B000XUBEHA EBOK (32 page)

“Don’t,” she whispered. “Not tonight. Your secrets will keep until tomorrow. Please, James.”

“By not telling you the truth long ago, I’ve done us both a great wrong.” He closed his arms around her and bent his head to inhale the warm fragrance of her hair and skin. In minutes she would jerk away from him.

“I don’t believe you’ve wronged anyone.” She pressed her palm against his heart.

She would, and very quickly.

“I’ve told you about the war,” he said, raising his head and looking into the darkness. He would rather have walked into a hail of bullets than say what had to be said. “But not everything.”

“I’ve known from the first there was something else to tell,” she said against his chest. In her voice he heard dread mixed with curiosity.

Speaking into the shadows above her head, he told her about that day in the forest when the war had ended for him. He told her about the man in the gray uniform appearing at the top of the ditch and both of them firing.

He felt her grow rigid in his arms. “Wait. You said a gray uniform, but you mean blue.”

“I wore the blue uniform, Della.”

She sat up and stared down at him with bewilderment and confusion. “But that can’t be,” she whispered, her voice barely audible. “That would make you a Yankee.”

“We both fired.” Looking into her face, he wondered if she could smell the burnt powder or hear the artillery in the distance. He could, and it seemed so real. “The Confederate soldier rolled into the ditch.” Her eyes locked to his, wide and dark and not wanting to believe. “We were trapped together by the bombardment. Eventually I wanted to know who he was, so I went through his pockets.”

“This was the man you told me about, the soldier who put a face on the enemy.” He could hardly hear her words, but he heard the raw harshness, saw the rapid rise and fall of her breast. “This was the last man you killed, wasn’t it? What was his name, James?” She asked the question, but she moved back on the bed and shook her head as if she didn’t want to hear. A single tear spilled over her lashes and rolled down her cheek before she dashed it away with an angry gesture. “Say his name!”

He pulled a hand down his face. “You know who it was, Della. It was Clarence Ward.”

Shaking hands covered her ears, then slid to her lips. Her eyes seemed huge and her face was white with shock. No sound emerged when her lips moved.

“I don’t know why I kept your letter and his, and your wedding photograph.” Reaching for her or touching her in any way would have been wrong, the worst thing he could do. But he wanted to hold and comfort her. “I regretted taking those items because I realized almost immediately that I’d have to find you and return what was yours.”

Horror flattened her gaze. “I used to wonder how it had happened, and if Clarence had seen the face of the man who killed him. But when I had the chance to ask about the circumstances, I didn’t.” She blinked then shook her head. “Oh God. You said you were with him when he died, and I assumed . . .”

He couldn’t bear to see her stunned expression so he swung his legs off the bed and bent forward, resting his elbows on his knees and rubbing hard at his jaw. There was nothing more to say. He stared at the flickering embers and listened.

“Everything that happened to me,” she said in a raw voice, working it out, “happened because you fired a rifle that day. I lost my husband, my daughter lost her father. The Wards lost their son. I’m living on a dirt farm in Texas because you were trapped behind the lines. Because of you, I haven’t seen my daughter in ten years. I’m alone with a tarnished reputation, thousands of miles from everything that was familiar . . . because you killed my husband. My whole life changed that day. Everything.”

A long, rasping moan began in her chest and emerged from the back of her throat. If anguish had a voice, it would sound like this, too painful to bear hearing. “Oh my God! I slept with you!” She pushed herself to the far edge of the bed. “I gave myself to you!”

There was no defense. Nothing he could say. But he did turn to face her, that seemed the decent thing, and he saw the revulsion that twisted her expression.

“You son of a bitch. How could you! How could you bed the wife of a man you killed?”

She flew at him and Cameron saw her swing back her arm, but he didn’t attempt to deflect the blow, didn’t turn away. She hit him hard enough to snap his head to the side. When he faced her, she hit him again and a trickle of blood leaked from his nose. He didn’t notice. Nothing physical could wound as deep as the revulsion and loathing burning in her eyes.

