Diana Palmer - Lawless

He finished his coffee and glared at her. “I don’t mind if you go out with Grier, as long as you’re discreet,” he said, hating the words even as he spoke them with deliberate carelessness. His black eyes pinned hers. “But you don’t cross the line with him.”

She knew exactly what he meant and she was insulted. “As if I would, Judd!”

“Until it’s annulled, it’s still a marriage,” he continued. “And a few people around town know about it.”

“I understand why you’re so worried about gossip...” she began, and then bit her tongue, because it was a subject he hated.

His chin lifted and his eyes narrowed dangerously. “My father was a minister,” he said roughly. “Can you imagine how it was for him, and for me, to have all of Jacobsville talking about my mother and her blatant affair with the vice president of the local manufacturing company? They didn’t even try to hide it. She moved in with him and lived with him openly while she was still married to my father. Everybody knew. His whole congregation knew, and he had to preach every Sunday. When her lover dropped her for someone younger, after he’d had his fill of the affair, she begged to come home again and pretend that it never happened. My father even tried to let her.”

He averted his eyes to the table, cold with the memory of how those days had been for him. He’d loved his mother. But his father, despite his faith, had been unable to forget what she’d done. In his world, as in Judd’s, vows were sacred. “In the end, it was the gossip that made it impossible for him to forget. It didn’t stop, even after she left her lover. Some of his congregation refused to speak to her. It affected him, even though he tried not to let it. In the end, he asked her to leave, and she went, without an argument.”

“You were only twelve when that happened, weren’t you?” she asked gently, trying to get him to talk about it. He never had.

He nodded. “I loved her. He did, too, but he couldn’t get over what she did. It was too public for either of them to get past it, in a small town.”

Her hand itched to slide across the table to his, but she knew he’d sling it off. He was unapproachable when he talked about the past.

“Did she write to you?”

He shook his head. “He told her that she could, but she moved to Kansas where she had a cousin, and apparently never looked back.” He toyed with the handle of his coffee cup. “We heard that she married again and had a child before she died. All we had was a card announcing the funeral and a dog-eared photograph of Dad and me that she kept in her wallet.” His voice became tight and he sat up straighter.

“Was the child a boy or a girl?” she asked.

He was staring into space with blank eyes. “A girl. She died of spinal meningitis when she was six, and my mother died in a car crash a few months later.” His teeth clenched. “She was a good mother,” he added absently. “Even if she was a lousy wife.”

She studied him quietly. “Sometimes people fall in love with the wrong people,” she began. “I don’t think they can help it.”

His black eyes bore into hers. “In my book, if you make a vow before God, you keep it. Period.”

She sighed, thinking that it was highly unlikely that he’d kept the wedding vow he made to her when she was sixteen, but she didn’t say it. “I expect she was sorry for what she did to your father.”

His broad shoulders moved restlessly. “He said she wrote him a letter. He never told me what was in it, but he admitted that his own pride had killed any hope of them getting back together. He couldn’t bear having everybody know what she did to him.” He smiled sadly. “She was his first woman,” he added, with a glance at Christabel’s wide-eyed stare. “And his last. I don’t suppose some people today even think it’s possible for a man to be faithful to one woman his whole life, but it’s not so rare a thing in small towns, even in the modern world.”

“I guess you’ve thought about how it would have been, if he could have forgiven her.”

“Yes.” He turned the coffee cup in his big, lean hands. “It was a lonely life after she left. I could never talk to him the way I could to her, about things that bothered me. I guess I drew inside myself afterward.”

He’d never talked to her this way before, as if she were an adult, an equal. She studied his hard face and ached to have his mouth on hers again. She knew she’d never be able to forget how it felt.

He pushed back from the table and got to his feet. “I need to get back to Victoria.”

She got up, too, eyeing him curiously. “What did you come down here for?”

“Leo Hart phoned me about some Salers bulls that have died mysteriously. He said he’d heard that our young one was poisoned. I wanted to talk to you about it.”

“Yes, I tried to tell you when it happened that I thought Jack Clark was responsible, and you wouldn’t listen...” she began.

He held up a hand. “You know you didn’t have the boys check that pasture for bloat-causing weeds,” he pointed out. “I told Leo so. I warned you about that, Christabel. You can’t accuse people of crimes without solid proof.”

“I wasn’t! Judd,” she said, exasperated, “there were four other young bulls in that pasture with him. They didn’t die.”

“I know that. They were lucky.”

She grimaced. “They were Herefords,” she said impatiently. “The only bull we lost was a Salers, and he was one of the same group that Fred Brewster bought calves from. He thinks Mr. Brewster’s bull was poisoned, and I still think ours was, too.”

He picked up his Stetson and slanted it across his brow. “Prove it,” he said.

She threw up her hands. “I don’t save dead bulls!” she exclaimed. “You wouldn’t believe me and I couldn’t afford an autopsy! We buried him with the backhoe!”

“Dig him up.”

She gave him a speaking glare. “Even if I did, where am I going to get the money to have an autopsy done?”

“Good point.” He sighed. “I’m skint. I used the last of my savings to repair that used tractor we had to have for haying.”

“I know,” she said, feeling guilty. “Listen, as soon as I graduate next year, I’ll get a job in town at one of the businesses. Computer programming pays good wages.”

“Then who’ll do the books?” he asked. “I don’t mind writing checks to pay bills, but I’m not burying myself in ten columns of figures and justifying bank statements. That’s your department.”

“I’ll justify the statements and do the printouts at night or on the weekends.”

“Poor Grier,” he said sarcastically.

“I only just met the man,” she pointed out.

“Stay out of parked cars with him,” he said with rare malice.

“He drives a truck,” she reminded him pertly, throwing his own earlier statement back at him.

“You know what I mean.” He turned and started out the front door.

She followed him, seething inside. He didn’t want her, but he didn’t want any other man around her, either.

“I’ll do what I please, Judd,” she said haughtily.

He whirled at the front porch. “You put your name on a marriage license,” he reminded her curtly.

“So did you, but that’s not stopping you from doing what you want to!”

He lifted an eyebrow and went on down the steps to his truck. “The film people are coming back Saturday to set up their equipment,” he added. “The director’s bringing Tippy Moore with him, and the guy who’s playing the cowboy—Rance Wayne.”

She couldn’t have cared less about the movie people. She hated the way Judd’s eyes twinkled when he mentioned Tippy Moore. The woman was internationally famous for her beauty. Christabel was going to look like a cactus plant by comparison, and she didn’t like it.