by Janet Dailey
"I had no intention of inviting them in," Valerie corrected. "In fact, Mickey was the one who invited Judd, not me."
"It's neither here nor there now," Clara muttered. "I'm going up to my room where I can have some privacy."
Valerie was about to say that she'd come along with her when Mickey appeared at the living room entrance. Clara scurried toward the staircase under his dancing look.
"I'll be up shortly," she called after Clara, then asked Mickey, "Did you want something?"
"I know you're tired and will be wanting to turn in, but will you have one small drink with us to the old man?" He wore his most beguiling expression as he raised an arm to show her he carried three glasses.
The haunting loneliness in his blue eyes told Valerie that he truly missed her grandfather and wanted to share his sense of loss with someone who had been close to Elias Wentworth. Her glance flickered uncertainly toward the study where Judd waited.
"Very well," she agreed, and wondered whether she was a sentimental fool or a masochist.
Judd's back was to the door, his attention focused on the framed pictures of thoroughbred horses that covered one paneled wall of the study. Valerie tried not to notice the way he pivoted sharply when she and Mickey entered, or the almost physical thrust of his gaze on her. She walked to the leather-covered armchair, its dark brown color worn to patches of tan on the seat and arms.
"I've got the glasses," Mickey announced. "All we need is the brandy." He walked to the stained oak desk and opened a bottom drawer. "Up until a few years ago Eli used to keep his liquor locked up in the safe."
Valerie's fingers curved into the leather armrest at Mickey's unwitting reminder of her past misdeeds. Her grandfather had kept it locked away to prevent her from drinking it. To this day, she didn't understand why she had done it. She hadn't liked the taste of alcohol and had usually ended up getting sick.
"Eli never touched a drop himself," Mickey went on as he held the bottle up to see how much was in it. "He was an alcoholic when he was younger. He told me once that it wasn't until after his wife died that he gave up drinking for good." He poured a healthy amount of brandy into the first water glass.
"Only a little for me," said Valerie, understanding at last why her grandfather had been so violently opposed to drinking.
"Eli swore he kept liquor in the house purely for medicinal reasons." When he reached the third glass, Mickey poured only enough brandy in to cover the bottom. "Personally, I think he kept it on hand to befuddle the brains of whoever came to buy a horse from him."
Picking up two of the glasses, Mickey carried the one with the smallest portion to Valerie and handed the other to Judd. Judd took a seat on the worn leather-covered sofa that was a match to her chair. Mickey completed the triangle by hoisting himself onto the desk top, his short legs dangling against the side.
"To Eli." Judd lifted his glass in a toast.
"May he rest in peace," Mickey added, and drank from his glass. Valerie sipped her brandy, the fiery liquid burning her tongue and throat, conscious that Judd's gaze seldom wavered from her. "Yeah, old Eli never smoked or drank," Mickey sighed, and stared at his glass. "They say a reformed hellion is stricter—and he sure was with you, Valerie. I remember the time he caught you with a pack of cigarettes. I thought he was going to beat the livin' tar out of you."
"I caused him a lot of grief when I was growing up." She lifted her shoulders in a dismissing shrug.
"You were a chip off the old block," the ex-jockey insisted with a smile, countering her self-criticism. "Besides, you gave him a lot of pleasure these last years." His comment warmed her. "Remember how Eli was, Judd, whenever he got a letter from her?"
"Yes," Judd answered quietly.
At his affirmative reply, her gaze swung curiously to him. "Did you visit granddad? I don't remember that you came over when I was still living here."
He rotated his glass in a circle, swirling the brandy inside. He seemed to be pretending an interest in the liquor while choosing how to word his answer.
"Your grandfather had a yearling filly that I liked the looks of a few years ago. Her bloodline wasn't bad, so I offered to buy her," Judd explained with a touch of diffidence. "After a week of haggling back and forth, we finally came to an agreement on the price. It was the first time I really became acquainted with Eli. I like to think that we had a mutual respect for each other."
