Magnolia (12 page)

“Indeed,” Evelyn replied.

“Are you going to the governor's ball, Mrs. Paine?” Diane broke in, addressing Evelyn.

“Certainly. I'm having a gown designed especially for
it by Magnolia. Really, my dear. You should avail yourself of her services. She does concoct the most delightful gowns.”

Diane sat taller in her chair, offended and not daring to admit or show it. “I must make her acquaintance. Does she live in Atlanta, then?”

Claire stiffened once more until the older woman spoke. “She lives hereabouts,” Evelyn said vaguely. “And you, Mr. Hawthorn—are you and Claire going to the governor's ball?”

“I'm afraid not,” John replied blandly, shocking Claire, who'd worked feverishly to get her special gown ready in time. “We're expecting visitors from out of town on that weekend, and they're the sort of people who don't approve of dancing. Very religious, you see,” he added, and looked so convincing that Claire almost believed him. But he'd said nothing about guests. And she'd so wanted to go to the ball. She was disappointed, but she tried not to show it.

“There will be other years,” she said absently.

“What a pity,” Diane said, glancing at John with disappointment in her soft eyes.

John didn't react to her look at all. He was deep in his own thoughts. He couldn't admit that he didn't dare go for fear of confronting his own family. He wanted nothing to do with his father. The thought of running into the old man at the ball made him angry and uneasy.

And Claire knew nothing about the feud. She would
have loved to know all about her taciturn husband, but he shared nothing about his past life with her.

“Will your parents attend the ball, John?” Diane asked innocently, setting the cat among the pigeons with a smug smile in Claire's direction.

Claire didn't know much about John's parents, as Diane had guessed. She sat stiffly, trying to adjust to this new information, while Diane toyed delicately with her crystal glass.

“I don't know,” he said abruptly, and gave her a glare that actually made her eyebrows fly upward.

The servers began to bring in the first course, saving him from any more complicated reply than that. But Diane had successfully ruined the evening for Claire, who felt like an utter fool.

John knew it, and was sorry. He stared at her all through the delicious meal, but she talked to Evelyn and refused even to look at him.

By the end of the tedious evening, John had pledges for more than enough money to make all the necessary repairs to the orphanage and pay for new toys for Christmas.

“Your wife is quite an organizer, I must say, John,” Mr. Calverson said when all the guests had gone and he was standing outside the restaurant with Claire and Diane and John. “My dear, you've done the bank proud tonight. I shall have to find other projects for you. I had no idea you were on such a friendly basis with so many socially prominent matrons!”

“Yes, she is a dark horse, isn't she?” Diane asked, with pure bile. “Shouldn't we go, Eli? It's very cold out here.”

“Certainly, my dear. Good night, John, Claire.”

He tipped his hat, put Diane in the carriage, and they drove away.

Claire got into their own carriage without John's assistance and sat as far away from him as possible, refusing to respond when he commented on the night, the party, and the weather.

She was on her way upstairs before he came into the house, but he was only two steps behind when she reached their apartment.

“Claire!” he called shortly when she started into her bed room.

She stopped, turning elegantly. “Yes?” she asked, her voice as cold as her heart.

“There are several questions I'd like to ask—” he began.

“And several I'd like to ask, as well,” she shot back. “But I realize that I'm unlikely to obtain answers, since you obviously feel that I have no importance in your life whatsoever. You made that abundantly clear tonight. Diane knows all about your background, I gather,” she added coldly.

“We were engaged,” he said heavily.

“Yes, and we are married,” she replied, gray eyes sparking with fury. She tossed her purse and her cloak onto the arm of a chair beside the door and turned to confront him. “Yet I know more about Mrs. Dobbs downstairs than I know about you!”

He took a cigar from his pocket and clipped off the end with a cutter. “What do you want to know about me, Claire?” he asked suddenly—and with a softness in his dark eyes that confounded her. She didn't know how it pleased him that she was curious about him. In recent days, he'd almost convinced himself that she'd fallen completely out of love with him.

