Amelia Read online

  The gesture was enough. Hartwell gathered the reins, gingerly this time, muttering under his breath about such consideration for a silly dumb animal as he moved away.

  Amelia's fingernails had made crescents in her palms. She had looked for her father to go crazy at the rebuke, perhaps to even grab a gun and start shooting. He was unpredictable. But King didn't know that, and she couldn't tell him. He probably wouldn't believe her anyway.

  But Brant saw the anxiety on Amelia's face and knew that something was amiss. "King," Brant began warningly.

  The younger man looked up at him without blinking, his silver eyes still flickering dangerously.

  "We should go, Father," Alan prompted, wary of explosions. The two older men were both rash and hot-tempered. And often they didn't see eye to eye on issues.

  "Yes, I suppose we should," Brant said finally, shifting restlessly in the saddle. "Watch your back," he told King.

  "You watch yours," came the curt reply.

  Brant smiled at his wife, nodded to Amelia, and turned his mount. Alan followed suit, glancing back until he almost fell from the saddle watching Amelia.

  "Young idiot, he'll break his neck. Must you encourage him so, Miss Howard, or are you just following Papa's commandments?"

  She turned, shocked at the vehemence in his voice.

  "Really, King," Enid clucked, glaring at him. "You were on your way to see the Valverdes, were you not? Pray, don't let us keep you."

  "How could you, when such a charming and fashionable young woman sits waiting for me in her parlor?" he asked with a contemptuous glance at Amelia in her simple homespun dress.

  Amelia felt the whip of that comment like a rope burn. The Howards had been a respected family in Atlanta but not a very wealthy one. Amelia had never had elegant clothes or a rich life. Neither did she covet it, but King seemed unconvinced.

  "Shall I help Marie with the girls, Mrs. Culhane?" Amelia asked her hostess with a pale smile. "She likes to bath them about this time, I notice."

  "Certainly, if you like, my dear. Marie will be leaving in the morning for home, so I'm certain she'll appreciate your help with the packing as well."

  "She's leaving?" Amelia couldn't know how upset she sounded.

  King arched an eyebrow. "You sound as if you feel she is deserting you in the face of doom, Miss Howard," he mused.

  "I don't feel that way at all, Mr. Culhane," she assured him. "I'll just get back to the house," she added quickly and, sidestepping King, lifted her skirts and ran toward the house.

  He watched her with cold, narrow eyes.

  "What is wrong with you?" his mother demanded icily. "Why are you so cruel to her?"

  He shrugged and moved to swing into the saddle, pausing to relight his cigar. "I won't be away long," he said carelessly.

  "What you see in that Valverde woman is beyond me," she told him. "She's cold and calculating and the most mercenary human being I've ever known."

  He leaned over the pommel. "You left out honest. She has the virtue of being exactly as she appears. She wants me for the ranch and my lineage, just as every other woman has," he added with a cold smile. "I admire her cold-blooded approach. It appeals to my sense of irony."

  "I know what caused this cynicism, but you were very young when it happened," Enid said softly, "and even such a deep scar should fade in time. It is not her death you can't forget, anyway, it is the fact that she had deserted you." He didn't speak. He looked explosive. "King, there are many women who look for qualities in men which bear no relevance to wealth."

  "Indeed? Women such as our fleeing guest?" he asked, watching Amelia's dash onto the porch. "She's still little more than a child; a rough hand would destroy her," he said, almost to himself. "She is drawn to Alan's smooth profile and parlor manners. Her father," he added, glancing at her, "is much more drawn to the possibility of a partnership through marriage, don't you think?"

  "Alan should marry," she returned curtly. "And Amelia is a lovely, sweet girl."

  "A spineless jellyfish with no spunk and no grit," he said shortly. "She lacks the nerve to speak back even to her father, despite his deplorable treatment of her. You ask me to admire such spinelessness? The girl may have a pretty face, but she is a coward. I had rather marry an ugly wild mustang than a broken pretty filly."

  "Women are not horses," Enid reminded him.

