Everything bad…all the terrible things that happened years ago were happening again.
Rage burned straight through his heart and consumed his very soul.
And at that moment a vibrant truth flared to life inside him, so bright, so strong he shook with its intensity.
“No way in hell,” he seethed aloud. “No way in hell, Theodosia!”
He stormed toward her. “It’s my baby, too, got that?”
His shout thundered through her. Confusion fairly overcame her. “Roman—”
“You are not giving the baby to your sister!”
“What?” Her mind spinning, she stepped backward until the backs of her legs hit the bed.
You are not giving the baby to your sister! His words shouted through her endlessly, and her heart skipped so many beats, she felt sure she would collapse and die.
Did he want her and the child? Would he tell her he loved her? Would he many her, take her to his ranch, and give her a dozen more children?
Her chest tightened in anticipation of what he would next say.
“Judging by the look on your face,” Roman growled, “I don’t think you understand. Let me put it to you straight. I want my baby, Theodosia!”
She stared at him so hard that everything else in the room disappeared from her vision. He said he wanted the baby.
He had not said that he wanted her.
She’d never known such heartache could exist. No longer could she resist her tears; they streamed down her cheeks and quickly dampened the front of her dress.
“Your tears don’t move me,” Roman snapped. “If giving a baby to your precious sister means that much to you, then you can get with child again after you’ve given me my baby. Hell, you can have a dozen kids for Lillian, but the one you carry now is mine!”
He spun on his heel and strode to the door. “We’re staying right here in Willow Patch until my baby is born,” he continued vehemently. “After the birth, you can go to Brazil and study beetle spit for the rest of your life for all I care, but you are leaving my baby with me!”
Yanking the door open, he continued to glare at her. “I’m going to find a place where we can live for the next eight or nine months, or however long it is before the baby comes. I’m also going to see the town doctor and find out when he can see you. Nothing’s going to happen to my child, got that? I’m going to watch you every second until I have my baby in my arms. After that, you’re free to do whatever the hell it is you want to do.”
He stepped into the corridor, then turned to face her again. “If you leave this room, I’ll hunt you down, Theodosia,” he warned. “No matter where you go, I’ll find you.”
He slammed the door.
Theodosia’s knees buckled. She fell to the bed behind her. For a moment she sat frozen, then began to shiver uncontrollably. As if someone were stabbing at her skin with sharp icicles.
Her hands felt so cold as she cupped them over her face. Not even her hot tears warmed them.
Why do you not love me, Roman?
She didn’t know what to do.
Yes, she did know what to do.
She wanted to stay with Roman. In the house he found for them in Willow Patch. And during the coming months, she realized, her love for him would deepen and fill her with the greatest of joy.
No, she would leave Willow Patch, now, while he was gone, before her love for him deepened and filled her with the deepest of sorrow.
He didn’t want her.
Where would she go?
Anywhere, and when she got there, she would decide where to go. What to do.
On trembling legs, she stood and shuffled to the window. There in the street below she saw Roman lead Secret out of the livery stable. Even from where she stood at the window, she could see his terrible frown. He mounted, urged his stallion forward, and galloped out of town.
Dust and speed and rage swirled all down the street.
He’d be back.
“I love you,” she whispered.
The breath of her farewell left a large foggy circle on the windowpane. With the tip of her finger, she wrote Roman’s name in the mist. Sunlight burst through the humid letters, then dried them.
And right before Theodosia’s eyes, Roman’s name disappeared.
Roman stalked into the Willow Patch mercantile and ordered provisions for traveling.
“Goin’ on a trip?” the shop owner asked while gathering the articles of his customer’s order.
Roman didn’t feel like being friendly. He gave a stiff nod, then turned his back on the man.
Dammit! he raged. After three hours of searching, he hadn’t found a single house for rent in or anywhere around Willow Patch. The boarding house had rooms available, but the lady who ran the establishment sheltered a cluster of whores beneath its roof. The thought of Theodosia living in such a squalid place sickened him.
