Pamela Morsi (8 page)

Pansy eyed him skeptically. “Well, I don’t see anything all that honest in pretending interest in one man to make another one jealous.”

But, of course, she had understood. She’d understood both of them. She could almost feel the sting of
Miss Gussie’s rejection. And she certainly knew how hard Rome had worked and how long he had dreamed of buying into the ice company.

So she let him do what he’d already decided that he would, and he kissed her toes and ran his tongue along the sole of her foot to say thank you.

She understood, all right. And she didn’t mind spending the evening alone. But somehow the combination of the two was unsettling.

“I think your Miss Gussie is barking up the wrong tree,” she’d told Rome. “I don’t think Amos Dewey can be run to ground.”

“What are you talking about?”

Pansy sighed. “That man is not one whit closer to being ready for a new woman in his life than he was the day he put Bess in the grave.”

Rome considered her words thoughtfully.

“Not everyone can just get up the next day and start all over again.”

From anyone else, such a statement would have been a slap in the face. She knew that Rome had not meant it to be as condemning as it sounded. But the shoe fit, and the whole town intended to see that Pansy wore it.

She set the stereoscope aside and got to her feet. Lamp in hand, she wandered out into the hallway. She considered going upstairs to bed, but it was far too early and she would never sleep. Pansy walked toward the back of the house, stepping into the dining room with its long, majestic mahogany table. Dinner had not been served in the room since her husband’s funeral.

She held the light up to near eye level and gazed at the portrait of her husband that hung upon the wall. It was a flattering likeness done the year before his
death. The artist had made the man almost handsome. Grover had not been so in life. But what was not captured upon the canvas was the spirit of the man. The lively twinkle that enlivened his eyes as he made some dry, witty comment that only the two of them understood well enough to laugh at.

Many people thought that he’d chosen Pansy because she was young and pretty. And that she’d married him for money and security. Those people would never understand how important it was to find someone in life with whom to share the inside jokes.

Her heart began to ache and she turned from the portrait abruptly.

She walked through the narrow serving door into the kitchen. She wandered about the room for several minutes before breaking off a hunk of cheese and setting it atop a piece of dry, day-old bread. She carried her small meal out the back door. Aimlessly she walked through her yard, eating and thinking. She stopped and gazed up into the darkness of the Texas night. There were a million stars in the sky. Tiny dots of fire in a cool night sky. She just looked. She just wondered.

Was her sweet husband up there a part of the heavens? Or was he just a rotted corpse six feet underground? She wanted to believe the former, but was tortured with the image of the latter.

She had been so cold, so empty inside. She had needed warmth. She’d needed a man’s arms around her. She’d not chosen wisely for the job. Judge Barclay had been her husband’s best friend. He had been bowed down with grief himself, she had thought She had turned to him in a moment of weakness. That moment had cost Pansy her reputation.

Perhaps she should have picked Amos Dewey, she mused to herself and snorted in derision. She would
certainly have been in no danger of losing her virtue to an unscrupulous man.

Amos was not a man at all these days. Gussie Mudd might not understand that. But Pansy knew that for a fact.

She’d had trouble with a bad tooth last winter and had let him examine her, to see if it should come out. He had, of necessity, looked down her throat and touched her neck, run his fingers along the sensitive flesh below her ear.

He was handsome, male, and he was close. Pansy could not have been expected to be unmoved. She had wanted him. She had wanted his hands to drift down along her throat to her collarbone, his fingers to find the neckline of her bodice and slide beneath it. She had wanted him to cup her breast in his palm, to tease the turgid nipple between his thumb and forefinger. She had wanted … she had wanted so much. But she had opened her eyes and saw him above her. Cool and distant. Completely unmoved. Clearly, he had felt nothing.

Pansy had become very knowledgeable about men in the past few years. She knew when a casual brush against her shoulder was dripping with unfulfilled lust. And she knew that a near-intimate encounter could be purely professional. When Amos touched her, it had not been with the careful courtesy of a man doing his job. It had been without any awareness of her as a female.

