by Rosalyn West
He’d wed a very clever woman, but he wasn’t about to congratulate himself now.
He was too afraid he was about to lose her.
“Patrice,” he said, with a calm that belied the frantic pace of his heartbeat, “I’d be grateful if you’d see my wife to the station for me and make sure she gets off safely.”
“Of course I will.” Patrice rose, flashing him a knowing expression filled with sympathy and reassurance.
Then, to Starla, he said, “I trust you’ll at least allow me to see you to the door.”
He fought with his crutches, clumsy in his apprehensive rush. Starla reached out to take hold of them, twisting them the right way, steadying them until he could plant them under his arms. Her expression was carefully neutral. He followed her into the foyer, where they paused at the front door. Seeing that they were alone, Dodge pressed his case.
“Don’t go.”
Starla looked nervously over his shoulder and called, “Patrice, are you ready?” Then she gave a start as his fingertips grazed her cheek.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. Just don’t run away.”
She caught his hand in one of hers to still its caressing motion and pressed her other one to his lips to still words that would break her heart.
“You don’t have anything to apologize for.”
His fingers seized up around hers. “Tell me what I did wrong.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not you.” Her eyes began to burn as painfully as the back of her throat. “Patrice!”
“Don’t leave me.” That low, rough statement, made more as a command than a plea, nearly undid her. Then Patrice, her rescuer, appeared in the hallway, making it easier for her to smile flirtatiously and tap his cheek.
“Don’t be silly. It’ll only be a few days … a week at most.”
He said nothing. The intensity of his stare pierced her to her troubled soul. At the last moment, she put her arms around him, tunneling her face against the crisply starched folds of his shirtfront while her fingers threaded through the short hair at his nape. His hands settled judiciously just below her shoulder blades, resting firmly but without pressure until she chose to step back. She couldn’t look up at him before whirling toward the open door and whisking past Patrice into the night.
She was crying by the time she reached the buggy and dry-eyed again before Patrice joined her on the seat. Neither spoke until they’d pulled away from the tidy little house to whir through the streets of Pride. Then Patrice stopped holding her tongue.
“If you’re thinking of leaving him, so help me, I’ll strangle you right here and now.”
“I’m not.”
“Then why did you spring your little trip on him like a bear trap right in the middle of the pecan chicken?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
Patrice wasn’t taking any of her haughty airs. “You’re right about that. I don’t understand how you could tear the heart out of that man right in front of everyone and carry it off like a trophy that doesn’t mean a damned thing to you.”
“Patrice, I declare! Your language.”
“Never mind my language. How could you hurt and humiliate him like that?”
“And how could you take his side without hearing mine?”
“Because I know both of you. And I know Dodge is an honest, decent man who would lay down his life to keep a promise.”
“What does that make me?”
“I don’t know what to make of you, Starla; I never did. You play games with people’s emotions as if you had none of your own. And I won’t let you do that with Dodge. I care too much for him as a friend.”
“I thought I was your friend.”
Refusing to yield to Starla’s fragile tone, Patrice said, “He never lies to me. There’s no train going anywhere near Louisville tonight or tomorrow, or even the day after that.”
Starla said nothing. Her hands clenched the reins in shaking fists until Patrice put hers over them.
“Go back to him. Don’t run away. You can make things work out between you.”
“I’m not running away from him, Patrice—honestly. I do have something I have to take care of.”
“What? If you can’t tell him, at least tell me.”
“I can’t tell anyone. Not ever. Not ever!”
She dropped the reins to hide her face in her hands, and as the well-trained animal slowed and finally halted at the edge of the road, Patrice took her weeping friend into a comforting embrace.
“I’m sorry, Star. I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
Starla sniffed and rubbed at her eyes. “Everything makes me cry these days. Dodge says it’s the baby.” She said his name with such tenderness that Patrice was as confused as she was frustrated.
“Let him take care of you both, Starla. He’s got so much to give.”
But Starla straightened and picked up the reins. “There are some things he can’t take care of. I have to myself.” Dragging the horse’s head up and Snapping it into a brisk pace, she let the breeze finish drying her cheeks as she looked determinedly ahead.
Knowing Starla as she did, Patrice saw that the conversation was over. She was no closer to understanding what haunted her friend.
All night the southbound train clattered toward the Gulf Coast. Starla gave up on sleep. Each time she closed her eyes the image of Dodge’s stricken face was there to torment her. She hadn’t meant to hurt him; she’d had no choice. She couldn’t move ahead toward a life with Dodge with so much still pulling her back into the past. The stress of living on lies took a savage toll, pushing her out onto the thin wire of truth, where it became harder and harder to find a point of balance. She wanted Dodge to be that balance. She wanted him to be her future.
But first she had things to settle.
Her hand clutched at the crumpled letter delivered to her only that morning. The contents had rocked her world and sent her into a panicked scramble to recover what she could while concealing her motives from those who cared about her.
It tore at her heart not to tell them why she had to leave. But how could she, without revealing all?