They’d have to move on to another town, one in which he might be able to find a house to rent during the coming months.
“Here you are,” the shopkeeper said when he’d finished piling the supplies on the counter.
Roman turned back around, withdrew a wad of money from his pocket, and peeled off several bills. While waiting for the mercantile owner to count out his change, he stared absently at the merchandise on display inside the glass-topped counter.
He saw a highly polished violin, a crystal wineglass, and a pair of sterling silver candlestick holders. A gold calling-card case with the name Alfred Chippers engraved upon it twinkled up at him, as well as a small emerald ring and a brooch.
Roman frowned. Then narrowed his eyes. Then clenched his fists.
The brooch. A heart-shaped ruby, and from its bottom dangled fragile gold chains.
Theodosia was gone. She’d sold the pin and left town.
Fury tightened around him like a thorny vine.
“Purty, ain’t it?” the shopkeeper said. Tapping his fingers on the top of the glass case, he too peered down at the brooch. “Jest bought it about three hours ago. A girl come in here askin’ a hunnerd and fifty dollars fer it. Her eyes was real red and swollen, and I could tell she’d been cryin’. I figgered she’d run into a spell o’ bad luck, but her woes was my gain. I give her thirty-five dollars, and she tuk it. I reckon I can sell that pin fer two hunnerd and make me a hunnerd-and-sixty-five-dollar profit. Ain’t bad, huh?”
Roman grabbed the man’s shirt collar and pulled him up and across the counter. “You bastard! How could you have cheated her like that?” he shouted.
The man’s eyes bulged; his face reddened.
“Where did she go?” Roman demanded.
“Don’t—don’t know! She did—didn’t say!”
His eyes glittering, Roman released the sniveling man. “Give me the brooch.”
The man rubbed his throat for a moment and then reached for the gun he kept behind the counter.
But he stilled instantly when he felt cold metal at his temple and the clicking sound of a gun hammer in his ears.
“Give me the brooch, you damned son-of-a-bitch,” Roman ordered again, pressing the barrel of his Colt further into the man’s fleshy temple.
The man practically tore the doors off the back of the counter in his haste to retrieve the ruby brooch.
Roman snatched it out of the shopkeeper’s hand and stormed out of the mercantile. Recalling that he’d just seen Theodosia’s horse and wagon in the livery when he’d stabled Secret, he realized she’d left Willow Patch by other means. He went back to the hotel but learned nothing from the hotel manager.
Most of her belongings remained in the room, which meant she’d packed only what she could carry.
If you leave this room, I’ll hunt you down, he had warned her. No matter where you go, I’ll find you.
His vow a chant that beat through him in cadence with his heart, Roman left the hotel again and soon found out that no stages had left Willow Patch. Several travelers had come and gone during the course of the day, but no one in town knew
who the travelers were or where they’d gone.
For hours, Roman described Theodosia to everyone he met. Many townspeople remembered seeing her, but not a one could recall her leaving.
Only the arrival of nighttime, when everyone had gone home to sleep or into the saloon to drink, did Roman finally cease his frenzied inquisition and admit to himself that Theodosia had really escaped him.
He was filled with rage. Worry. Guilt.
And emptiness.
Secret and moonbeams showed him the way out of Willow Patch. He didn’t know where to go and so he headed nowhere. Just straight ahead, into the darkness. Night creatures talked to him with hisses, chirps, buzzes, and snarls, but he heard no wagon wheels behind him.
“Can I ask you a question?” he shouted into the darkness.
No one corrected his grammar.
“Fifteen plus three equals twenty!”
No one corrected his arithmetic.
Starlight shimmered over the grassy field to his left. The grass remained green.
But the wild flowers were gone.
He lost all awareness of time as his stallion ambled through the black night.
Thoughts of his baby pulled at his mind.
Memories of its mother tugged at his heart.
He stopped Secret and dismounted. Mulberry branches swayed above him. Glancing up at them, he wondered what their scientific name was. “Mullinas berrisinium,” he guessed.