  "They yield to the same treatment," King said carelessly, with a last glance at Amelia's retreating figure. "A sugar cube and a soft word, and the wildest of them will submit," he added as he gathered the reins.

  Enid still stared up at him quietly. "She fears her father. It is not the sort of fear that is engendered by a loud voice, King."

  "And how would you know?"

  "I am a woman," Enid replied simply. "There is an unspoken language that we share."

  "And the tendency to look for drama where none exists," he murmured with a chuckle at her glower. "I shan't be long."

  Enid watched him canter away with impotent rage. Sometimes he and his father maddened her with their arrogant manners. She knew all too well how brutal a man could be, and how overpowering, when he took to drink. Amelia's fear the night before had not been of her father's voice, she knew it. There had been something more there, and this afternoon she was certain of it when she saw the girl's look of relief mingled with anxiety as her father left the ranch. Perhaps during his absence she could draw her out and discover what the problem was. If she could help, she decided, she would, men or no men.

  Amelia helped bathe the girls and then sat in the parlor with Marie and Enid, chatting, while she worked the intricate crochet pattern Enid had taught the women.

  "Did your mother not do handwork, Amelia?" Enid asked curiously.

  "Mama was much too busy trying to watch the children and keep house and cook," Amelia said gently. "As I was."

  "King mentioned that you never seemed to rest when he visited Quinn those few times," she added.

  "I wonder that your eldest son even noticed," she replied colorlessly. "He never looked at me."

  Enid lifted a quick eyebrow, but she didn't say anything. Alan had gone with King on one visit to the Howards while the youngest boys were still alive. King had come home brooding and austere for days. He seemed to find nothing to relate about Amelia, but Alan must have seen a different side of her. He let slip little glimpses of Amelia's life. A particular one came to mind, that of Amelia playing Indian with two little boys in the backyard late in the afternoon, laughing and radiant in the sunset. Alan had told King about it, and King had made the cold remark that Amelia was hardly the type to roughhouse with children.

  Enid recalled that the little boys had died only a few months later, of a vicious bout of typhoid. The family had grieved and grieved. Alan had gone back with Quinn for the funeral. King had told his mother, and no one else, that he refused flatly to stay in the same house with Amelia. So Alan had gone instead to represent the family. He had noticed a change in Hartwell Howard, a violence in his manner and a building affinity for hard liquor that seemed to grow by the day. His wife, Amelia's mother, had quickly begun to fail.

  "How is your brother?" Enid asked.

  "Very well. Quinn writes to us," she said with a smile as she finished a row and turned the piece she was working on. "Isn't that unusual, for a man? But he writes a very elegant and literate letter. He is in New Mexico, searching for a man who killed a banker in El Paso. Imagine, my brother, a Texas Ranger."

  "And a very good one, for all we hear," Enid replied.

  "Your brother is a Ranger?" Marie asked, aghast. "Oh, but how delightful! And I will not get to meet him. My father was employed with the police in Paris. I am certain that they would have had so much to discuss, if they met!"

  "Indeed they would," Amelia said, smiling. "Perhaps you will come to visit again and Quinn will be in town."

  " Certainement ," Marie agreed. "But for now, alas, I must return home, must I not, Enid?"

  "As you say, my dear," Enid
replied with a twinkle in her brown eyes, " certainement !"

  The women said good night to Marie, and she went to settle down with her children.

  "I will lock up before I come to bed," Enid told Amelia. "Good night, my dear."

  "Do wake me before Marie leaves," Amelia pleaded. "I wouldn't want to miss seeing her off."

  "Of course you don't. Sleep well."

  "And you."

  Amelia closed the door of her bedroom and changed into her long, cotton gown. It had a pretty row of pink lace around the high collar and lace at the wrists as well. She took down her long, blond hair and sat before the vanity mirror, combing it with long, lazy strokes.

  She was twenty. As she watched her arm lift and fall, watched the brush pull through the silken skeins of hair, she wondered if she would ever marry and have children, like those of Marie. It would be nice to have a husband. The brush poised in midair, and her brown eyes grew cold and fearful. Or would it?