Finally, exhaustion, coupled with the constant rocking of the rails, lulled her into a restless slumber from which she awoke to the thick scent of saltwater. New Orleans. Rumpled and sore, she claimed her scant baggage and found a rented hack to take her to the exotic French Quarter, to the Creole-style house set beneath shading live oak trees bearded in Spanish moss where she’d lived the last four years as Mrs. Stephen Fortun.
Walking in was like taking on another person’s life. The smells of chicory coffee and frying beignets were as familiar as the patois of hurried French coming from behind the servants’ stairs. As familiar as the sudden clomp of tiny feet on the hardwood landing overhead and the sweet voice crying out, “Mama!”
Chapter 13
Starla bent down to receive the hurtling impact of a three-year-old’s unconditional love. For a moment, with eyes squeezed tightly shut and heart opened wide, she felt all the loneliness she’d known in her lifetime wash away.
And just as quickly, the taint of guilt and unforgivable sin resurfaced to stain the purity of a mother’s emotions. She released the child and straightened.
“I declare, you’ve grown a foot since I last saw you. Stand back and let me have a good look.”
She gazed long and hungrily at the delicate child, who, with his huge green eyes and lanky black hair, and even with the softness of youth to hide the beautiful structure of his face, was so much like her brother it brought unexpected tears to her eyes. And she redoubled her determination that this innocent child grow up in the embrace of a normal family—feeling loved, special, and protected from evils no child should have to experience, let alone try to understand.
The way her little boy was trying to understand why his mama found it so difficult to hold him.
“Have you come to stay, Mama?”
She brushed lovingly at the rumpled
shoulders and sleeves of his coat, forcing words through the tender thickening in her throat. “Not for very long, I’m afraid. I have to go back soon.”
“Will you take me with you this time?”
She shuddered with the fracturing of her heart as she said, “We’ll see,” knowing he was too young to read the lie in those words or to recognize the pain in her eyes. Soon he would learn to see through her placating falsehoods and be cynical enough to doubt the seeming truths she told. That’s when he would truly begin to look like Tyler, when the happy trust in his uplifted gaze grew jaded with wariness—when he learned to hide his disappointment and tears behind an insincere smile.
These were the things she would teach her son, unless she decided soon what she would do.
“Christien, go find Grandmère and tell her I’ve come for a visit.”
Though reluctant to leave her, the child did as told. She watched him scramble up the stairs with a toddler’s energy that was more enthusiasm than coordination. A sad smile shaped her lips as the image blurred before her eyes.
“I love you, baby,” she whispered hoarsely.
Her welcome back into the Fortun household was as nonexistent as it had been when she’d arrived at its doorstep four years prior, on the arm of Stephen Fortun, a wealthy rice planter’s only son who’d announced her to his startled parents as his new bride. As quickly as he’d ensconced her in his family home, he was off to join his Louisiana regiment, not to return for three long years—leaving his mysterious young bride in the care of strangers, alone, and soon, they discovered, pregnant.
Stephen’s father, Robert Fortun, was thrilled to learn his legacy would continue. He treated Starla with a courtly politeness that couldn’t quite offset his wife’s chill hostility. For those three years Starla shared their home, but never their affection or acceptance. As Starla Fortun, she’d lived as a prosperous member of New Orleans society. Giving birth in the absence of her husband, she appeared a sad and intriguing figure, becoming one of the most sought-after belles of the city. But the enigmatic younger Mrs. Fortun entertained no company and kept to herself in the elegant house on Chartres Street. It was a quiet, contented life watching her son grow up—or at least, that’s how it appeared.
But her luck wasn’t to hold. Called home at the death of his father, Stephen Fortun returned from the battlegrounds a changed man. From that time until his self-destruction eight months later, Starla lived on the edge of a nightmare, one that truly began the day Stephen was buried and his inheritance passed to his son.
Starla didn’t care about the money; she hadn’t married Stephen for it, and, contrary to whispered rumors, she hadn’t hurried her husband to his death to claim it. What she did care about was their son, Christien. But what her widowed mother-in-law, Sally Fortun, cared about were the family name and the family fortune, and she was quick to strike to maintain both by fighting for custody of Christien against a woman she claimed was unfit to raise him.
Starla had never seen the battle coming and was unprepared for the clever woman’s vicious slanders. A member of high society, Sally Fortun could not let it be known that her only son had died at the hands of his own weakness for opium. Instead, she created a grand fiction that his wife’s continued infidelities had led the poor man, a war hero, to take his life in a fit of tragic despair. And such an unfaithful woman could not be allowed to raise her only surviving kin.
Help came to Starla in the guise of one of Stephen’s friends, Beau LeBlanc, an ambitious young lawyer she’d met at a soiree. His offer to aid her in the fight for Christien seemed too good to be true. She gave him her trust, her every confidence—and she’d been cruelly betrayed. The Fortun money had bought off LeBlanc’s honor and Starla had been forced to flee the city. That was when she’d discovered that LeBlanc’s treachery had not only stripped her of her child’s love but had filled her with another.
It was those two vipers, her mother-in-law and her lawyer, that she faced that day in the elegant parlor.