Pansy lowered her eyes to the world around her once more and shook her head. She and Amos Dewey. They had a lot in common. They had both married for life and lost their spouses far too soon. Pansy’s husband was struck down as if like a bolt from the blue. Amos’s wife had suffered a long, protracted illness.
But death, no matter how inevitable or unexpected, is always a surprise.

Their tragic losses were so similar. However, their reactions to that fate could not have been more different.

For Dewey, it was as if he had died as well. He allowed his heart to be buried in his wife’s coffin and he walked the world with no feelings but hunger, thirst and a terrible tiredness.

Pansy would have none of that. Death had robbed her of her husband, her hope, her dreams. She would not allow it to rob her of her spirit as well. If that made her a harlot and a disgrace to the people of Cottonwood, then so be it. She far preferred living in a scandal than in a sarcophagus.

Amos Dewey, of course, was lauded for his lifeless living. He was a tragic figure whom all admired. Like the fine stallion who had lost his will to run, the husbandman had given up on his bloodline and cut the source of his future to make him more manageable today.

Emotional gelding was what it was. It was a powerful obstacle to be overcome. She didn’t envy Gussie Mudd the task.

But she
did
envy Gussie Mudd tonight. She envied Gussie walking with Rome and talking with Rome and being seen with him in public. Something that she would never be able to do.

Since their affair began almost a year ago, her handsome iceman had kept himself totally to her. He didn’t even see other women socially. And, of course, he’d asked Pansy to wed him.

Not the most traditional of marriage proposals
, she said to herself.

They lay naked in each other’s arms on a warm summer night, content and satisfied.

“We could be good together, Pansy,” he said. “Marriage to me would restore your reputation. They could still talk, but they wouldn’t be able to cut you or treat you with such disdain.”

The loss of her good name was a paltry thing when compared to the loss of her mate. But she didn’t try to explain that to Rome.

‘I’m not the most eligible fellow in town,” he continued awkwardly. “But I work hard and I would treat you well.”

Pansy had looked over at him. He had a nice face, handsome in its own way, and such strength in his arms and shoulders the sight could make a woman’s mouth water.

“Are you in love with me, Rome?” she asked him.

She saw the truth in his face immediately; still he hesitated in his words.

“I don’t think I’m the kind of man who falls in love,” he told her quietly. “But I would try, if it is what you want.”

She rolled in his arms and kissed him then. It was not a sultry meeting of mouths born of hot passion, intent upon enticement, but an honest gesture of genuine affection.

“I have already loved and been loved,” she said. “Grover Richardson adored me.” She smiled as she added with a teasing lilt, “It was the quality I liked best about him.”

Rome’s eyes showed real sympathy. Since her fall from grace, many in town had rewritten her personal history to suit her unsavory end. They forgot how romantic her wedding had been and how content and
devoted she had been to her husband. Now she was painted as a crass adventuress who had married for money.

Rome, however, understood the truth.

“I can never be him,” he acknowledged. “But I would be with you and protect you and try to make you happy.”

She had laughed without humor. “This is about as happy as I get, sir. But you, you deserve a woman who loves you. And one that you love so much you just ache from the burden of it.”

Pansy swallowed the last of her little snack and dusted her hands together to whisk away any leftover crumbs.

“Yes, that is truly what you deserve,” she said aloud.

A sound next door caught her attention. She turned to see the Pearsalls coming up the walkway in front of their house. Most likely they were returning from the wedding party downtown. They had an unimpeded view of Pansy standing in her backyard talking to herself. And if she had heard them, they surely had heard her.

Vera Pearsall, a former friendly neighbor, actively detested her. Probably because Vera’s husband spent every free moment at home watching Pansy’s house, hoping for a glimpse of the wicked widow. The townspeople had learned that Vera could be counted upon to report every whisper and movement that occurred at the Richardson house.

Pansy almost sighed aloud.

On one of the most boring evenings of her remembrance, she had still managed to do something to keep her solitary life and wild reputation in the forefront of Cottonwood’s community gossip.

