The Kissing Stars (19 page)

For the next hour, the Aurorians ate and drank and danced. Even the animals got into the spirit of the day, Castor and Pollux having wandered out of the barn and plopped down just outside the kitchen— downwind, thank goodness. Rosie for some reason chose to sit at Gabe’s feet and wouldn’t move. As a result, he strummed the guitar and sang a song he tided “Pickled Pig’s Feet in a Mason Jar.”

Amy Baker chucked a roll at him. Rosie went for the bread then returned to her position at Gabe’s feet, only this time she managed to lie on his feet which amused everyone but Gabe.

Soon the colonel leaned back and patted his stomach, declaring himself full near to busting. At that point Amy glanced at Jack and he nodded Tess’s instincts went on alert. Something was definitely up.

The young man excused himself, then returned a few moments later carrying his humidor. The box containing Jack’s favorite smokes. The one thing he refused to share with the community. “What’s up, Jack?” Andrew asked.

Tess knew. She could tell by the look on Amy’s face.

Jack said, “I’ve been saving these for a special occasion and this is as special as they come. I have an announcement to make. Our efforts have met with success. My wife is expecting a child.”

A baby. Tess listened to the news with mixed emotions. Fierce gladness rushed through her like water through a bursting dam. But wrenching regret rode as driftwood beneath the surface, battering both her heart and her soul.

Summoning her grit, Tess did her best to lock any sad thoughts firmly away as she joined her friends in offering the happy couple their congratulations. “Amy,” she said, giving the beaming young woman a hug. “I am so thrilled for you. Are you feeling all right?”

“Thank you, Tess.” Amy’s hand drifted down to hover over her womb. “It’s such a grand thought. And I know she’s a girl. I sense it. We’ll have a beautiful little girl and she’ll grow up to make a grand scientific discovery one day. I just know it.”

“A girl?” Tess repeated. “Do you really think you’ll have a girl?”

Jack slipped his arm around his wife and beamed. “A bright-eyed little girl just as pretty as her mama.”

Instinctively, Tess’s gaze sought Gabe. He was busy selecting a smoke from the box and didn’t catch her look. “Congratulations, Jack,” she told him. “This is truly wonderful news.”

The lump in her throat prevented Tess from speaking any more, so she wrapped her arms around Amy and gave her another hug. When she pulled away, Andrew stood at her back. He wrapped his arms around her and leaned down to whisper in her ear, “You’re a good friend, Tess, and you’re a strong woman.”

“Thank you, Andrew.”

Along with Doc and Twinkle, he was the only other resident of Aurora Springs who knew all the relevant details about her past. She allowed herself a moment of rest in the comfort of his embrace, and said a quick prayer of thanks for friends like Amy and Andrew.

Then, she pasted on a smile and called, “Colonel, if your accordion is handy, how about a waltz? I think Jack should dance with the mother-to-be, don’t you?”

And so the dancing resumed and merrymaking recommenced Tess tried, she tried hard, but the past had charged in and caught her unaware. Knocked her flat. Grief welled up inside her.

Needing some time to herself, she watched for a chance to slip away unobtrusively. Her opportunity came a short time later when Gabe asked Twinkle for a dance. Tess gave no conscious thought to where she was going, but her feet carried her home and into her bedroom where she retrieved a key from her jewelry box. She climbed the stairs to the loft and made her way toward the farthest, darkest, dustiest comer where a trunk sat against a rafter. Tess sank to her knees, inserted the key, and unlocked her past.

GABE WONDERED what had come over Tess. It wasn’t like her to get so down in the mouth, especially not during a party. She’d hid it well, and he didn’t think anyone else had noticed. But he’d watched her closely and something was definitely bothering her.

Half a dozen times he’d started to ask her what was wrong, but he’d always stopped. She wore a hands-off sign as obvious as the bow around Rosie’s neck.

He was willing to wait her out until she up and sneaked away. Once he realized she’d disappeared from the festivities, he knew he had to track her down. Because Andrew had been hugging on her, Gabe approached him first. “What’s the matter with Tess?”

“What do you mean?” He tried to look surprised, but he couldn’t manage it.

“She’s upset. Why?”

Andrew wouldn’t meet Gabe’s eyes. He did, however, keep his lips zipped tight, so Gabe turned to Twinkle next. “Where is Tess?”