“It was wise of you to respond so quickly to my message,” LeBlanc began with a benign smile. Why had she never seen his shallow charm for what it was, a mask over raw and ruthless ambition?
“What do you want?” she asked without a trace of civility. She had no desire to pretend with these people. They meant to tear her child from her, and she refused to be polite about it.
“Why, what’s best for Christien, of course,” Sally cooed with false sincerity. “That’s all we’ve ever wanted. That’s why I’ve asked Monsieur LeBlanc to draw up papers that will resolve the matter of his future without any … shall we say, ugliness.”
“Let me see them.”
Starla’s heart went cold as she read the document, which, in professional jargon, stripped her of parental rights to her own son, giving custody of him, and thus control of his accompanying fortune, to his grandmother. With her signature attached, it would cover over all the unpleasant truths, all the nasty trickery, all the potential threats. All she had to do was sign, and four years of her life would disappear forever.
But Christien would be lost to her.
“We are not totally unsympathetic,” LeBlanc continued. “Mrs. Fortun has agreed to be quite generous. She’ll give you a thousand dollars for your inconvenience.”
Starla stared at them aghast and outraged. Her voice was a strained whisper. “Inconvenience? Is that what you call it?”
“Call it whatever you like,” Sally snapped. “Just take the money and get out.”
“Do you expect me to sell my child so cheaply?”
That surprised them. They sat back and exchanged glances.
“Give her two thousand,” Sally said at last. “Just get her to sign.”
“And what if I don’t want your money?” she countered.
LeBlanc smiled in the face of Starla’s challenge, proving he felt it was empty. “Take it, my dear, and count yourself lucky. The matter goes to court in thirty days. You can’t win; you know that. But you have everything to lose.” He let that linger, an undefined threat. Starla didn’t need him to spell it out for her. She knew what he was willing to do and say to win Christien from her. She carried proof of it.
“I need time to think.”
Sally’s patience ended. “You have until morning. Then the offer is rescinded.”
“Don’t force us to make trouble for you.” LeBlanc stated it plainly. “Take the money and have done with it. You’re a beautiful woman, Starla. It shouldn’t be hard for you to start over. What man could refuse you anything you wanted? And what other choice do you have?”
She shivered at the evidence of lust thickening his words. And she recoiled from the truth he spoke with such confidence.
What choice did she have?
As she looked down at her sleeping child, hating herself for not being able to embrace him without feeling the possible taint of his conception, she struggled for the right thing to do for Christien.
If he were to remain, she would have to sever all ties and claim to him. That was the only way to be sure LeBlanc wouldn’t attempt to exact revenge upon her. He was a vain creature who felt himself humiliated at her hands, and that made him dangerous and not above stooping to despicable means.
She knew that for a fact, and she was afraid.
But after knowing the abandonment of a mother’s love, how could she wish the same unhappiness upon her own child? Even within the opulent home Sally Fortun would provide for him, he would always recall that his mother had not cared enough or had not been strong enough to keep him at her side.
After nearly fifteen years, she still found herself wondering if it was somehow her fault that her own mother had run away, while alternately blaming the woman she could scarcely remember for leaving her to face a nightmare on her own. She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life knowing her son resented her.
She touched the boy’s head, threading her fingers through hair fine as silk. How could she leave him to his heartless grandmother? Yet how
equally difficult it was to take him with her to Kentucky. How could she win the right to Christien without revealing a truth that would forever damn him? Dodge would know the truth. In knowing it, would he take her back? Would he accept Christien?
The image of her husband’s smiling tolerance as his sister’s children climbed all over him warmed her heart with an ember of hope. Perhaps he had enough love to bestow upon this blameless boy. But how, then, would he treat her, knowing that she was guilty of a huge lie of omission when she said her vows without telling him everything?
Everything….
She withdrew her hand and scrubbed her palm against her skirts.
Was there enough love in anyone’s heart for a mother and child of their circumstances? How could she expect Dodge to forgive her when she couldn’t forgive herself?
The alternative was to take Christien and begin anew where no one knew them or would ever have reason to suspect their past. To leave her home, her family, her friends … her husband.
To escape the constant fear of someone finding out her secret and suffering for their disappointment.
A whore, just like your mother. Nothing but a lying whore….
She surged to her feet and paced the darkened room, the soft, sonorous sounds of her son’s breathing failing to comfort her. She had to get away from that voice, from feelings of being unclean and unworthy. And therein lay the conflict of heart and mind, the heart saying, “Go to your husband and confess your sins; trust him to forgive you and ask him to help,” and the quick, clever, self-preserving mind whispering, “Go to your husband’s accounts and take all you can to see you safely out of everyone’s reach. Only then can you and the boy be free and safe from the censure of those you love; then no one can hurt you.”
What am I going to do? she cried softly to the unresponsive night. But, deep in her heart, she knew the answer.
There was only one time when Dodge could remember ever feeling worse. That was when the shock of taking a bullet dulled enough for him to realize he couldn’t move his legs. That slashing panic and the certainty that nothing in his life would ever be the same was how he felt now. Only then, he’d hoped he would die, and now, he knew he was going to live.