  What if she chose badly? Her father had seemed so kind and good, and then he had changed. What if Amelia unknowingly chose a man who liked to drink or gamble or had no control over his temper? What if she married a brutal man who thought of her as a piece of property and proceeded to use and abuse her. Marriage now seemed to Amelia like a very real threat, not a promise of happiness. Downplaying her assets kept men from being attracted to her, and she was glad of it. She was certain that she never wanted to marry, even if children would have been a delight. Besides, there was her father to consider. He might yet live a long time. There was no one else to be responsible for him, except perhaps Quinn. But Quinn had to work. That left Amelia. And Hartwell wasn't going to rest in his efforts to get her married to Alan.

  She put the brush down slowly and felt her body grow cold. She really must speak to Quinn when he came home again, she decided. Surely he would come back by the time her father's hunting trip was over.

  She felt her arms break out in goose bumps. Silly, she thought, to worry so. She was a God-fearing woman. She had to believe that she had the hope of a settled, less terrifying life than she had enjoyed so far. She was no coward, even if she had been forced to act like one in her father's best interests.

  Her hand lifted the brush, and she forced it through her long, soft hair once more. You must have courage, she told her reflection. You will be free one day, and Papa will be, too, from the pain that makes a savage of him. If only he would see a doctor. But he would not even admit the need.

  Meanwhile, she thought ruefully, she had a more immediate problem. Marie was leaving. Now Amelia would have only Enid's company for protection against the thorn in her flesh. How would she cope with King without the buffer of other people? It seemed she was trading one rough man for another.

  But Enid would be her buffer, she told, herself. It would be all right.

  Finally, she put down the brush and climbed in between the thick white sheets and covering quilt. It was late March, but the nights were cool here on the fringe of the desert. The cover felt nice.

  She closed her eyes and soon fell asleep.

  King was already gone when she went to see Marie and the girls off the next morning. She had said more good-byes in two days than in the past two years, she thought as she waved them off at the train station in El Paso.

  It was, she thought, a good thing that Enid had asked old Mr. Singleton down the road for a lift to town that morning and a ride back as well. There had been no explanation or apology for King's absence, and Amelia reasoned that there might be something about it that Enid didn't feel comfortable telling her.

  Mr. Singleton took her arm and Enid's, shaking his head. "Those trains," he complained. "They lay more track and more track. The blessed things set fires, don't you know?"

  "Progress, Mr. Singleton, is to everyone's advantage," Enid chided the old man.

  "Not so, madam," he lamented. "Ah, for the days when the ranges were still wide and a man could be himself without censure."

  "Mr. Singleton saw a gunfight once," Enid whispered to Amelia. "He actually saw John Wesley Hardin shot down by John Selman!"

  "Here in El Paso?" she exclaimed.

  "Indeed," came the reply. "And not so long ago, either. Only a few years back."

  "Oh, I've seen more than that little scrape in my time," the old man recalled, his blue eyes misting with memory. "I've seen buffalo cover the plains and wild Indians riding on the warpath to glory. I've seen covered wagons rush the horizon and the first telegraph wires strung. " He glanced down at Amelia. "Just about your age, I were, when I came here and settled with my brothers. My, my, Amelia, them was hard days. Real hard days. Comanche wars hadn't ended then. There were a man burned alive on this very ranch"

  "Mr. Singleton!" Enid hissed.

  He stopped, remembered himself, and cleared his throat as he saw Amelia's wide, shocked eyes. "I do beg your pardon, Amelia. I forget sometimes."

  "Oh, that's that's quite all right," she faltered.

  "Come along, Amelia, we'll let Mr. Singleton buy us a nice ice cream soda, and we'll talk about some pleasant things!" she added with a meaningful glance at their companion.

  "Yes, ma'am," he said obediently.

  On the way to the soda parlor, they passed the city's famous alligator pit, and Amelia had to stop and watch the creatures as food was tossed down to them by various passersby.

  "Dangerous varmints," Mr. Singleton muttered with evident disapproval. "Ate Don Harris's foot off, they did, and the city fathers had the gall to say he asked for it!"