She glanced around and frowned. “Oh, dear. I was afraid of this.”

“Afraid of what? What’s the matter with her?”

He startled in surprise when she reached up and grasped his chin, then pulled his face around so she could look into his eyes. She studied him long and hard, and Gabe felt as if she peered straight into his heart.

Maybe there was something to this crystal ball stuff of hers after all.

Abruptly, she gave a satisfied nod. “She’s more to you than just your past isn’t she?”

Gabe drew a deep breath, then let out the air in a rush. “Actually, I’m hoping she’ll be my future.”

“Then go to her, Gabe. Go to her and make her tell you what happened. She can’t be yours until she does. But I caution you to be gentle with her. These moods don’t come on her often, but when they do, she isn’t herself. She’s fragile. Make sure you keep that in mind.”

The warning sounded ominous. “Where do you think she went? Up Paintbrush Mountain? Lookout Peak?”

Twinkle thought about it a moment, then shook her head. “Try her house first. Knowing her, you’ll find her up in the loft. She keeps a trunk up there, and I bet my orange turban that’s where she went.”

The orange was Twinkle’s favorite. Gabe would start with the house. Sure enough, he found her seated on the floor, folded squares of cloth of some sort in her lap. “What is the matter? What’s wrong, darlin’?”

She looked up at him then and he saw an ocean of grief floating in her eyes. “Her scent is gone. It stayed for a time, but it’s all gone now. All gone. Oh, Gabe, I miss her so much.”

He knelt beside her and took one of her hands in both of his. “Miss who?”

“Rachel. Rachel Elizabeth.” As tears overflowed her eyes to slip down her cheek, she added, “She was our daughter, Gabe.”

Everything inside him froze. “Daughter? I have a daughter? Where is she?”

“She was born too early, and she wasn’t strong. She couldn’t fight hard enough. But she tried. Oh, she tried so hard. I had her two weeks before I lost her.”

Baby clothes. Those were baby clothes packed away in that trunk. Gabe dropped her hand and sat back on his heels. He dragged a hand down his face as he tried to comprehend what she had told him.

A baby. A little girl.

Dead.

“Oh, God.” He worked to draw a breath.

Tess gently unfolded one of the squares in her lap. It was a gown. A tiny little pink baby sacque.

“She was so beautiful,” Tess said, her smile bittersweet. “A full head of hair. It was red, Gabe. She had a tiny little head just full of red hair. There was this place…” She tilted her head to one side and pointed at a spot. “It was a swirl, a little nebula of downy red hair. Her eyes were blue, of course. All baby’s eyes are blue when they’re born. But Rachel’s didn’t muddy. They were still true blue when she died.”

Gabe flinched at the word.

“She didn’t have any eyelashes that you could see, but she did have all her fingers and all her toes.” Tess stared at the tip of her finger, using her thumb to mark a spot not even halfway down her index finger. “Her entire hand was hardly bigger than this. It never had the chance to grow any larger. Her voice was little, too. A tiny kitten voice. It broke my heart. I used to worry so when I heard her cry, but at the same time I worried she wouldn’t. One day she didn’t.”

Shit. Shit. Shit
. Gabe rocked back and forth. His feet went numb from sitting on them. His whole body was numb. A baby. A daughter. A death.

Tess suddenly set aside the baby clothes and went digging in the trunk. She removed a gold locket that dangled from a chain. She held it out to him saying, “I saved a lock of her hair. You can see the color.”

His hand trembling like a palsied old man, Gabe reached for the necklace. He didn’t open it. He couldn’t.

“And I have a portrait,” Tess continued, returning her attention to the trunk. “I usually save it to look at last. It’s not a painting, just a charcoal drawing the doctor’s wife did for me. She was something of an artist, and I think he must have told her Rachel wouldn’t live long because she showed up with a sketch pad when Rachel was three days old.”

She withdrew a folded photographer’s mat from the trunk and tried to hand it to him. He wouldn’t take it. He still hadn’t opened the locket. Forcing the word through the noose of emotion strangling his throat, Gabe spoke for the first time since Tess told him he’d once been a father. “No.”

She straightened her arm, holding it right in his face. Silently demanding.

“No,” he repeated, staring with something akin to horror at the folder. This news had slain him. He had to prepare himself.