His head bowed low, he kicked at pebbles as he walked circles around Secret.
When dawn whispered through the sky, he was still walking around his horse, but there were no more pebbles for him to kick.
Bewilderment sat in his mind like a rock, too heavy to move, too large to see past.
He stopped in front of Secret’s face. “What would I do with a baby, anyway?” he asked the stallion. “I’ll be so busy raising horses, I won’t have time to raise a child. What the hell is the matter with me? I don’t need some dumb kid tagging along after me!”
He kicked at dirt and watched it fly over Secret’s leg. “And it’ll probably be a girl,” he muttered. “I’ve taken care of women for forever and a day, and I’ll be damned if I need another one to take care of.”
He shoved his fingers through his hair. “I bet she’ll go back to Boston,” he muttered, staring into his steed’s huge black eyes. “She won’t stay in Texas because she’ll be afraid I’ll find her. She’ll wire her rich sister and brother-in-law, they’ll send her another trunk full of gold, and she’ll head east. And where she goes, my baby goes.”
He turned in the dirt and glanced at the pink and yellow horizon. Threads of blue wove through the pink and yellow, and he decided the sky resembled a pastel baby blanket.
He tried to visualize his child. First, he saw a little person with black hair and big brown eyes. Then he saw one with golden hair and blue eyes. He saw dark skin, and pale skin. He saw the child riding a horse; the child peering into a microscope.
He couldn’t understand his own child. Couldn’t imagine him or her, no matter how hard he tried.
But he could see its mother as if she stood right before him.
Melted butter. Her hair. Flowing, soft, warm, and fragrant. “And your eyes,” he whispered into the early morning breeze. “The color of tree bark. A well-worn saddle. Of whiskey.”
He saw her lips. Parted. Shining because she’d licked them. “Pink as Secret’s tongue. As boiled gulf shrimp. Pink as dawn,” he murmured.
Secret’s soft nickers floated around him. Secret. Soon he’d have thousands of Secrets. Horses that could reach a full gallop within seconds and stop on a dime. He’d live in his huge ranch house, look out over his twenty-five thousand acres of land, and know he was one of the wealthiest men in all of Texas.
Quite a feat for a young man who had dared to reach for a dream. In only a short time he would turn the fantasy into reality.
Nodding to himself, he took a deep breath of air and satisfaction, stuffed his hands into his pockets, and winced.
Something sharp pricked his right thumb. He pinched the object between his fingers and withdrew it from his pocket.
The pink and yellow glimmers of dawn struck the bloodred depths of ruby and fragile chains of gold.
He stared at the heart-shaped ruby, the dainty gold strings, and he remembered the pale slender throat against which it had once gleamed.
Something pulled at his heart again. Tenderly but insistently.
He closed his eyes. In the darkness he heard her.
Back in the fifteenth century, the heartstring was believed to be a nerve that sustained the heart. Presently the expression is used to describe deep emotion and affection, and one is said to feel a tug at the heart when so touched.
He stared down at the pin again, seeing a diamond in the middle of the ruby. Strange, he’d never noticed the diamond before.
He looked closer. The diamond wasn’t a diamond.
A tear pooled on the ruby. His tear, and then he watched another fall. And another, and soon the ruby was wet with the spill of his emotions.
Deep emotion. Affection.
…one is supposed to feel a tug at the heart when so touched.
Roman closed his fingers over the wet ruby. The pin stuck his palm, and as his tears seeped into the wound, he realized with startling clarity the name of the feeling he harbored for Theodosia.
He stood transfixed, gazing into the softly lit heavens. His ranch materialized within the early morning clouds. He saw his horses running through fields. He’d carried the image in his mind for ten long years, and he knew it by heart.
It faded right before his eyes, and in its place a woman’s face floated into the mellow sky. Her lips moved as she whispered to him.
When you truly love someone, Roman, no sacrifice is too great to make.
The heart-shaped ruby clutched in his hand, Roman mounted.
He followed the pull in his heart.
The tug on his heartstrings.