"After that, Judd began stopping by once or twice a month," Mickey elaborated. "Your granddad would get out his letters from you and tell anybody who would listen how you were."
Apprehension quivered through Valerie that Judd might have seen what she wrote. Of course, she had never told her grandfather the identity of Tadd's father, not even in the letters. Not that she eared whether Judd knew, but she didn't like the idea that he might have read the personal letters intended only for her grandfather. Mickey's next statement put that apprehension to rest.
"He never actually read your letters aloud, but he'd tell what you said. All the time he'd be talking, he'd be holding the envelope with your letter inside it and stroking it like it was one of his horses."
"I wish…I could have seen him before he died." But she hadn't thought she would be welcomed.
"I wanted to call you when he was in the hospital," Mickey told her. "But Eli told me that in your last letter you'd said you and your husband were going to take a Caribbean cruise. I didn't know he was so sick or I would have got in touch with you anyway."
"On a cruise?" Valerie frowned.
"That's what he said," Mickey repeated.
"I didn't go on any cruise," she denied before she realized that it was another story her grandfather had made up.
"Maybe he got your letters confused," he suggested. "He kept them all, every one of them. He hoarded them like they were gold. He carried them around with him until they stuck out of the pockets of his old green plaid jacket like straw out of a scarecrow."
"He did?" Valerie was bemused by the thought. The idea that he treasured her letters that much made her forgive him for making up those stories about her.
"He sure did. As a matter of fact, they're all still in his jacket." Mickey hopped down from his perch on the desk and walked to the old armoire used as a storage cabinet for the farm records. The green plaid jacket hung on a hook inside the wooden door. "Here it is, letters and all."
As he walked over to her, Mickey began gathering the letters from the various pockets, not stopping until there were several handfuls on her lap. Some of the envelopes had the yellow tinge of age, but all of them were worn from numerous handlings.
Setting her brandy glass down, Valerie picked up one envelope that was postmarked five years ago. She turned it over, curious to read the letter inside, but the flap of the envelope was still sealed. A cold chill raced through her.
"No?" Her cry was a sobbing protest of angry and hurt disbelief. She raced frantically through the rest of the envelopes. All were sealed. None of the letters had ever been read. "No! No! No!" She sobbed out bitter, futile denials of a truth too painful to accept.
"What is it?" Mickey was plainly confused.
"What's wrong?" Judd was standing beside her chair. He reached down and took one of the envelopes. "Look at it!" Valerie challenged through her tears.
When he turned it over and saw the sealed flap that had no marks of ever having been opened, his darkly green, questing gaze sliced back to her. In each of her hands she held envelopes in the same unopened condition. Her fingers curled into them, crumpling them into her palms. In agitation she rose from the chair, letting the letters in her lap fall to the floor. She stared at the ones in her hands.
"It isn't fair!" In a mixture of rage and pain, Valerie cast away the envelopes in her hands. She began shaking uncontrollably, her fingers still curled into fists. "It isn't fair?"
Scalding tears burned hot trails down her cheeks. The emotion-charged feelings and tempers maturity had taught her to control broke free of the restraints to erupt
in a stormy display.
"Valerie!" Judd's quieting voice had the opposite effect.
The instant his hands gripped her shoulders and turned her around, she began pummeling his shoulders with her fists. Sobbing in earnest, she was like the tigress he had once called her, with tawny hair and topaz eyes, wounded and lashing out from the hurt.
"He never opened them. He never read any of my letters," she sobbed in frustration and anguish.
Indifferent to the hands on her waist, she pounded Judd's shoulders, hitting out at the only solid object in the vicinity. Her crying face was buried in his shirtfront, moistening it and the lapel of his jacket.
Somewhere on the edge of her consciousness she was aware of concerned voices, Mickey's and Clara's. Only one penetrated and it came from Judd.
"Let her cry. She needs the release."
After that, there was only silence and the heart-tearing sounds of her own sobbing. When the violence within subsided, she cried softly for several minutes more. Her hands stopped beating at the indestructible wall of muscle and clutched the expensive material of Judd's jacket instead. His arms were around her, holding her closely in silent comfort. Gradually she began to regain her senses, but there were still things that needed to come out.
