Heartstrings (47 page)

“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.

R
oman 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.