Bride in Barbados

• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• Chapter Eleven
  
• Chapter Twelve
  
• Chapter Thirteen
  

"I'll Never Forgive You for This, Travis. Never!"


She paused. "How could I have been such a fool? I was so
careful to be honest with you, telling you everything. I didn't want to
keep anything from you, and all the time—"


"Susan, listen to me. I know I should have told you. I
would have—"


"
When
?" Her voice rose shrilly. "I'm
leaving you, Travis. You'll hear from my lawyer about the divorce."

JEANNE STEPHENS loves to travel, but she's always glad to get home to her
Oklahoma cattle ranch. This mother of three loves reading ("I'll read
anything!" she says), needlework, photography and long walks, during
which she works out her latest book.

Dear Reader,

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Silhouette Books

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Dunton Green

Sevenoaks

Kent

TN13 2YE

Copyright © 1982 by Jeanne Stephens

Map by Tony
Ferrara

First printing 1982

ISBN 0 340 32616 6

The dusty Jeep jolted to a stop on the grassy verge at the
edge of a field of sugarcane. The green-leafed stalks, taller than a
man, spread out across the lowland plateau, following the shape of the
coast as far as the eye could see. The sea was calm and quiet, that
deep Caribbean blue that has to be seen to be believed. The sky was
almost as resplendently colored as the sea, with a few puffy cotton
clouds drifting near the horizon. In contrast to the blue of sea and
sky, the sand on the narrow beach was white with a trace of pale gold,
testimony to its coral reef origin, and the cane was at the height of
its lush green and yellow hues.

The door of the Jeep creaked faintly, perhaps protesting
at the way it was forcefully thrust back as the driver climbed out. He
was a tall man with a hard, lean build, burned bronze by the sun. His
hair was black and thick, his brows heavy over brown eyes that caught
the hint of color from the sand and reflected it in golden glints. It
was clear that a narrowing of the lids, bringing the thick black lashes
close together to soften the sun's glare, was habitual, for fans of
fine lines were etched deeply at the corners of his eyes.

His wide mouth twisted into an expression that was more a
grimace than a smile, the straight line of his teeth flashing white in
the surrounding deep tan of his skin. His faded jeans rode low on his
hips and, below the knees, were tucked into tall leather boots that
were dusty from traversing cane fields and dirt lanes too narrow for a
vehicle. His shirt was of blue-gray chambray, spread open almost to his
navel to reveal more bronzed skin and black hair glistening with the
sweat that had drenched the shirt, pasting it to his solidly muscled
midsection and back.

A stained, Western-style straw hat was pushed back from
his face, leaving a wide, banded impression across his forehead as
evidence of its usual position. The hard angles of his features
suggested strength, and a potential for implacability. He had the
appearance of a man who did what had to be done unhesitatingly,
whatever the consequences.

He gazed, squint-eyed, down the narrow space between the
two rows of sugarcane directly in front of him, then with a loose,
swinging gait walked into the opening. Pulling a pocket knife from his
jeans, Travis Sennett cut a short piece of cane from the nearest plant
and examined the cross section with experienced eyes. The stalk was a
healthy yellow and oozing juice, progressing toward the perfect
maturity made possible by the limey richness of the coral soil and the
temperate Barbadian climate.

He tossed the sample aside and pocketed the knife, his
eyes moving on down the straight green wall of cane. Its robust
perfection seemed to mock him. "Damn you, Harris Sennett!" he muttered
softly. Had the old coot really meant to dangle all this beneath his
nose for two years, then yank it away? Maybe his grandfather had merely
wanted to continue pulling the strings, even from his grave. "To think
I got all choked up at your funeral, you capricious old goat! I'll bet
you got a laugh out of that, didn't you?"

Hanging his thumbs on the edges of his pants pockets, he
moved farther into the cane, stopping now and then to check another
stalk. It would be an abundant harvest, possibly the last harvest he
would see on the Sennett Plantation. The thought pushed another soft
curse from him…

As his hands checked the cane, his mind wandered back to
his boyhood when he had come with his parents, at his grandfather's
summons, to live on the plantation.