She glared down at her hand as if striking him had soiled her palm. Then she crawled off the bed and ran to her own room, slamming the door behind her. He heard the lock snap into place.

He didn’t attempt to follow. Right now, she’d welcome the devil sooner than she would open her door to James Cameron. She needed time. He’d go to her in the morning, because he knew she’d have more questions.

But in the morning, she was gone.

After he broke down the connecting door, he discovered she had left behind the dinner dress and anything else that he’d bought her. Fragments of burned paper lay in the hearth ashes. Kneeling, he was able to make out a few words and realized that she’d burned the journal she’d been keeping.

Walking to the window, he leaned on the sill and gazed outside, wondering where she would go. He was a hunter, he’d find her. What worried him more was . . . then what?

She’d hailed a cab and directed the driver to take her to a hotel on the far side of town, something clean and respectable, but cheap. Fifty cents a night including breakfast didn’t sound cheap to Della, but the cab driver swore that it was. For another nickel the driver carried her small trunk to the room she rented, then left her sitting awkwardly on the edge of the bed because there was no side chair. She had only a dim idea of where she was in relation to the train station. Not close to the River Manse, that was the important thing.

After the driver departed, Della locked the door, then emptied her drawstring purse and counted her money out on a plain white bedspread. She had left Two Creeks, Texas, with ten dollars. As Cameron had insisted on paying for everything, she’d spent only a dollar seventy-five during the journey. For the life of her she couldn’t remember what she’d spent it on. Then she’d paid the driver fifteen cents to get her to this hotel and she’d given him a gratuity to cart her trunk upstairs since there were no bellmen. She had paid three nights in advance for the room, which left her with six dollars and fifty-five cents.

That was enough to carry her for a few days while she decided what to do next.

But first . . . she removed her hat and placed it atop a time-scarred bureau. Then she hung her traveling suit in the armoire and placed her shoes beneath her suit. Stockings, drawers, corset, and shimmy went into a bureau drawer, then she donned her oldest, faded flannel nightgown. The nightgown should have gone into the rag bin long ago, but when the world fell down around her ears, this was the item she reached for. She didn’t know why she’d packed it, but she had and she was glad.

Della pulled down the window shade, shutting out the sight of a cold, dry day. Then she climbed into a bed almost as hard as the floor, slid beneath the covers, and pulled the pillow over her head.

And then she gave herself up to the damp-eyed confusion that battered her mind. The man she was beginning to love had killed her husband. And everything she thought she knew about Cameron was wrong. He wasn’t a Southerner; he hadn’t been Clarence’s friend. He had deliberately deceived her.

Della did not emerge from her hotel room for twenty-four hours. She paced. She raged. And occasionally she fell into an exhausted sleep, only to waken with fury in her heart and wisps of bad dreams darkening her mind.

She had fed Cameron and washed and ironed his laundry. She had teased him and laughed with him. She had admired him. Once or twice she had let herself admit that she might love him. And the worst, the very worst: she had climbed into his bed and all but begged him to make love to her. The son of a bitch.

When she thought about making love to Clarence’s killer, she felt wild and crazy inside, wanted to scream and tear her hair, wanted to smash furniture and claw down the walls. She wanted to buy a gun and shoot James Cameron straight through his black heart.

On the morning of her second day alone, she stood at the window and watched snow drifting past the window panes. It was a light snow that melted as soon as it reached the ground, not the raging blizzard that her heart longed to experience.

The intensity of her anger made her stomach cramp. An hour ago she had summoned a maid and requested tea and toast. Now she felt sick and wished she hadn’t eaten.

But it wasn’t the toast that made her ill. She should have pushed harder for the missing information. She had sensed it, had felt it, but she hadn’t pressed. Something in her hadn’t wanted to know.

