GABE WONDERED what had come over Tess. It wasn’t like her to get so down in the mouth, especially not during a party. She’d hid it well, and he didn’t think anyone else had noticed. But he’d watched her closely and something was definitely bothering her.
Half a dozen times he’d started to ask her what was wrong, but he’d always stopped. She wore a hands-off sign as obvious as the bow around Rosie’s neck.
He was willing to wait her out until she up and sneaked away. Once he realized she’d disappeared from the festivities, he knew he had to track her down. Because Andrew had been hugging on her, Gabe approached him first. “What’s the matter with Tess?”
“What do you mean?” He tried to look surprised, but he couldn’t manage it.
“She’s upset. Why?”
Andrew wouldn’t meet Gabe’s eyes. He did, however, keep his lips zipped tight, so Gabe turned to Twinkle next. “Where is Tess?”
She glanced around and frowned. “Oh, dear. I was afraid of this.”
“Afraid of what? What’s the matter with her?”
He startled in surprise when she reached up and grasped his chin, then pulled his face around so she could look into his eyes. She studied him long and hard, and Gabe felt as if she peered straight into his heart.
Maybe there was something to this crystal ball stuff of hers after all.
Abruptly, she gave a satisfied nod. “She’s more to you than just your past isn’t she?”
Gabe drew a deep breath, then let out the air in a rush. “Actually, I’m hoping she’ll be my future.”
“Then go to her, Gabe. Go to her and make her tell you what happened. She can’t be yours until she does. But I caution you to be gentle with her. These moods don’t come on her often, but when they do, she isn’t herself. She’s fragile. Make sure you keep that in mind.”
The warning sounded ominous. “Where do you think she went? Up Paintbrush Mountain? Lookout Peak?”
Twinkle thought about it a moment, then shook her head. “Try her house first. Knowing her, you’ll find her up in the loft. She keeps a trunk up there, and I bet my orange turban that’s where she went.”
The orange was Twinkle’s favorite. Gabe would start with the house. Sure enough, he found her seated on the floor, folded squares of cloth of some sort in her lap. “What is the matter? What’s wrong, darlin’?”
She looked up at him then and he saw an ocean of grief floating in her eyes. “Her scent is gone. It stayed for a time, but it’s all gone now. All gone. Oh, Gabe, I miss her so much.”
He knelt beside her and took one of her hands in both of his. “Miss who?”
“Rachel. Rachel Elizabeth.” As tears overflowed her eyes to slip down her cheek, she added, “She was our daughter, Gabe.”
Everything inside him froze. “Daughter? I have a daughter? Where is she?”
“She was born too early, and she wasn’t strong. She couldn’t fight hard enough. But she tried. Oh, she tried so hard. I had her two weeks before I lost her.”
Baby clothes. Those were baby clothes packed away in that trunk. Gabe dropped her hand and sat back on his heels. He dragged a hand down his face as he tried to comprehend what she had told him.
A baby. A little girl.
Dead.
“Oh, God.” He worked to draw a breath.
Tess gently unfolded one of the squares in her lap. It was a gown. A tiny little pink baby sacque.
“She was so beautiful,” Tess said, her smile bittersweet. “A full head of hair. It was red, Gabe. She had a tiny little head just full of red hair. There was this place…” She tilted her head to one side and pointed at a spot. “It was a swirl, a little nebula of downy red hair. Her eyes were blue, of course. All baby’s eyes are blue when they’re born. But Rachel’s didn’t muddy. They were still true blue when she died.”
Gabe flinched at the word.
“She didn’t have any eyelashes that you could see, but she did have all her fingers and all her toes.” Tess stared at the tip of her finger, using her thumb to mark a spot not even halfway down her index finger. “Her entire hand was hardly bigger than this. It never had the chance to grow any larger. Her voice was little, too. A tiny kitten voice. It broke my heart. I used to worry so when I heard her cry, but at the same time I worried she wouldn’t. One day she didn’t.”
