Soon all of Tucson would be gossiping, asking who the father was. Only Larry and Kathy and, of course, Paul knew, though she had never mentioned Nick’s name when she told him she was pregnant and breaking off the engagement.
“I still want to marry you, Amanda,” he had told her. It was his first evening back in Tucson since his proposal, and they were eating at the Westward Ho, one of the many guest ranches that had sprung up in Tucson’s Santa Catalina mountains.
She looked away from the handsomely distinguished face. Her eyes shimmered like Tucson’s night lights stretched out below the restaurant’s panoramic window. “It wouldn’t work, Paul.”
“Why don’t you give it a try?” he asked gently.
She looked back at the face that was etched with tender concern. “Like my grandmother,” she said, managing a faint smile, “I seem to be caught up between two stepbrothers.”
“It does seem a strange parallel,” he mused. “As I recall the story of the Ghost Lady, in the end she had neither stepbrother.”
“So a version of the story goes,” she whispered, still clinging to her inane smile. "So why change what’s fated to be?”
They parted that night, vowing their friendship, though she knew that Paul felt more. She swore Paul to silence about her pregnancy. “You don't want Nick to know?” he asked.
She nodded. “He’ll know soon enough, along with the rest of the world. But the child’s father I want to remain unknown.” She raised her chin. “I won’t have anyone feeling sorry for us.”
“You promise you’ll call me if ever you need me?” he demanded of her before he kissed her goodbye.
She knew she never would. Somehow she would make it on her own. There were a lot of mothers who had lost husbands in the war and were raising children by themselves, she reminded herself fiercely. She could not castigate herself for having given away her life's dream. Her hand descended to her stomach to the little soul that stirred there, and she knew that since she could not have both, she had made the only choice she could live with.
She returned her attention to a case outlined in the United States Code Annotated. The door opened, and she looked up to see Nick enter. She gasped and almost stood but then thought better of it. She could not let him see the gentle mound beneath her dress. When he was near enough she searched those cool blue eyes for the quick anger that seemed to be ever present when the two of them came together. But this time she could not make out what that gaze held.
He came around the desk and hunkered one thigh on its top, so that he looked down into that face that had hounded him for so many years. “Your friend Kathy told me you’d still be in,” he said in that voice that was like low thunder.
Stunned, she said nothing. She had not the strength to face his anger as she so often had had before
“Dammit, I have known from that first meeting at Cristo Rey that you had hooked my heart . . . if it is possible for a boy of thirteen to know and understand such a feeling.”
She blinked at the bold admission. “You came here just to tell – ”
“It didn’t take me long to find out that you were the daughter of a Japanese. Falling in love with you could only hold me back, and I had tried every way under the sun to deny my love. I had tried to go without seeing you. I had tried other women. I had tried replacing the love of you with the love of power. And I had tried calling the love for you lust. Nothing had worked. There was no magic potion to cure me of your Oriental sorceress’s spells.
“After I read that your engagement with Paul had been called off,” he continued, “I kept hoping I’d hear from you. But I should have known your stubborn pride would stand in the way.”
Her fingers clenched the book she held so that they would not reach up to caress the homely-handsome face she loved so much. He was her Stronghold. Had always been her heart’s stronghold. “Nick,” she whispered, “I can’t go back to you.”
His brows rose. “Then I’m wrong? No, I don’t think so. What’s between you and me, Mandy, I could never be wrong about.”
Gently he took her shoulders and pushed her back against the chair. But there was nothing gentle in the mouth that claimed hers hungrily. Despite her determination not to, she returned the kiss, her lips following his lead. That same damnable itch that always plagued her when he was near began again in spite of the other changes motherhood had wrought in her metabolism. Nothing could ever change that burning knot inside her for Nick Godwin.
When his lips finally released hers, she realized his hand rested on her swelling abdomen. Her lids flew open. “You know?’’ she rasped.
“About our child?" He grinned. “Not until Kathy lit into me with a sermon. She hit me with both barrels right there on Pennington and Court. I think if she'd had her way, the police would have dragged me off to the old whipping post.”
"I won’t be your mistress again, Nick. I won’t subject my child to that kind of life.”
He leaned over her and began to nibble at her earlobe. His hand slid boldly beneath her dress's V-neck to caress one of her breasts, engorged now with motherhood. “Would you settle for marriage?”
Her lungs ceased to function. Nick’s hand didn’t. She pushed it away. “Danielle?”
He feigned a sigh. “Don’t tell me that I’ll have to forgo the delights of your marvelous body the rest of your pregnancy.” “Your marriage to Danielle?” she persisted.
“The night I came here I was going to tell you that I had asked her for a divorce.”
“Oh, no, Nick. The destruction of your marriage—it could only hurt whatever it is between us.”
His fingers were slipping back inside her dress, cupping one full breast, squeezing it gently. “They’re delightful!” he murmured, his lips descending to burn a trail along the graceful column of her neck, while his hand loosed the buttons of her dress.
“You’re not listening!” she cried indignantly.
“Oh, yes—yes, I am, love,” he said huskily as he freed the golden globes.
Her hands tried to shield herself from his probing lips, and he sighed again. “Now listen to me this once, Mandy Shima, soon-to-be Mandy Godwin,” he said, prying her fingers away from her buttons. “You are not responsible for my marriage’s failure. Danielle’s and my marriage has never been the kind it should have been. It was only after you left that I knew I couldn’t continue the farce any longer.”