“Yes,” she hissed, leaning toward him. “Yes, you will, Gabe Cameron.”

His gaze flew up to meet hers and what he saw there took him aback. Her eyes were glittering blue diamonds, hard and cutting and filled with fury. Her voice trembled with the force of her emotions. “You will look at her and you will listen of her and you will touch her things and do everything you should have done eleven years ago. You weren’t there for her when she needed you. You weren’t there. She needed you. We needed you. You weren’t there!”

She swung her hand and slapped him.

Before he could absorb the blow, she threw herself into his arms. She clutched the portrait to her heart as grief poured out. She wept violently, passionately; her bereavement a bitter, inconsolable despair.

And Gabe couldn’t breathe. Something was crushing his chest. He panted, trying to… survive.

Oh, God. A
baby
. A
daughter
.

He hadn’t been there.

How long Tess cried he couldn’t say. It might have been minutes or days for all he knew. He held her until the storm of tears rained itself out, and she fell into an exhausted slumber in his arms. And then he continued to hold her.

Eleven damned years too late
.

TESS AWOKE at sunset. She was in her own room, tucked into her bed. Her body felt battered, but her mind and her soul were at peace.

Then she turned her head and saw her husband.

He sat in the hardwood rocker staring out the window. Rachel’s picture lay in his lap. He held the locket the chain looped around his right hand, his thumb stroking the pendant.

His face looked ravaged.

Tess closed her eyes, haunted by the sight. Shame nipped at her, its teeth razor-sharp. She’d been cruel in the telling of it. Cruel with her accusations and omissions. She’d shared only the bad and none of the good.

Bedsheets rustled as she slid to a sitting position. While she searched her mind for the right words with which to begin. “Gabe, I’ve tried to tell you a number of times.”

He cut her off with a question. “Why was Rachel born early?”

“The doctor said it sometimes happens that way when a woman…”

“When a woman what?” he prodded, his expression stark, his sorrow so raw it bled from his voice. “Is all alone? Has no man around to help her?”

“Gabe, I—”

“Your father threw you out because you were carrying, didn’t he? Because she was my baby. He hated me because of how Billy died, so he hated you, too.”

She nodded.

He shut his eyes. “God, Tess. Your father was as worthless as mine.” Then he let out a chuckle that sent shivers racing down her spine. “And I’m as worthless as Monty Cameron. Like father, like son. I followed in the old man’s footsteps without even knowing it.”

“No, Gabe,” she protested her fists clutching at the bedcovers. “I’m sorry I said what I did earlier. I’m sorry I slapped you. It wasn’t your fault you weren’t there. You would have been had you known. I know that; I knew it then. It was wicked of me to accuse you like that. It was the grief talking. I get that way sometimes and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I told you about Rachel in that way. You deserved better.”

He spat an oath. “Not my fault? You mean like it wasn’t my father’s fault he left my mother to die giving birth in a swamp? Where did you give birth, Tess? Out here in the Chihuahuan Desert?” He lifted Rachel’s picture and asked, “Where did my baby die?”

She chose her words carefully. “I think this would be easier for me…for us both…if I started this story from the beginning.”

He stood and walked toward her, placed the picture and pendant carefully on the bed. Then, without speaking he turned away and returned to the rocker where he sat, resting his elbows on his knees, his hands loosely clasped. He stared at the ground, his entire being braced as if anticipating a blow. “Let’s hear it.”

“You already know the worst of it,” she said softly. “Nothing I have to say will be any worse than hearing about Rachel.”

He shrugged in reply. Tess took a deep breath and began. “As you know, after Billy’s funeral my father invited me back to the Rolling R. When he found out I was getting sick in the mornings, he guessed the truth. His fury caught me by surprise. He was so full of hate. He said no Cameron spawn would ever get a hand on anything that should have belonged to Billy. He cursed the Cameron name. Cursed me.”

Gabe’s features hardened like mortar. “Did he hurt you? Hit you?”

She shook her head. “He wasn’t physical. Not much anyway. Nothing more than a shove or two.”

Gabe’s grip on his hands tightened, his knuckles growing white with the strain.

Tess pressed on. “The problem was, he sent me away without any money. All I had was what you and I had saved in our biscuit tin at home.”

“That couldn’t have been much more than forty dollars.”

“Twenty-seven fifty, to be exact.”