“I’m not grateful to you at all,” she repeated with feeling. “I said that out of pride. I was being nice when I said that.” Perri laughed sadly. “I’ve felt locked, frozen into being polite about how deeply you hurt me twelve years ago. I hate that! I was being nice about the fact that you broke my heart. I never wanted to leave Spirit,” she whispered. “I wanted a family. Here.”
“Perri, I didn’t mean half of what I said yesterday,” Matt replied softly. “You and I are not done, honey. But now is not the time for this.” He was wary of her mood. No one should make snap decisions in a storm. It was best just to hang on and ride it out.
“We are done,” she answered calmly. “I can’t stay with a man who doesn’t want me for myself. I can’t stay and become the woman that would make me. And pretty soon, Matt,” she declared, “you wouldn’t be the man I was staying for.”
“What?” he demanded.
“I won’t end up locked in the past like Gannie and I won’t run,” she went on. “But I won’t pine away either. I’m not going to spend my days living out the loss. You make a family where you are,” Perri stated, “and where you are able. You’ve made it clear that I’m not a part of your family and I accept that,” she said softly. “I’ll just have to make one of my own.”
Matt drove on, shocked into silence.
“I’ll work with you for an amiable divorce, Ransom,” she said. In spite of herself, she sounded reasonable, fair and polite. “I’ll be staying right here. I’ll make room for myself in Spirit if it’s the last thing I ever do,” she vowed. “I’ll be doing what’s best for the baby and for myself as a single mother.”
She didn’t see him wince at the term. “And I will do my part to make it easy for you to have a strong relationship with our child. But you’re not getting custody,” she continued forcefully when his eyes whipped around at her words. “So put that idea right out of your head.”
Matt acknowledged silently that his remark about gaining custody had probably been his biggest mistake. “Perri, I don’t want a divorce,” he said firmly. “I want us to stay married.” He was so sure that. was all he had to say. Thea everything would be fine between them.
“Matt, please,” she said, as they drove toward the outbuildings. “I just don’t have it in me to maintain the pretense of believing that. The only reason you wanted me in the first place was because I was forbidden. I was someone they said Matt Ransom couldn’t have. Now all you want me for is the baby,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone.
“Hold it!” he said, swerving to avoid a sheet of plywood loose in the wind. “Don’t say that! I want the baby, of course. But I want you with or without the baby.”
“Please don’t insult my intelligence, Matt,” she answered, grabbing hold of the gun rack as they struggled to clear the field. “You can’t have it both ways. You’ve made it clear you will do anything, say anything, in order to accomplish what you have decreed must be done. And what ‘must be done’ in your estimation is to keep this baby here. You will say whatever you think I want to hear to get me to stay,” she declared.
“But there’s a flaw in your strategy, Ransom,” Perri continued. “In order for it to work, I’d have to be stupid enough with love not to care that you really don’t love me, or blind enough with love to believe that you do want me for me. Well,” she reflected, “I’m Neither.” Perri looked away. “And I’m staying anyway, so you can drop the pretense.
“But you’re right about one thing,” she continued politely. “Now is not the time to discuss this. Maybe when I get back, we’ll both have had time to think.”
“Get back?” The look on Matt’s face all but shouted his opposition.
“I plan to visit Tucson.” Perri informed him. “I can take off after my amnio.” She settled back into the silence as they drove on.
Matt stared straight ahead and slowly, carefully went through the motions of breathing. It wasn’t just the atmospheric pressure that made it difficult. Alarm had locked his lungs up tighter than a wedge. At the moment, he had no resources to call upon to win her over. She was not going to give him another chance.
And why should she? He had never give
n her time to adjust. He’d just kept pushing. At the same time. he’d expected her to give him room while he took his own time to adapt to being married To adjust to having her back; to loving her. Matt realized she didn’t even know that he was in love with her. He hadn’t shared it with her.
Although he was practically sweating bullets. he no longer felt the heat building around him. He felt frozen, locked inside his point of view. A prisoner of his own strategy. In his nightmare, it had been the frozen countryside Matt had battled through to reach her. In reality, the red earth around him baked in the night. It was his iced-over emotions that were guilty of driving her away. He had been unwilling to give her what he had demanded for himself.
