Lacy (41 page)

She wondered if she could ever feel it again.
Her life had undergone such a radical change in a very short time. It was going
to be hard getting back to normal, if she even could. Meanwhile there was Turk.
She had no idea what he really wanted with her. He'd said he cared about her,
but she didn't trust him. She remembered too well the things he'd told her
before she'd left with Danny. Turk still loved his late wife, and he wanted no
serious involvement with a woman. He'd said that and meant it, so he couldn't
have changed his mind so quickly. He felt sorry for her, guilty about the baby
she'd lost, but she'd better remember what he'd said the day she'd left the
ranch. She'd better
never
forget it, or she could
be in for as much heartache as poor Wardell.

Back in Chicago, Blake Wardell
was
trying to puzzle out a conundrum of his own. He'd had a letter from Cole
Whitehall asking him to come down to San Antonio at the end of the week for a
business meeting. He didn't know what Whitehall was up to, but he had a feeling
he was about to be offered a partnership. He wasn't going to refuse it, if that
was what the other man had in mind. He'd do anything for Katy. That feeling
extended to her whole family. Over the weeks since Katy had left Chicago, his frequent conversations with her brother had given him a new knowledge of the
man. It would be no hardship to invest in a ranching enterprise. Especially, he
thought, with ironic humor, since he seemed to be going the whole hog in his
search for respectability. Katy would be proud of him. She'd worked hard enough
to make him change his ways.

He put the letter down with a smile. The trip
would give him the opportunity to find out how she was. He might even get a
glimpse of her. The smile faded as he realized how hungry he was for that small
mercy. She belonged to the blond ace. He'd never had any doubts about her
feeling for her brother's foreman. He couldn't stop loving her, wanting her.
But he had some precious memories to carry into his old age; they were so good
that he hadn't even had the urge to tarnish them by going to bed with some
other woman. His eyes warmed as he thought how it had been with Katy that
night, how she'd responded to him with such eager ardor, such delight. Even if
she'd spent the whole time thinking of another man, it didn't seem to matter.
That one memory of her was all his, and he was going to treasure it until he
died.

the movie Turk took
Katy to see was a
Valentino one,
Blood and Sand,
about a bullfighter's
tragic rise and fall. Katy sat stiffly at his side watching it, and he cursed
his own insensitivity in taking her to a picture that ended in a bloodbath.
To
his credit he hadn't known about that
last scene, but now he wished he'd asked somebody before he'd taken her to see
it.

"Come on," he said gently, helping her
out of the theater before she realized what was happening.

Out in daylight again, she winced at the surge
of bright light. Turk walked beside her in silence, his dark suit looking
unfamiliar on his tall frame, the only recognizable attire his boots and
Stetson.

"I'm sorry," he said shortly as he
took her arm and led her back toward the runabout. "I never thought about
the gore."

She searched for words. "It's all
right," she said finally when they'd reached the car. "I didn't,
either."

He helped her inside and went through the ritual
of cranking the car while she sat uneasily inside.

They were outside town before he spoke again.
"I mean it, Katy. I had no idea what the end of the film would be
like."

"Could we get out and walk for a little
bit?" she asked, glancing toward a path that led off into the trees, just
before the dirt road crossed a little stream.

"Sure." He pulled off on the side of
the road and cut the engine. Katy took off her hat and left it on the seat,
lifting her skirts to keep them out of the grass as she wandered through the
mesquite trees to the edge of the stream, then paused, listening to its cold
burble as it ran over slick stones. In Chicago, she'd worn short skirts. But
here in Spanish Flats, she was trying desperately to attain some measure of
respectability again. The length of her dress—briefly in fashion this year—was
armor.

Turk lit a cigarette and leaned against a
mesquite's thick trunk, his wide-brimmed hat pushed back over his blond hair
while he stared at the water.

Katy's eyes slid sideways, lingering on the way
his slacks molded his powerful legs, the narrowness of his hips, the broadness
of his chest and shoulders. He was perfectly built. For the first time since
Danny's death, her mind wandered to the afternoon she'd known him in complete
intimacy. Flushing she averted her eyes to the stream.

Turk caught the tail edge of that look and began
to hope. So she wasn't completely indifferent to him. Thank God. He'd almost
given up hope.

"You said you'd tell me one day," she
said.

His heavy blond eyebrows arched. "About
what?" he asked, and smiled.

"How you and my brother met."

He knocked an ash off his cigarette. Deep, soft
laughter teased his throat. "That wasn't so much a meeting as a
confrontation. I was having a hard time of it. I'd come straight from my wife's
funeral into the army, been shipped overseas with no time to come to terms with
the loss. I drank quite a lot," he said slowly. His eyes narrowed as he
looked at the stream. "Cole and I were in the same outfit, both avid
fliers. As we began to make names for ourselves, we started competing.
Inevitably we got into a fight one day and almost landed each other in the
hospital."

"What did you fight about?" Katy
asked.

"Damned if I remember," he replied
thoughtfully, his pale eyes twinkling with humor. "But it was enough to
convince us both that we'd make better friends than enemies. I fought like a
wild man in the sky, then drank until I couldn't stand up, remembering how my
wife had died, blaming myself for leaving her there alone in her
condition." He took a long draw from the cigarette. "One night, I
tried to go up in my airplane while I was staggering drunk. I had some noble
idea of crashing down on the German barracks at night, you see. Cole stopped me,
put me to bed. I got a lecture the next morning about the reverence of life and
how I was trying to waste mine. It worked. I pulled myself together."