Shit. Shit. Shit. Gabe rocked back and forth. His feet went numb from sitting on them. His whole body was numb. A baby. A daughter. A death.
Tess suddenly set aside the baby clothes and went digging in the trunk. She removed a gold locket that dangled from a chain. She held it out to him saying, “I saved a lock of her hair. You can see the color.”
His hand trembling like a palsied old man, Gabe reached for the necklace. He didn’t open it. He couldn’t.
“And I have a portrait,” Tess continued, returning her attention to the trunk. “I usually save it to look at last. It’s not a painting, just a charcoal drawing the doctor’s wife did for me. She was something of an artist, and I think he must have told her Rachel wouldn’t live long because she showed up with a sketch pad when Rachel was three days old.”
She withdrew a folded photographer’s mat from the trunk and tried to hand it to him. He wouldn’t take it. He still hadn’t opened the locket. Forcing the word through the noose of emotion strangling his throat, Gabe spoke for the first time since Tess told him he’d once been a father. “No.”
She straightened her arm, holding it right in his face. Silently demanding.
“No,” he repeated, staring with something akin to horror at the folder. This news had slain him. He had to prepare himself.
“Yes,” she hissed, leaning toward him. “Yes, you will, Gabe Cameron.”
His gaze flew up to meet hers and what he saw there took him aback. Her eyes were glittering blue diamonds, hard and cutting and filled with fury. Her voice trembled with the force of her emotions. “You will look at her and you will listen of her and you will touch her things and do everything you should have done eleven years ago. You weren’t there for her when she needed you. You weren’t there. She needed you. We needed you. You weren’t there!”
She swung her hand and slapped him.
Before he could absorb the blow, she threw herself into his arms. She clutched the portrait to her heart as grief poured out. She wept violently, passionately; her bereavement a bitter, inconsolable despair.
And Gabe couldn’t breathe. Something was crushing his chest. He panted, trying to… survive.
Oh, God. A baby. A daughter.
He hadn’t been there.
How long Tess cried he couldn’t say. It might have been minutes or days for all he knew. He held her until the storm of tears rained itself out, and she fell into an exhausted slumber in his arms. And then he continued to hold her.
Eleven damned years too late.
TESS AWOKE at sunset. She was in her own room, tucked into her bed. Her body felt battered, but her mind and her soul were at peace.
Then she turned her head and saw her husband.
He sat in the hardwood rocker staring out the window. Rachel’s picture lay in his lap. He held the locket the chain looped around his right hand, his thumb stroking the pendant.
His face looked ravaged.
Tess closed her eyes, haunted by the sight. Shame nipped at her, its teeth razor-sharp. She’d been cruel in the telling of it. Cruel with her accusations and omissions. She’d shared only the bad and none of the good.
Bedsheets rustled as she slid to a sitting position. While she searched her mind for the right words with which to begin. “Gabe, I’ve tried to tell you a number of times.”
He cut her off with a question. “Why was Rachel born early?”
“The doctor said it sometimes happens that way when a woman…”
“When a woman what?” he prodded, his expression stark, his sorrow so raw it bled from his voice. “Is all alone? Has no man around to help her?”
“Gabe, I—”
; “Your father threw you out because you were carrying, didn’t he? Because she was my baby. He hated me because of how Billy died, so he hated you, too.”
She nodded.
He shut his eyes. “God, Tess. Your father was as worthless as mine.” Then he let out a chuckle that sent shivers racing down her spine. “And I’m as worthless as Monty Cameron. Like father, like son. I followed in the old man’s footsteps without even knowing it.”
“No, Gabe,” she protested her fists clutching at the bedcovers. “I’m sorry I said what I did earlier. I’m sorry I slapped you. It wasn’t your fault you weren’t there. You would have been had you known. I know that; I knew it then. It was wicked of me to accuse you like that. It was the grief talking. I get that way sometimes and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I told you about Rachel in that way. You deserved better.”