  "He certainly did," Enid said with a jerk of her head. "He took off his shoe and sock and stuck his foot in there, didn't he?"

  "Weren't no call for that gator to bite it off," Mr. Singleton argued.

  "Perhaps it hadn't been fed," Amelia ventured, watching the strange dead eyes of an alligator that seemed to be looking back at her.

  "Ate two chickens that very morning," the old man argued. "Wish they'd close that thing down."

  "Just make sure you don't wander too close to it," Enid cautioned Amelia. "Now, let's get some ice cream. It's very warm out here today!"

  They were late getting back, because Enid had wanted some new patterns and cloth. There was a fiesta coming up at the end of the week, she told Amelia, and they'd have just enough time to sew new dresses for it.

  Enid had insisted that Amelia choose a bolt of fabric for herself, and when the younger woman leaned toward pearl gray, Enid had immediately insisted on a gay lavender.

  "But this is more than I can afford," Amelia had protested.

  Enid had gently but firmly had her way. The cloth was cut and wrapped, matched with thread, and taken out of the shop.

  "You'll look lovely in it," Enid chided. "It's little enough recompense for all your help with Marie's children this week. You've been constantly watching them."

  "I've enjoyed it, and Marie hasn't felt well at all."

  "She's been frail since she lost her husband," Enid replied. "We all thought this would be a good holiday for her, and it has been. You've brought her out of her depression. I'm very grateful. Marie has been like a daughter to me."

  "She's very sweet."

  "Will you mind if I tell you that you're very sweet, too, my dear?" Enid asked gently. "I'm enjoying your company."

  "And I yours," Amelia replied. She gnawed on her lower lip. "This fiesta, is it going to be here?"

  "Why, no. It will be at the Valverdes," Enid said. "But we're all invited. We don't stand on ceremony when there's a party. Everyone comes."

  Amelia hesitated. She didn't like the Valverde heiress, and the woman certainly didn't like her.

  "Don't worry so. You'll have a good time. Hurry, now, and change for dinner. Rosa made her famous fried chicken. Can't you smell it? It's my favorite!"

  Amelia didn't argue. She went to dress, already dreading the party she could see she wouldn't be able to avoid attending. It would be torment to watch King dancing with the other woman, rubbing his distaste for her in her face.
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  At dinner King sat at the head of the table looking unapproachable. Enid did her best to keep the conversation going, but her son made no remark unless prompted. He ate his food and drank his coffee and then retired to the study to smoke without asking anyone's permission.

  "Something's happened," Enid muttered, watching as the door closed behind him. "He's always like that when he's upset. He never rages, as Brant does. He simply goes quiet and closes up."

  Amelia helped her clear away, wondering what could have upset him.

  "No, no, I'll wash these few. Rosa's already gone for the night. Dear, do take King a second cup of coffee before I drain the pot, will you? No cream or sugar. He likes it black."

  "But" Amelia hesitated, panicked.

  "He doesn't bite," the older woman assured her with a smile. "Go on. It's all right."

  Amelia hated herself for being persuaded. It was bound to lead to disaster, but it was hard to say no to Enid.

  She carried the full cup in its saucer to the door of his study and knocked, grimacing as the coffee threatened to overflow the cup.

  "Come in!"

  His voice didn't sound at all inviting, but Amelia gently opened the door and entered the room. Her heartbeat was unnaturally heavy as she approached the desk with her eyes on the cup instead of King.

  He was lounging in the burgundy-colored leather chair behind the desk, his big, booted feet resting on the thick pad that covered the surface of the big oak desk. Smoke from his cigar wafted to the ceiling.

  She felt his eyes as she put the cup down on the desk. Her gaze glanced off the brandy snifter in his hand and, higher, the speculative look in his glittery silver eyes.

  "Your mother asked me to bring your coffee," she said quickly, turning to beat a hasty retreat.

  "Close the door and sit down, Miss Howard," he said curtly, stopping her in her tracks.

  She turned, hesitating uneasily. "It's rather late"

  "It's barely six."