“Are you going to smoke that in here?” she demanded. “Because if you are, I shall sleep in my automobile in the shed!”

He cocked an eyebrow and chuckled at her vehemence. “I hadn't planned to smoke it inside. I usually have it on the veranda before I retire. Outside, my dear…where the smoke troubles no one.”

“No one except God,” she said coolly.

He ignored that. “What do you want to know about me?”

It was an opening that she almost took advantage of. He was offering to tell her, presumably, anything she wanted to know. But as relaxed as he appeared to be, she sensed a tension in him. She didn't want to provoke a scene such as had happened on one other evening, to have him throw up to her that she'd tempted him.

“What use is it?” she asked, and sounded unutterably weary of the whole thing. She started to turn when his voice stopped her.

“My parents live in Savannah,” he said, volunteering something that she would never have asked him. “My father and I have been estranged for a number of years. I never
go home, nor do they come here. He has forbidden my mother, my brother, and my sister to speak to me.”

She moved to the velvet-covered chair and held on to its carved rosewood frame for support. Her heart beat madly. “Why?”

He shoved a hand into his pocket with a rough sigh. “I was in the fighting in Cuba. I joined the service after I graduated from the Citadel in '89 because I was tired of books and education, and I loved the very thought of soldiering and war.” He laughed coldly. “You see how romanticism warps the mind? I thought the military glorious and exciting and adventurous.” His gaze fell to the Persian rug on the floor and traced its swirls and lines. “But my father convinced me that the military was no life, so I mustered out to go to Harvard. Then, as you know, I came here in '96 and began to work for Eli. But in '97 there were rumors of an impending war with Spain, so I reenlisted. The talk of fighting invigorated me. I went home to my family on leave, raving about the mistreatment of Cuban nationals at the hands of the Spanish, which I had heard from a newspaperman passing through town. My young twin brothers, Robert and Andrew, were incensed by the plight of the Cuban people and impressed by my tales of military life. They went right out and joined the navy.” He paused briefly. “They were on the USS
Maine
when it blew up in Havana Harbor in February of '98, two months before the United States declared war on Spain and sent armed forces to fight in Cuba.”

She hardly dared breathe. “I see.”

He looked up. “My father blamed me for their deaths. No explanation I could make would satisfy him. After war was declared, I was in the thick of the fighting outside Havana.” He shrugged powerful shoulders and fingered the unlit cigar with the hand that wasn't in his pocket. “I was wounded. They contacted my father and he sent a telegram back. It read that he had no son in the army.” He laughed coldly. “So you see, I really had nothing to come back to.”

“You were engaged to Diane before you went to war.”

“I had been,” he corrected. “I was keeping company with her when I enlisted. I proposed while I was on leave, the Thanksgiving before my unit shipped out for Cuba, while my brothers were raw recruits looking forward to their hitch on a ship,” he said. “She wanted me to ask my father for…something.” He refused to mention his family's wealth or his inheritance, since it was lost anyway. “My father refused, which created the first rift between us, and she married Calverson when I shipped out to go to war.”

“While you were in Cuba,” she said, infuriated.

He sighed. “She was alone and in financial trouble,” he said, absently defending her even now. “I'm certain that Calverson persuaded her that I might not come back at all. He was here and I wasn't, and her family was in desperate need.”

Claire was thinking that if her family had been in desperate need, she'd have worked herself to death trying to save them, but she wouldn't have forsaken a fiancé in a war
to do it. She didn't say that. She was sure that he wouldn't hear criticism of Diane.

“It was a sad homecoming for you,” was all she said.

He spoke briefly about the cold, lonely dock on the eastern tip of Long Island where his regiment had been sent from Cuba. Coming from the tropics to the icy cold of Long Island had been responsible for making many of the men sick. It had taken a petition signed by Teddy Roosevelt and the regimental officers to get the U.S. government even to rotate the troops out of Cuba, where they were literally starving to death. And instead of sending them back to Florida to muster out, they were sent to New York State. John had arrived in America, wounded and disillusioned, with only the companionship of fellow soldiers to make it less stark.