He spat an oath. “Not my fault? You mean like it wasn’t my father’s fault he left my mother to die giving birth in a swamp? Where did you give birth, Tess? Out here in the Chihuahuan Desert?” He lifted Rachel’s picture and asked, “Where did my baby die?”
She chose her words carefully. “I think this would be easier for me…for us both…if I started this story from the beginning.”
He stood and walked toward her, placed the picture and pendant carefully on the bed. Then, without speaking he turned away and returned to the rocker where he sat, resting his elbows on his knees, his hands loosely clasped. He stared at the ground, his entire being braced as if anticipating a blow. “Let’s hear it.”
“You already know the worst of it,” she said softly. “Nothing I have to say will be any worse than hearing about Rachel.”
He shrugged in reply. Tess took a deep breath and began. “As you know, after Billy’s funeral my father invited me back to the Rolling R. When he found out I was getting sick in the mornings, he guessed the truth. His fury caught me by surprise. He was so full of hate. He said no Cameron spawn would ever get a hand on anything that should have belonged to Billy. He cursed the Cameron name. Cursed me.”
Gabe’s features hardened like mortar. “Did he hurt you? Hit you?”
She shook her head. “He wasn’t physical. Not much anyway. Nothing more than a shove or two.”
Gabe’s grip on his hands tightened, his knuckles growing white with the strain.
Tess pressed on. “The problem was, he sent me away without any money. All I had was what you and I had saved in our biscuit tin at home.”
“That couldn’t have been much more than forty dollars.”
“Twenty-seven fifty, to be exact.”
He turned his head away from her, staring out the window. “So how did you get by?”
“The first couple months were all right. I was careful with what I spent and the townspeople were kind. I took in some sewing and got by. Then the rumors started.”
“Rumors?”
Tess debated how much to tell him. On the one hand, he didn’t need to know all the details, but on the other…well…it might make the going easier if he knew just how much Doc had helped her. “Word got around town that I was whoring.”
“What?”
“My father made it known that he’d disowned me. Do you remember Lester Woods at the Rolling R? I’ve always believed he was the one who started the talk. He came by our cabin one day with a wicked glint in his eyes. I sent him on his way. Shortly after that, word got around that I was supposedly making my living on my back. Men took to coming around night and day. It became rather…ugly. Someone burned me out.”
Across the small bedroom, Gabe sucked in a harsh breath. “They burned our home?”
She nodded. The horror of those old memories washed over her, forcing her to collect herself before continuing the tale. “The following day the sheriff came around and suggested I move on to another town where I could make a fresh start. He gave me twenty dollars and a stage ticket west. I got lucky when we arrived at a stagecoach inn only to find the owner’s wife had traveled back East for a family visit and the cook had quit the day before. I got the job and that lasted for almost three months until the wife returned.”
Gabe lurched from his chair and started pacing, a panther on the prowl. Or a man trying desperately to run from the reality of the past.
“After that is when I had a run of bad luck. I took a job as a seamstress in San Antonio. One of the other employees resented me and…well…to make a long story short, I ended up in jail charged with theft.”
He braced both hands against a wall at shoulder level, his head hanging, one knee bent, his weight resting on the other leg. He gave the appearance of an animal in pain, and Tess hated to continue, but she knew she must. Better to cauterize a wound quickly. “They didn’t listen to me when I tried to explain what had happened. I was in jail for six weeks.”
Gabe reared back and put his fist through the plaster wall, his curses steady, low, and furious.
Tess shook her head at the sight of his scraped and bleeding knuckles. “Now what good did that do, might I ask?” she said, getting up to wet a cloth from the pitcher of water on her bedside table. She crossed over to him, intending to tend his hand, but he flinched away from her. “Don’t. Don’t bother.”
“But you need—”
He yanked the cloth away from her and wrapped his hand. “Finish it, Tess. Tell me everything.”