"You did something similar for Cole, didn't
you?" she asked. "Nobody tells me anything, you know—but Lacy
sometimes says things without thinking. She said you saved Cole's life
once."

"He was no more in control of his faculties
than I'd been," he said. "But what happened is between the two of us.
Lacy may know, but only if he's told her. That's his secret, not mine."

She snapped a dead twig from a limb and turned
it in her fingers. "He's lucky to have a friend like you."

"That works both ways."

She nodded. Her hair blew gently across her
cheek as she lifted her face. "It's cold," she said after a minute,
tugging her fur-lined coat closer.

He stared at her, the cigarette forgotten in his
fingers. "You've changed," he said. "The light's gone out of
you, Katy."

"I've had a rough time," she said,
averting her eyes. "The memories won't go away overnight."

"Still mooning over the Chicago
mobster?" he asked suddenly, his eyes dangerous.

She went white. With a tiny cry, she turned and
started back toward the car, blinded by the sting of wounded tears. She should
never have told him about Wardell. He'd never get over it. He'd never let her
forget.

He cursed furiously under his breath and threw
the cigarette in the stream, going after her with angry strides.

She felt his big hand on her arm before she
reached the clearing. He whipped her around, close up against him. His size and
strength had never been more evident as he scowled down at her, pale eyes
blazing out of a face dark with anger and subdued passion.

"Why don't you go back to Illinois and
marry him?" he asked curtly. "Maybe that would turn you back into the
girl you were!"

She felt his grip even through the coat. It
hadn't been long enough for the memory of Danny's white rages to pass. She felt
the pain of his bruising hold and prepared herself subconsciously for the blow
that always accompanied Danny's violent grip. She cringed and threw up a
protective arm, shaking as she anticipated the beating Danny had accustomed her
to.

Her posture brought Turk to his senses. He went
very still, his grip relaxing as he realized what she was thinking.

"Oh, my God, Katy," he ground out,
dropping her arm. "I'm not going to hit you! How could you think me
capable of such a thing? I'm not Marlone!"

She had to fight for composure. It took more
than a minute to regain it, and even then she could barely look at him.

His face had gone rigid. "I thought it was
only the one time," he said, his voice rough. "When you lost the
baby. But it wasn't, was it? He beat you more than once."

"For a while it was every day," she
whispered huskily. She wiped at tears, but without looking at him. "The
more dope he used, the worse it was. I have.. .marks..." She swallowed.
"He didn't just use his hands. He used a belt." She lowered her face.

He didn't know what to say, what to do. He was
more confused than he'd ever been in his life, about her feelings and his own.

"Wardell tried to stop him, you said,"
he muttered after a minute, his voice cold as he asked the question.

She lifted her wounded eyes to his. "You
really hate it, don't you, Turk?" she asked huskily. "You hate the
very thought of Blake Wardell."

His eyes flashed wildly. "I can't help
it,"he said harshly. "Marlone was your husband. But, Wardell..."
He cursed, turning away. "It turns my stomach!"

Nothing had ever hurt Katy so much. Her face
felt drawn as the muscles in it went rigid. Turk wasn't going to get over what
she'd done. He hated her and Wardell; she.. .repulsed him.

She turned away, moving slowly back to the car.
She was soiled goods in his mind, something so low that he didn't want to touch
her. That was just as well, because she wasn't sure if she could get past her
fear of male strength to ever allow intimacy again. Her reaction to Turk just
now had shown her that.

He smoked a cigarette before he went back to the
car. He shouldn't have been so violent with her. He'd frightened her all over
again, just when she was getting over her experience. He shouldn't have made
that crack about Wardell, either, he realized belatedly. His jealousy of the
man was getting completely out of hand. It wasn't Katy's fault if she loved the
lousy gambler, was it? He had no right to punish her for what she felt. She'd
loved him once, and he'd thrown her right out of his life. What did he expect,
he wondered with self-loathing, that she'd moon over him as long as she lived
and never let any other man touch her?

Katy, unaware of what he was thinking, had taken
his contempt at face value and accepted it. Her eyes were staring straight
ahead; she was deadly quiet when he came back and cranked the car.

"I'm sorry if I upset you," he said.
"Are you all right?"

"I'm perfectly fine, thank you," she
said, with eerie calm.

He hesitated, but she wouldn't look at him. He
pulled back onto the road and drove home. When she got out at the front steps,
she still hadn't spoken.

Two hours later, they found her in the bathroom
between her bedroom and Marion's, lying unconscious on the floor, a bottle of
sleeping pills spilled beside her disheveled hair.

They were just in time, Cole realized when the
doctor came out to speak to them. He felt as sick as Lacy looked. Turk was
another matter. The man had gone crazy when he saw Katy lying on the floor.
Cole had finally had to hit him to make him turn her loose so they could get
her to the doctor. He'd sent Lacy out of the room, in fact, to spare Turk the
embarrassment of being seen in that condition, sobbing brokenly over Katy's
limp body.

He'd explained it to her while they were waiting
at the small clinic to see if Katy was going to survive at all.

"Poor man," she sighed, pressing close
to Cole as they waited with cold fear to see what was going to happen.
"Cole, if she dies, he'll kill himself," she said huskily.

"I know." His voice was bitter. He
could barely speak at all for the lump in his throat. He loved Katy. They all
did. He felt somehow responsible, as if he'd put her here by refusing to give
in to her obsession with Turk.