He headed west, toward Templeton. He needed money. All the money he had.
Senor Madrigal would have to find another buyer for the twenty-five thousand acres of Rio Grande grassland.
Roman was going to Boston.
From there, he reckoned he’d set sail for Brazil.
The man and woman chattered endlessly. Luby and Pinky Scrully were their names, and Theodosia sat between them as Luby directed the ox-driven wagon down the mulberry-tree-edged road.
She had just sold her ruby brooch to the owner of the Willow Patch mercantile when Luby Scrully entered the store, announced that he was passing through town, and ordered supplies for his trip. She hadn’t cared where the man was headed; when she heard him say he was passing through Willow Patch, the only thing she cared about was leaving with him.
The Scrullys had been more than willing to have her along on their journey to Gull Sky and had refused to accept the money she’d tried to offer them.
They’d been traveling for two days now, and Roman had not found them. He wouldn’t. No one in Willow Patch knew she’d left with the Scrullys, so no one in Willow Patch could tell Roman where she’d gone.
She hugged John the Baptist’s cage to her breasts, and as the wagon rumbled along, she watched red, yellow, and orange leaves fall from the trees and flutter to the ground.
“Yeah, Theodosia, honey,” Pinky said, patting Theodosia’s arm, “me and Luby’s on our way fer a visit with our son, Gilly. Don’t ’spect we’ll enjoy the visit much, though, what with his wife there.”
Luby threw his wife a sidelong frown. “You’re jealous, Pinky, and that’s the truth of it. It pains you somethin’ awful to know Gilly loves another woman ’sides you.”
Pinky laughed. “I reckon you’re right, Luby. I’ll git along with that wife o’ his as best as I can, but Lord how I long fer them days when Gilly was jest a young’un. ’Member how happy we was then, Luby?”
Luby nodded. “Time goes on, though, Pinky. Least we still got each other. Be
worser if one of us was dead.”
“Speakin’ o’ the dead,” Pinky said, “I heared tell that four men in the Blanco y Negro Gang’s done meeted up with the only knowed cure fer birth. Yeah, dead’s what they are, and I heared it said right in the street back in Wilier Patch. Don’t nobody know who killed ’em, but they was shore killed and dead. Where you headin’, anyway, Theodosia, honey? Y’ain’t said more’n a handful o’ words in two days’ time. Me? Well, I’ve been curious as all git out about you, but I been mindin’ my manners and keepin’ quiet. Cain’t keep quiet no more, though. Where you headin’?”
Lost in the memory of the day Roman had saved her from the notorious gang, it was a moment before Theodosia could answer. “Boston,” she murmured.
Pinky nodded. “That’s a place on the Missersipper River, ain’t it? Yeah, me and Luby was there ’bout two years past. S’where Luby buyed me a new kitchen knife. I busted the ole one when I throwed it at a rattler that slithered itsef into the house. Didn’t hit the rattler. Hit the stove. Knife broke, and the rattler bit my leg.”
A fresh wave of nostalgia sucked Theodosia into deeper grief as she recalled the day Roman had caught a rattlesnake with his bare hands. That had been the day he’d made her eat baby hotcakes. “And play in the mud,” she whispered.
“What was that, honey?” Pinky asked.
“Nothing,” Theodosia replied. “Nothing.” Feeling tears fill her eyes, she pretended to sneeze into her hands. Her action squeezed the tears onto her fingers. They slid down her palm and disappeared beneath her sleeves.
“Bless you,” Pinky said. She hiked her patched skirts up to her knees, pushed down her sock, and pointed to two fang marks on her plump calf. “Look here at where the rattler bit me, Theodosia. I didn’t die, though. What I done to save my own life, y’see, was I drank a whole bottle o’ whiskey jest as soon as that snake let go o’ me. Don’t rightly know what it is about bein’ likkered up, but somehow a body full o’ likker ain’t bothered none a’tall by a little bit o’ snake poison. Luby says he can drink more likker’n I can, but he ain’t nothin’ but a liar.”
Heartstrings Page 34