“Why?” she replied angrily. “So you can run off and break your leg next? I’m not doing this to hurt you, Gabe, and I won’t have you hurting yourself, either.”
He clenched his jaw and said, “Fine.”
She sighed heavily. “Don’t lock up on me now. I want you to listen hard to what I have to tell you next.”
“I’m listening.”
Like a man headed to the gallows, she thought. Fine, then. I’ll give him the noose and we’ll see what he does with it.
“I was in jail when Doc found me. He’d been looking for me, trailing me across Texas. He convinced the other seamstress to confess to the theft, got me released from jail, then found a house to rent and a doctor to monitor my pregnancy.”
As she spoke, Tess watched him grow tense, his body going stiff like wet rawhide drying beneath the desert sun. But she was determined to mention every single thing Doc had done for her. Gabe needed to hear them.
She continued “Doc stayed with me, took care of me. When I went into labor, he went for the doctor. In those first few minutes following Rachel’s birth when she almost died and the doctor was busy saving my own life, Doc tended Rachel and pulled her through the crisis. He was there for me that night and the night she died. When I felt so sad afterward and wanted to give up and die myself, he reminded me of all the good things I had to live for. He wrote off and got me the fellowship with Dr. Pierce, then saw us safely to Europe. When it was time, he brought us home and found us a place to settle, a place to build a home.”
“What a paragon,” he drawled. “So what will he think to learn you’ve been bedding down with me, Tess? Do I need to watch my back?”
With a penetrating stare, Tess studied her husband. He was good at hiding his emotions, but when she looked past the gray glaciers that were his eyes she saw flickers of what he was feeling. Fury and jealousy. Shame and self-contempt. It was time to finish it. Time to finish so the healing could begin.
Her mouth as dry as the Chihuahuan in summer, she drew a deep breath and said, “He is a treasure. I never would have made it without Doc.”
“He took the place of your husband.”
“In a manner of speaking, he did. He filled in for you. For you, Gabe. Everything he did for me, he was doing for you.”
“Oh yeah? I can’t wait to hear how you’re gonna reason this one out.”
“You’ve never asked his last name.” She waited, watching, hoping he’d work his way to the truth himself. But from the set of his jaw and the steel in his stance, she realized he wasn’t thinking, simply absorbing. That and waiting for the next blow.
She hoped the last one wouldn’t fe
ll him.
Tess licked her lips, then said, “Doc stood in for you like any good father would do. Like any good father and grandfather.”
His gaze jerked up to meet hers then, his eyes round and glittering. Like an animal caught in torchlight.
“Yes, Gabe,” she said. “Doc is the name we call Monty Cameron. Doc is your father.”
CHAPTER 11
FOR THREE DAYS TESS watched the canyon trail waiting for Gabe to come home. For three nights she studied the Kissing Stars, wishing she believed in their supernatural powers like her friends so she could ask them to lead her husband back to where he belonged. With her.
He’d left without a word once she told him the truth about Doc. He’d left, fled, before she could confess her last secret, the one that might have soothed some of his pain.
As the first day passed and then the second, she came to believe events had worked out for the best. As much as she loved him, if Gabe wanted to be part of her life, part of her family, then he must reconcile with Doc. She refused to turn her back on the man who’d walked with her through fire.
Then, too, she had her more selfish reason for keeping the last bit of news to herself. She loved her husband and she wanted his love in return. She wanted him to want her. And she needed to trust in the knowledge that he wanted her as much as he wanted what she could give him.
The fact that she had intended to tell him and was prevented from doing so by his flight assuaged any guilt she might have felt for deciding to keep her secret a little while longer. “Not that it makes any difference,” she grumbled “The man might never come back.”
Tess turned her attentions to her studies, once again using astronomy to distract her from the mess of her personal life. Early on the fourth afternoon as she left her star shed carrying the Birr Castle notebook containing her notes on stellar parallax, she noted the rider making his way down the trail into the canyon.
The Kissing Stars Page 18