All along his ace had been that she loved him. He had taken it for granted that Perri would remain the center for him. And in pushing her to accommodate his needs, he’d pushed her right out of his life.
He drove on. Gledhill hadn’t crumbled. Ransom’s held. The one thing that had been blown apart was the one thing he had felt in his heart would always remain constant. That Perri would love him long enough for him to find his way back to loving her.
“What do I have to do to get you to stay with me?” Matt demanded hoarsely. ”What do I have to say?”
A muffled crash from the other side of his father’s house saved him from making things worse. They both held their breath as the sound of a car horn carried over from the entrance to the property. It was beating out an SOS. Sam, he thought desperately. “Get out,” he ordered, pulling up and braking hard by his front porch.
“No,” she replied grimly. “You may need me. Don’t waste time!”
He didn’t. The pickup headed toward the horn. As they reached the front. Matt swore viciously at the sight between them and the highway.
The wrought-iron arch at the entrance had been brought down. It looked as if the side, or probably the roof of an eighteen-wheeler had been turned into a sail. Siding, tumbled by the storm, had clipped the top of the arch, sending it to the ground. The road onto the property was blocked by fallen trees, mangled aluminum and ironwork. His father’s car had been chased into the windbreaks.
“He must have figured that he couldn’t make it on the straightaway and headed into the trees,” Matt said tightly as they drove hard to reach the damaged car. He threw the pickup into park and flew out the door. It barely registered when Perri scooted into the driver’s seat and completed a turnaround.
Matt cursed the wind. Sam’s beloved trees were damaged, obscuring Matt’s view of the driver’s side. His eyes burning, unable to see, he fought hurriedly through broken branches. But he just couldn’t find a way to get to the car.
He couldn’t get to his father. Matt coughed at the sandy feeling of tainted wind rushing into his lungs. Grief, despair and anger shot through him. The car was almost buried in the broken trees and debris.
A closer look, however, revealed that it wasn’t that bad. Matt gave thanks, relieved to note that the arch had only smashed the car’s trunk and the back portion of the roof. Mercifully, Sam had avoided ramming into a tree. One headlight still worked.
“Is he all right?” Perri demanded, aiming her flashlight toward the driver’s side. She could barely see with the dirt blowing. The familiar, dreaded pain of heat and grit and wind ravaging the eyes hit her immediately.
She battled to steady the beam and stay upright. For the first time Perri got the full rage of the wind. The force was so strong, it kept driving her forward into the angry tangle of broken branches and siding. Dizzy with the heat blasting into her, she licked her lips and tasted the grit.
Thin wires of heat lightning streaked out of the south as the car’s overhead fight came on and Sam carefully squeezed through the door on the passenger’s side. They watched, anxious and helpless to assist, as he slowly battled his way through the barbed-wire fence and into the west pasture. Sam signaled forward at their shouts and headed briskly along the fence until he was in the clear. Matt grabbed Perri and in relief they tracked him from their side of the wire.
Illuminated by the one working headlight and Perri’s flashlight, Matt held the wire as Sam carefully worked his way through. The wind seemed to slow down around him, as if adjusting to a force equal to its own. Sam Ransom stood unbending and grimly eyed his damaged trees, his damaged car, his fallen iron arch and his obstructed road.
“Sam, talk to me!” Perri demanded, studying him under the beam of her flashlight “How are you?”
“Annoyed,” Sam said, leading them back for a closer look at the damage. “Annoyed about covers it, honey. We’re going to have to call the tree surgeon and get on his list.” Sam politely turned her hand so the flashlight shone into Matt’s sweating eyes instead of his own.
“He could care less that his car is wrecked, sweetheart,” Matt replied dryly. He blinked at the light and the grit in his eyes. “He’s just mad about his trees and a little peeved that he couldn’t outrun that arch.” Matt was more shaken than his father. It was obvious. He started hollering.
“You had to try and outrun it, didn’t you?” he demanded, ignoring the fact that he would have done the same thing. “You just had to prove you could. What if that thing had fallen faster? I have enough to worry about without having to cut you out of a car wreck.” There, he’d said it. “And do you mind telling me where the hell you’ve been?”