Lifting her head far enough from his chest to see the buttons of his shirt, she sniffed, "He hated me." Her voice was hoarse and broken as she wiped the wetness from her cheek with a scrubbing motion of her hand.
"I'm sure he didn't," Judd denied.
"Yes, he did." Valerie bobbed her head, a caramel curtain of rippling hair falling forward to hide her face. "He couldn't stand the thought of having me as a granddaughter, so he made up a fictitious one, complete with stories about marriage and vacation cruises. It was all lies!"
His hand raked the hair from one cheek and tilted her face up for his glittering study. "What are you saying?" he demanded with tight-lipped grimness.
Golden defiance flashed in her eyes, a defiance for convention and her grandfather. "I work for a living. I couldn't afford a trip on a rowboat. I'm not married—I never have been. Tadd is his great-grandchild, but without the legitimacy of a marriage license."
"Damn you!" His head came down, his mouth roughly brushing across a tear-dampened cheek to reach her lips. "I've been going through hell wondering how I was going to keep my hands off somebody else's wife." He breathed the savagely issued words into her mouth. "And all the time you weren't even married!"
The hungry ferocity of his kiss claimed her lips, devouring their fullness. Her battered emotions had no defenses against his rapacious assault and he fed on her weakness. She was dragged into the powerful undercurrent of his passion, then swept high by the response of her own senses. The flames of carnal longing licked through her veins to heat her flesh. This consuming fire fused her melting curves to the iron contours of his male form. Not content with the domination of her lips, Judd ravaged her throat and the sensitive hollows below her ears.
His hand moved slowly down her back, unzipping her dress, but when the room's air touched the exposed skin, it was the cool breath of sanity that she had needed. She pushed out of his arms and took a quick step away, stopping with her back to him. She was trembling from the force of the passion he had so easily aroused.
At the touch of his hand on her hair, Valerie stiffened, Judd brushed the long toffee mane of hair aside. His warm breath caressed her skin as he bent to kiss the ultrasensitive spot at the back of her neck, and desire quivered through her.
"You're right, Valerie." His fingers teased her spine as he zipped up her dress. "This isn't the time nor the place, not with your grandfather's funeral tomorrow."
"As if you give a damn?" Her voice wavered under the burning weight of resentment and bitterness. She dredged up the parting phrase she had used seven years ago. "Go to hell, Judd Prescott?"
She closed her eyes tightly as she heard his footsteps recede from her. When she opened them they were dry of tears and she was alone. A few minutes later Clara came slopping into the room in her furry slippers.
"Are you all right now?" she questioned.
Valerie turned, breathing in deeply and nodding a curt, "Yes, I'm fine." The letters were still scattered on the linoleum floor, and she stooped to pick them up. "Granddad never opened them, Clara."
"That doesn't mean anything. He kept them, didn't he? So he must have felt something for you," her friend reasoned, "otherwise he would have burned them."
"Maybe." But Valerie was no longer sure.
"What did Prescott have to say?" Clara bent awkwardly down on her knees to help Valerie collect the scattered envelopes.
"Nothing really. I told him I wasn't married and that Tadd was illegitimate, so he knows granddad was lying all this time," she replied with almost frightening calm.
"Did you tell him he was Tadd's father? Is that why he left in such a freezing silence?"
"No. He never asked who Tadd's father was. I'm just a tramp to him. I doubt if he even believes I know who the father is," she said, releasing a short bitter laugh. The postmark of one of the envelopes in her hand caught her eye. It was dated two days after Tadd's birth, unopened like the rest of them. "If granddad never opened any of my letters, how did he know about Tadd?"
Clara stood up, making a show of straightening the stack of envelopes she held. "I phoned him a couple hours after Tadd was born. I thought he should know he had a great-grandson."
"What…did he say?" Valerie unconsciously held her breath.
