Rose(68)

Now that he had started he seemed to relax a little.

“Ma thought Pa hung the moon. No matter how scandalous his behavior, the disgrace he brought on us, or the misery his gambling caused, she never stopped loving him or trying to make us love him just as much.”

He paused.

“After a particularly nasty scandal, a group of family, neighbors, and past friends bought this ranch and forced Pa to come out here. But he never meant to stay. He figured he’d soon find a way to get back. And he did. The war started just months after we arrived. He must have loved it. It was the only thing whose violence matched his own.”

Another pause as the lines in his face hardened.

“Ma was in poor health and Zac still a baby. The boys were too small to look after a ranch, but he never considered that. Hen says they never heard from him. You can imagine what that did to Ma. She died a year later.”

Rose knew George would never understand. To him responsibility was everything.

“Monty merely curses at the mention of Pa’s name, but I think Hen would have killed him if he had come home. He worshiped Ma.”

George might not hate his father, but he could never forgive him. The tragedy, Rose knew, was that he wanted to.

“Your mother must have been a remarkable woman.”

“She never wanted to come to Texas—she considered it a foreign country—but it never occurred to her to oppose Pa.” George paused again, remembering something he didn’t share with Rose. “I don’t think any of us will ever forgive him for what he did to her.”

“You know that’s exactly what you have to do, don’t you?”

“Could you?”

Rose wanted to think she could, but she knew better. She hadn’t forgiven the people of Austin for much less.

“I don’t think so.”

“Maybe I could if I didn’t see the consequences staring me in the face every day. Have you noticed that faint scar around Monty’s neck? It’s a rope burn. Two bandits had just strung him up when Hen found them. Monty was fourteen. Fourteen, for God’s sake, and he thought he was going to die. Hen killed two men that day. He was fourteen, too. If you want to know what that did to them, just look into their eyes. They’re only seventeen, but they’re older than I am.”

Rose didn’t say anything. She couldn’t.

“Jeff didn’t want to join the army. He was afraid he wouldn’t measure up, but Pa shamed him into it. He lost his arm, and now he feels even less a man.”

Rose had never felt so useless. She had looked deep into George’s heart and seen the heat of his passion. She had also seen the iron bands that held it in check. She finally understood, and she felt more helpless than ever.





With a hiss of exasperation, Rose threw back the covers and sat up on the edge of her bed. She was exhausted, but she hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep. She couldn’t stop thinking about last night. Not about George’s father or the vote. About George. She had made the mistake of asking him how he felt about her staying.

“I’ve told you all along how much I appreciated the job you’re doing,” he said. “That hasn’t changed.”

She didn’t know why she asked. She had told him to keep his distance. What did she want from the man?

She knew exactly what she wanted.

She wanted him to say he wanted her to stay more than anything else in the world. She wanted him to say he would be devastated if she left, that he would come after her and bring her back, drag her back if necessary. She wanted him to say he couldn’t imagine life without her, that she was as necessary as the sun or the earth beneath his feet. She wanted him to say she filled his dreams at night and his hopes during the day. She wanted him to say she would be an inseparable part of his life for as long as she lived.

She wanted him to say he loved her.

She wanted him to talk about her eyes, her hair, her lips, her skin, her nose, her ears, even her breasts. Anything except her cooking, how well she kept house, or her wonderful knowledge of Texas law. She wanted him to think of her as a woman. A desirable woman. A woman who caused him to lie awake at night. A woman whose beauty and charm had become an obsession, whose nearness tortured him, body, mind, and soul. A woman who had so thoroughly worked her way into his life he could never feel complete until he possessed her.

Utterly and completely.

She wanted him to be so filled with raging desire when he was around her that she would have to lock her bedroom door to protect her virtue. She wanted his passion for her to utterly vanquish his maddening control, his need for her to be so great he would do anything to win her love.

She longed for him to ache for her as much as she ached for him, to know the agony of spurned love, of unacknowledged love, of love forced into the ignominy of hoping for compliments on cooking and cleaning just so she would know he thought of her. She wanted him to look into her eyes, search desperately for a sign of warmth, a sign of genuine feeling, and find only cold appreciation.