The experience had hardened him. His memories of Cuba would always be bittersweet as he recalled fallen comrades and yellow fever and the Cuban resistance. He also remembered Teddy Roosevelt's deep, booming voice praising his Rough Riders for their sacrifices and their valor, and wishing that he'd been part of that volunteer force, under Teddy's command. He respected the man. Obviously, so did those fire-eating recruits of his, many of whom had been lawmen in the West, some even outlaws. A Texas outlaw had, in fact, been given a pardon thanks to Teddy's intervention after the man served so valiantly in Cuba.

The experience of meeting Roosevelt had colored his memories. Roosevelt became governor of New York State, and later ran on the ticket with Republican incumbent
presidential candidate William McKinley, as his vice president. McKinley won on November 6, 1900.

“It was quiet, at least,” he said. He searched her eyes. “Did I ever tell you what a difference you made by coming to see me in the hospital?”

She beamed shyly. “Did I, really?”

“You kept me alive, I think. You were always smiling, always happy. It was one of the best times of my life.” Amazing, he thought as he spoke, that he hadn't realized at the time how important Claire was to him.

Claire felt her heart swell. “I hoped you didn't mind that I came with Uncle Will. I enjoyed doing what little I could for you. I suppose Mr. Calverson had no qualms about giving your job back to you when you returned. People thought it a little strange, you know, because you'd once been engaged to his wife and he'd taken her from you.”

“Yes.” He'd wondered about that himself from time to time. “But I suppose it didn't hurt that I had a degree in business and that I was a wizard with numbers. In fact, I also worked in a bank up North while I was in school at Harvard.”

She watched him trace a path along the unlit cigar, as if he were remembering.

“You never spoke about Cuba, even on those long evenings when you and my uncle Will played chess in our parlor.”

His gaze lifted to hers. “I try to forget. Most of the memories are not pleasant ones.”

“Uncle Will said that you were given a medal for what you did in Cuba.”

“I had a Silver Star,” he said, without telling what he'd won it for. “And a Purple Heart for that wound in the lung.”

She remembered seeing a rough scar on his chest, just below the nipple. She averted her face, to hide her own memories.

“I know that your parents died of cholera when you were ten,” he said.

She looked at him, surprised. “Uncle Will told you?”

He nodded. “Did you finish school?”

“Yes. I wanted to go on to college at Agnes Scott and read history, but there was no money.”

“Because Will spent it all on his passion for machines,” he said, guessing.

She flushed. “I didn't want it so badly after all, I suppose,” she said, hedging. “And it was fun learning about my uncle's motorcar.”

His eyes were all over her, like hands, tracing and appraising. They narrowed, smoldered. He wanted her. Just like that. She was his wife. He had a hunch that she wouldn't deny him. All he would have to do was kiss her. One kiss, and he could have her; it was in her eyes. She, like him, remembered the ecstasy they'd shared.

She bit her lower lip hard, trying to restore sanity to a mind crazy to have him. She lifted her face. “I must go to bed,” she said firmly.

His dark eyes glittered. “Whose?” he asked quietly.

The flush got worse. “My own, unless you don't mind increasing the risk of a child,” she said deliberately.

His jaw tightened. “It would be worth any risk,” he said huskily. “I want you.”

Such plain speaking embarrassed her. She lowered her head. “I am not Diane,” she said through her teeth.

The sound of her name on his wife's lips went through him like a knife. His intake of breath was audible. As if he could ever have confused the two of them! Did she realize what an insult she'd just offered him? His fist clenched in his pocket, and the fingers holding the expensive cigar all but crushed it.

“Perhaps it would be better not to take the risk,” he said stiffly. “Good night, Claire.”

“Good night, John.”

She went slowly into her room and closed the door. Once inside, her heart raced wildly. If only he had said
Damn the risk!
But here was proof that his hunger for Claire was only physical. All she had to do was mention Diane, and all his ardor died a quick death. It was something she must remember, she told herself firmly, and she refused to think of what might have happened.