Clara hesitated, then looked her in the eye. "He didn't say anything. He just hung up." The flickering light of hope went out of Valerie's eyes. "I was talking to Mickey today," Clara went on. "It wasn't until a year after Tadd was born that he told everybody he had a great-grandchild."
"I suppose so there was a decent interval between the time I supposedly was married and Tadd was born," Valerie concluded acidly. "Damn!" she swore softly and with pain. "Now all of them think Tadd is five years old instead of six."
"I know it hurts." Clara's brisk voice tried to offer comfort. "But, in his way, I think your grandfather was trying to keep people from talking bad about you."
"I'm not going to live his lies!" Valerie flashed.
"You don't have to, but I wouldn't suggest going around broadcasting the truth, either," the other woman cautioned. "You might be able to thumb your nose at the gossip you'd start, but there's Tadd to consider."
Valerie released a long breath in silent acknowledgement of her logic. "Where's Mickey?" she asked.
"He went out to the barn, said there was a place for him to sleep there where he could be close to the horses," Clara answered.
"I'm tired, too." Valerie felt emotionally drained, her energy sapped. Exhaustion was stealing through her limbs. She handed the letters to Clara, not caring what she did with them, and walked toward the stairs.
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Chapter Four
A BEE BUZZED LAZILY around the wreath of flowers lying on the coffin and a green canopy shaded the mourners from the glare of the sun. Valerie absently watched the bee's wanderings. Her attention had strayed from the intoning voice of the minister.
At the "Amen," she lifted her gaze and encountered Judd's steady regard. Her pulse altered its regular tempo before she glanced away. The graveside service was over and the minister was approaching her. Valerie smiled politely and thanked him, words and gestures that she repeated to several others until she was facing Judd.
"It was good of you to come." She offered him the same stilted phrase.
His carved bronze features were expressionless as he inclined his head in smooth acknowledgement. A dancing breeze combed its fingers through his black hair as he drew her attention to the woman at his side, ushering her forward.
"I don't believe you've met my mother, Valerie," he said. "This is Valerie Wentworth." An inbred old-world courtesy prompted him to introduce the younger to the elder first. "My mother, Maureen Prescott."
"How do you do, Mrs. Prescott." Valerie shook the white-gloved hand, her gaze curiously skimming the woman who had given birth to this man.
Petitely built, she had black hair with startling wings of silver at the temples. Her eyes were an unusual shade of turquoise green, not as brilliant as her son's nor as disconcerting. She was attractive, her face generally unlined. She conveyed warmth where her son revealed cynicism. Valerie decided that Maureen Prescott was a genteel woman made of flexible steel.
"Judd was better acquainted with your grandfather than I, but please accept my sincere sympathies," the woman offered in a pleasant, gentle voice.
"Thank you." Valerie thawed slightly.
"If there's anything you need, please remember that we're your neighbors." A smile curved the perfectly shaped lips.
"I will, Mrs. Prescott," she nodded, knowing it was the last place she would go for assistance.
Others were waiting to speak to her and Judd didn't attempt to prolong the exchange with her. As he walked his mother toward the line of cars parked along the cemetery gates, Valerie's gaze strayed after them, following their progress.
When the last of those waiting approached her, Valerie almost sighed aloud. The strain of hearing the same words and repeating the same phrases in answer was beginning to wear on her nerves.
She offered the man her hand. "It was kind of you to come," she recited.
"I'm Jefferson Burrows," he said, as if the name was supposed to mean something to her. Valerie looked at him without recognition. He was of medium height, in his early fifties, and carried himself with a certain air of authority. "I was your grandfather's attorney," he explained.
"I'm pleased to meet you, Mr. Burrows." She kept hold of her fraying patience.
"This is not perhaps the proper time, but I was wondering if I might arrange to see you tomorrow," he said.
"I'll probably be fairly busy tomorrow. You see, I stored many of my personal things at my grandfather's, childhood mementoes, et cetera," she explained coolly. "I planned to sort through them tomorrow and I'll be loving the day after to return to Cincinnati. Was it important?"