“I almost made it!” Sam countered. He ignored his shouting son and smiled at Perri. “I’d already committed myself to the turn when that arch started to go. There was nothing else to do but outrun that devil. And no,” he said, looking at Matt, then Perri. “I’m not going to the emergency room.”
Matt looked insulted. “Did I suggest such a thing?” he demanded. “Dad, why didn’t you call?”
The grit felt like all of the desert had lodged between her teeth. She hated the sound of it in her mouth. Perri flinched, her head jerking to the side when a slender branch turned vicious and slapped her hard across the jaw. The blow knocked her against a chunk of mangled siding. She cried out suddenly and was on her way down.
She had no chance to avoid the raw, jagged edge of a broken limb as it rolled under her feet. It happened fast. There was no time to recover before she was dragged down by the wind, caught in a lethal undercurrent.
Matt’s quick grab kept her from being impaled through the throat on an unyielding spike of broken limb. He pulled her up and back, carrying her away from the lethal mass that seemed almost alive with vengeance.
Then Matt wouldn’t let her go. If he could have pulled her inside him, it wouldn’t have been enough. He’d never had a chance to tell her he loved her.
Sam faced his son in a fury that rivaled the night. “What is she doing out in this?” he demanded. “Perri’s not dressed to be out here without losing half the skin off her legs just by standing still. You yourself wouldn’t come out dressed in shorts.” He pointedly eyed the bandanna tied around Matt’s neck.
“Come on back to the house with me,” Perri said, taking Sam’s arm, and the opportunity. She ignored her trembling. Matt tried to hold her even closer. “Since you won’t go to the hospital—”
“Honey, I’m fine,” Sam interrupted with a gesture that let her know to stay out of it. He turned to straighten out his son. “I’ll start clearing away what I can,” Sam declared in a low, dangerous tone. “See to your wife and make sure she calls her mother. I assured Janie you would take care of Perri. Now don’t make me a liar.”
“So that’s where you’ve been,” Matt said with sudden understanding, noting how sharp his father looked for a man who’d just crawled through a fence. Matt gently relaxed his hold on Perri and shook out his aching hand. He’d bent his thumb backward when he’d made the grab. Only now did the pain hasten through him.
He put physical pain and aching emotions aside as he knew he must. He dared not think about how he had almost lost her. The fear that had twisted through him since he’d heard Sam’s SOS, Matt buried deep. Now was not the time to start
sweating over what might have happened. There was work to be done; and deep emotions would just get in the way.
His dad was his old self. Perri was safe, sweltered in his arms from the wind. He had gotten to her in time. He would be content with that. Matt’s relief was faintly tinged with despair. He would let himself feel when he could. If he could.
Taking the flashlight from Perri, Sam started barking orders. “Get her to the house. Then check on the stock and come back here. Pronto. And Matt,” Sam whispered to his son’s back as Matt escorted his wife to the pickup, “don’t mess it up this time.”
By sunrise, the storm was played out.
Twelve
Matt must have watered, Perri thought. Obviously someone had cleared away the storm debris while she had slept. They hadn’t seen each other since Matt had driven her back to Gledhill sometime around dawn. He had ordered her to bed and headed back. Perri had barely had the opportunity to thank him for saving her life.
She’d headed straight for the shower. As she had breathed deeply, letting the shower’s warmth and moisture cleanse her lungs, Perri had started to shake. It had finally hit her how easily one of them could have been killed or seriously injured. She had welcomed the water stinging into the cuts on her legs. The sharp pain had alerted her to the fact that she was alive.
Perri had given thanks her family had made it through almost unscathed before falling into bed. What sleep she had gotten had been fretful. And she doubted Matt or Sam had been to bed yet
Now, she let the steamy scent of water on warm concrete ground her in the present like nothing else could. Remarkably, there was no evening wind. The sweet, damp smell of the honeysuckle, what was left of it, played around her. Water always intensified its lush quality. She looked forward to the time for rain.
She moved to the door and studied the dirt floor of the old barn in the light of evening. The earth seemed energized by its recent exposure to the sky. It glowed a dusty pink, shades lighter than the surrounding soil.
The Bridal Promise Page 19