Cameron had not lied outright, she gave him that. But he was guilty of the silent lie. Of letting her draw false conclusions and not correcting her when she assumed he was Clarence’s friend. Or when she asked his opinion about Clarence. He was guilty of letting her iron his shirts when he knew she would not have if she’d known who he really was. He was guilty of letting her climb into his bed.

She glared at the snowflakes. There was no escaping the admission that she’d been a fool. If she had paid closer attention, she might have noticed Cameron’s evasions. Sometimes he hadn’t even needed to evade a direct question, because she refused to hear the truth.

Last night she had remembered asking him where he was from. He had answered, Winthrop. And what did she do? Instantly she had decided there must be a Winthrop, Georgia, instead of recalling the Winthrop outside of Boston, even though she had visited there as a child.

Turning from the window, she pressed the heels of her palms against her eyelids. He should have told her the truth at once.

Now she would never know for certain, but she believed she could have accepted the truth if he’d told her that first night. She might even have admired him for facing the widow of a man he had killed. It was even possible that she still would have invited him to sleep in her barn. Naturally she would be curious about him.

But Cameron had chosen to deceive her. He’d used her badly.

Needing to clear her mind, Della threw on some clothing and pulled a shawl over the shoulders of her traveling suit. There wasn’t much traffic outside the hotel, thank heaven. The wagons and gigs that did pass splashed cold mud on the boards laid down as a walkway. When Della reached the wrought-iron gates of a small park, she turned inside to escape the mud and followed a brick path set beneath bare-branched elms.

The cold air and snowflakes melting on her cheeks were not enough to cool her anger. She had slept with Clarence’s killer.

Cameron should have told her the truth before . . . to be fair, he had tried . . . but she had stopped him . . . she’d told him she would die of humiliation if he refused her . . . so he’d let her into his bed and then he had attempted to tell her the truth . . . but she wouldn’t hear it . . .

Bending, she brushed a dusting of snow off the seat of a wooden bench, then sat heavily and rubbed her temples. Cameron had carried the letters and the photograph for ten long years. Why? Because he couldn’t face her knowing he had devastated her life?

That couldn’t be entirely correct. He’d found her in the saloon but had gone away without giving her the letters and the photo. If Cameron had done the right thing then, she wouldn’t now be sitting in a snowy park in St. Louis.

On her way to see her daughter.

That was another deception. He wasn’t doing a kind thing for the wife of a friend. Cameron acted out of guilt and shame. He felt responsible for Claire growing up with the Wards instead of with her parents, and he damn well should. Because of James Cameron, Claire’s father was dead and her mother lived far away in a small Texas town no one had ever heard of.

No wonder he pressed her to reunite with her daughter. Cameron was trying to reassemble the pieces of lives he had broken.

That night she was almost asleep when she thought of something that brought her upright, clutching the sheet to her chest and blinking hard.

James Cameron had found her working in the saloon, they both recalled that brief meeting. But he had spoken to her, then he had gone away. And shortly afterward, her monthly allotment began to arrive.

“Oh my heavens,” she whispered, squeezing her eyes shut.

Every instinct shouted that the money didn’t come from Mr. Ward. It came from Cameron. That’s why he hadn’t given her the letters ten years ago. She would have noticed that he brought her the letters and then the money began to arrive. She would have guessed that he was easing his conscience by helping to support a woman he’d made a widow.

Lying back on the pillows, she stared up at the ceiling. All these years . . . it was Cameron’s money that arrived at the bank every month. Cameron’s money that had made it possible for her to quit working at the saloon. Cameron’s money that kept her alive.

She remembered his comments about the farm. He must have believed that he was supplementing an income she received from Clarence’s father. He hadn’t known that he was her sole source of support.

So if she telegraphed the bank in Two Creeks to wire her enough money to complete the journey to Atlanta, she would be requesting Cameron’s money. James Cameron had been part of her life for ten years, she just hadn’t known it.