T
HEY WERE LAUGHING TOGETHER AS THEY MADE THEIR
way down the street. The evening had started out nervously and uncertainly. But they had danced and giggled and been surrounded by friends. It was a thoroughly pleasant way to spend an evening.

Gussie had never realized that Rome could be so utterly charming. There had been, of course, several uncomfortable moments. But for the most part it had simply been fun. In fact, it had been one of the most pleasant social events she’d been to in quite some time. That was a delightful surprise. But she couldn’t help wishing that it had been Amos at her side.

Rome sensed her disappointment.

“It was too bad that Amos left so quickly after the ceremony,” he said.

Gussie nodded agreement.

“But I’m sure he saw us,” she said.

Rome chuckled. “Of course he did. Why else would he have taken off so quickly?”

That was undoubtedly true, she thought.

“It’s too bad that he didn’t stay around to see how well we dance together,” Rome said.

Gussie smiled. “He would have been surprised. We’ve danced together many times and he knows how left-footed I am.”

“Well, I thought you were wonderful,” Rome told her. “And on such things I always rely on my own opinion.”

She was pleased with the compliment. More pleased than perhaps she should have been. But kind words of praise were always welcome, and with Amos they were infrequent. It wasn’t that he was not as polite or as gracious. His manners were considerably more elegant than those of Rome Akers. Amos just had a lot of things on his mind, Gussie assured herself. He would say nice things to her if he thought of them. And perhaps after tonight, she would be in his thoughts a good deal more often.

They reached Gussie’s house. Her front gate was stubborn, the stiff and rusty bar fastener difficult to manage in the darkness. But before she had a chance to suggest that he allow her to open it, Rome reached over and easily unlatched it from the inside.

“Oh, you did that so effortlessly,” she said. “Amos always has trouble with it.”

“The gate?” Rome shrugged. “It’s just temperamental. I’ve been coming and going out of it for years. Guess I’m pretty familiar.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

He held it open for her as she passed by him and down the front walk. Rome followed.

She reached the steps and then turned toward him.

“Well, I certainly hope our efforts worked tonight,” she said.

He was standing a few feet from her, hands in his pockets.

“I hope so too, Miss Gussie,” he said. “I hope the guy doesn’t sleep all night and is here before breakfast with a proposal on his lips.”

She laughed lightly.

“Is that what men do?” she asked. “Have a long, sleepless night and then turn up in the morning with the question on their lips?”

In the silvery moonlight she could see him respond with a shrug.

“It’s what I would do if my woman were out with another man,” he said.

He used the term
my woman
with a certain emphasis that was unexpected and Gussie wondered briefly what it would be like to be Rome Akers’s woman. Had anyone ever been that to him? It was strange that she had known him so well, known him so long, and just now realized how little she really knew about him.

Instinctively, she understood it was better that way.

“So,” she said, “on the off chance that tonight’s performance was not enough to drive him to bended knee, what should we do next?”

Thoughtful, Rome seated himself on the porch steps. Though there were chairs only a few feet away, Gussie followed his example. Or she did so to a point. Reme was sprawled upon the steps, one foot high, one low, his elbows behind him resting upon the porch. She sat more circumspectly, back straight, ankles together and her hands clasped at her knees.

“I don’t think there is much point in my coming to call on you every evening,” Rome said. “I’ll be sitting on your porch every afternoon to go over the books with you as usual. I’m sure the gossips will be able to come up with a good deal of speculation over that.”

‘Oh, my goodness,” Gussie said. “I’m sure they will.”

“Don’t let it concern you,” Rome replied quickly. “We’ll be in plain view of anyone passing on the street. There is absolutely no chance that your reputation will be sullied or that people will begin to talk about you in any uncommon fashion.”

“No, of course not.”

“But everyone will know that we are together,” he continued. “And Amos will have to wonder if all our discussions are … purely business.”

He said the latter in a deep-voiced whisper and with a dark, dramatic inflection that made Gussie giggle. Across the darkness she could see his teeth gleaming in a broad smile.