“But your career—what will people say when—”
He chuckled. “Have I ever worried about what people said? I told you once before I’m a gambler and it’s the game and not the stack of chips, or lack of chips, at the end that counts. Besides,” he added, his hand slipping down to cup the weight of one of her breasts again, “with your drive and my gambler's daring, there’s no way we can lose, love."
He bent his hand once more to tease the rose-tinted breast, and with a soft sigh she gave up resisting him. It was useless. She simply was not ever going to rid herself of the hunger for Nick Godwin. It tormented her like a plague.
Damn the animal!
And her hands slipped up to enfold him to her.
As a grown woman with a child of my own, a daughter with honey-colored hair and dusky skin, I still return occasionally to the wilderness of Cristo Rey . . . only as a visitor, for with Paul Godwin’s death, my husband, Nick, deeded the land over to become part of the Coronado National Park, which was as it should have been, I know now.
But that does not stop me from recounting to our daughter, Catherine, the stories of her great-grandmother, her namesake, the stories of the Ghost Lady. And when she asks if I have ever met the Ghost Lady, I tell her, "Only once, the day I agreed to become your father's wife.”
At least I think I did. I realize that no one believes in ghosts in these modern times, but still I think . . . I think that the tortured soul of my Ghost Lady was at last returned to its resting place that day . . . to the chimerical arms of the lover long denied Catherine Davalos in life.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
A great many of the characters in Deep Purple are authentic people out of history. For those interested readers, Sam and Atanacia Hughes really did exist. Atanacia went on to have the fifteen children she wanted and celebrated her golden anniversary with her beloved Anglo, Sam.
I felt the Shoot-out at the O.K. Corral was an important part of Tombstone, Arizona, history, but in order to retain the continuity of the story, I had to date the event two full years later than it actually occurred, and I beg the reader’s pardon for my literary license.
Lastly, I must thank both Lori Davisson and Bruce Hilpert of the Arizona Historical Society and Helen Weber and Gina Smith of the Lewisville Public Library for all their help.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
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Parris Afton Bonds is the mother of five sons and the author of more than thirty-five published novels. She is the co-founder of and first vice president of Romance Writers of America. Declared by ABC’s Nightline as one of three best-selling authors of romantic fiction, the award winning Parris Afton Bonds has been interviewed by such luminaries as Charlie Rose and featured in major newspapers and magazines as well as published in more than a dozen languages. She donates her time to teaching creative writing to both grade school children and female inmates. The Parris Award was established in her name by the Southwest Writers Workshop to honor a published writer who has given outstandingly of time and talent to other writers. Prestigious recipients of the Parris Award include Tony Hillerman and the Pulitzer nominee Norman Zollinger.
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THE MAIDENHEAD
The Virginia Company of London seeks one hundred willing maids for marriage to bachelor planters of James Cittie Colony. Maids must be young, handsome, and honestly educated.
Gingerly, Modesty nudged aside the still-wet blue snuffbox she'd painted so that she could better view the advertisement beneath it. After hours of tedious work, her eyes ached. They were her bane. Needed glasses, she did. And a pair of eyes the same color would be faerie dust. One green and one brown was an occasional cause for consternation.
Her stepfather had been ought to say, "Tis a sure sign of the devil." And her cleft chin a sign of lewdness.
Little wonder her mother died early. If the plague hadn't killed her, her husband’s sanctimonious carping would have.
Modesty leaned closer to the broadside. Her nose, which she considered too large for her face, was a thimble's length from the print. Her finger, its nail crusted with blue paint, followed the words. Posted notices for available sailor berths shared space with names of ships in port and a list of merchants’ goods that included Moorish slaves and Oriental spices.
Paint fumes blurred her vision, and she pushed away the jar of cobalt blue. She squinted at the broadside’s date. March 9,1620. The announcement was only three days old.
She read further. James Cittie was described as a "thriving towne amidst faire meddowes and goodly tall trees.”
The broadside stated that the Virginia Company of London had elected to invest in the importation of the females for the purpose of selling them off to the enormous number of bachelors who could afford to buy a wife.
She made a sound that was half snort and half chuckle. "Young, handsome, and honestly educated," she mused.
Well, at twenty-six, she wasn’t young.
If an hourglass figure and fair features were prerequisites for being considered handsome, then she didn’t qualify in that category either.
Her nocturnal activities would certainly discredit her claim to honesty.
Tha
t left the attribute of "educated." Aha. Now that was a quality to which her stepfather could attest, bless his shriveled soul.
Thomas Fanshaw had been a harsh taskmaster. Her fingers and her shoulders had smarted enough under his razor strap when her penmanship went awry or her scribbled sum was not the correct total. Thanks to his pious and exacting nature, she could recite the books of the Bible and quote its scripture. He had been a chorister in the Canterbury cathedral, a fact that hardly determined her life path. Or just mayhap it did.
When Thomas Fanshaw had allowed the village vicar, an Anglican with a strong puritan bent, to order an awl driven through the tongue of her brother Robby for swearing, she forsook both society’s God and its religion.
She sighed. To dwell with regret on the past was foolish. The hour was late, nearly four in the morning. At this rate, she would get less than four hours sleep before she exchanged her painter’s smock for an alehouse maid’s apron.
She picked up the paintbrush, dipped it in the jar, and went back to work on her latest masterpiece: transforming Lord Pemberton’s black snuffbox, embossed with his gold seal, into a blue one festooned with a fairy ring.
Deep Purple Page 43