At seven he had been far too young to realize that his
father, Lyle, had returned to Barbados because he was too indolent to
make something of himself on his own, and too weak to stand up to his
father. These character deficiencies ensured that Lyle would dislike
almost everything about the plantation. There was plenty of hard
physical labor, even for the owner's son, for Harris Sennett believed
in working alongside his overseer and field hands often enough to earn
their respect.

Lyle had preferred supervising from afar, preferably a
shaded veranda with a frosty pi
ñ
a colada in one hand. Breaking into a
sweat while getting his hands dirty alongside the workers was offensive
to tastes honed to a discerning sensitivity at exclusive British
boarding schools.

When Lyle had ventured to suggest that his rowdy young son
could benefit from being shipped off to Lyle's old school, Harris had
retorted flatly, "I don't mean to make the same mistake with my
grandson that I made with you. Until he's ready for college, Travis can
go to school right here on the island."

"You mean a tutor?"

"No tutor!" Harris spat out the word as if its taste
disgusted him.

Aghast, Lyle had exclaimed, "Surely you wouldn't send him
to that school in town along with slaves' descendants and every ragtag
ruffian in the vicinity!"

Harris had snorted, his tone adamant. "I mean to do just
that. Travis can take care of himself. He'll grow up with a good, stiff
backbone." He did not add, "unlike his father," but the criticism was
there in the air between them. Even the seven-year-old Travis had
sensed it.

But if Lyle had disliked the plantation, Travis's mother,
Mary, had hated it with a passion that far outstripped any emotion
elicited by her husband or son. Sometimes in the night, a seven-,
eight-, or nine-year-old Travis had been awakened by his mother's
shrill berating of his father in their bedroom at the opposite end of a
long corridor.

"I'm going crazy, I tell you! I hate this place—
this house, this plantation, this hot little pile of coral they call an
island! I can't stand it here any longer!"

Once Travis had heard his father say, "When he's gone,
we'll sell everything and move back to England. He can't live forever."

His mother's reply had revealed the agony of her
frustration. "What makes you think he can't?" And then she had begun to
sob and it had taken his father a long time to quiet her.

As it had turned out, Mary had not been overstating her
aversion to Barbados. When Travis was ten, she had packed a bag in a
fit of hysteria and walked out. The next day Harris learned that his
daughter-in-law was staying temporarily on a nearby island, waiting for
Lyle to bring her enough money to return to England. Harris sent Lyle
after her, not with the demanded money, but to bring her back to the
plantation where, according to Harris, she belonged.

In one of those cruel strokes that fate sometimes visits
upon men, a long-dormant volcano on the island where Mary had taken
refuge erupted. Mary and Lyle Sennett were among the forty people
killed, and among the handful whose bodies were never recovered.

Left alone with a stubborn, independent old man whose
regard did not manifest itself in demonstrations of affection, even to
a ten-year-old grandson, Travis learned stoicism at an early age. More
pertinently, he learned self-sufficiency, a self-sufficiency modeled on
the curt homespun adages of Harris Sennett:
A man never
backs down. A man never runs from a fight. It's no disgrace to get
knocked down, but it's the worst sort of disgrace not to get back up swinging. A man has to be more determined and
more ruthless than his enemies or he'll take a beating.

Gradually, as he passed through his teens, Travis became
conscious of the void in his life. He missed an occasional gentle
motherly caress or a kind fatherly word. He began to blame his
grandfather and the plantation for his parents' deaths. He managed, in
those crucial adolescent years, to forget Lyle's and Mary's weaknesses,
and turned them, in his mind, into martyrs the equal of Joan of Arc and
Thomas More. He vowed that, when he graduated from college, he would
never again return to Barbados and his grandfather.

Instead, he had gone as a construction engineer to
supervise the building of dams, bridges and roads in remote places
where the work was the most grueling, the conditions the most
primitive, the hours the longest and the pay the highest. The jungles
and wildernesses of Guatemala, Brazil, China—for ten years he
had traveled from one such out-of-the-way corner of the world to
another. Harris's letters occasionally caught up with him, letters
threatening everything short of murder if Travis didn't return to
Barbados. But Harris no longer had the wherewithal to back up his
threats. Travis didn't care who inherited the old man's money; he was
his own man at last, and as determined and unbending as his
grandfather. The streak of iron that had somehow skipped the son's
generation had come out strong and true in the grandson.