Dream's End (10 page)

“Aren't you buying Amanda's?” she asked bitterly, glaring at him.

He paused. “It's different with her. She doesn't want ties, and neither do I.”

“You don't consider marriage a tie?” She looked straight into his glittering eyes. “Do you think I'd use the back stairs to your bedroom while she spent the better part of her life in Houston, Curry? Is that what you had in mind for me?”

He had the grace to flush, his eyes stormy and strange. “It wouldn't be like that.”

“Oh, wouldn't it?” She laughed without humor. “Do you think I'm so stupefied by a few of your kisses that I'll tell Jim Black sorry and climb into your bed?
I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I'm still going. If you thought you could keep me here by blinding me with your potent charm, you lose.”

He looked for an instant as if he'd been hit from behind. “You think that?” he asked in an ominously quiet tone.

“Did you think you had me buffaloed?” she replied with a coolness that was smoothly convincing. “That I wouldn't guess what you were up to? I may be naïve, Curry, but I'm not stupid. I've seen you in action, remember, and I know better than most how low you'll stoop to get what you want. You couldn't stand letting Jim Black walk away with anything you considered your property, could you?” She drew in a sharp breath. “Did you have to grit your teeth when you kissed me, Curry?” she asked bitterly. “After all, you said yourself that no man would be blind enough to want me.”

“What the hell are you talking
about?” he asked in a frankly dangerous voice.

“You know what I'm talking about, you've tried everything short of proposing to keep me here!” she said furiously. “You and Jim have been rivals in business for years, and you've never taken a challenge from him that you didn't win. Did it really bother you that much to have him hire me right out from under you? Or was it just that you couldn't stand having a woman around the place who could resist you?”

His eyes caught fire. “Resist me?” he growled. “You little wildcat, I could lay you down in that grass and have you right now if I wanted you, and you'd let me! So don't stand there like some Victorian society matron and tell me how immune you are to me. I just might let you prove it!”

She wrapped her arms around her chest and turned her attention back to the water. She didn't say another word.

“You're still the shriveled up little chicken you were before you shed your disguise, Jadebud,” he growled cruelly. “For your information, I wasn't trying to get you into my bed. I thought you might benefit from a little experience if you're going to be tangling with the likes of Jim Black. But from now on, your education can go hang! If you think I'd trade Amanda for a repressed little bundle of piety like you, you're crazy as hell!”

She went white in the face. Absolutely white, her nails bit into her forearms as she fought not to let him see the effect the vicious attack had on her.

“You're free to go whenever you damned well please, Eleanor,” he added curtly. “Making love to you every day is too damned high a price to pay to keep you at your desk.”

She heard him walk away and a minute later, there was the creak of saddle leather and the thud of a horse's hooves dying away.

It was only then that she let the tears roll freely down her pale cheeks. She'd wanted the truth, and now she had it. Only four more days, she reminded herself, and she'd be able to walk out the door with a clean conscience. But how would she survive it? How?

R
oundup went on, but without Eleanor. There were no more trips out to the holding pens, no more quiet rides with Curry. He avoided her like the plague, speaking to her only when it was necessary.

She was grateful for his absence. She felt wounded, and she needed time for the scars to heal.

“Something wrong between you and Curry?” Bessie asked her at supper one
night when Curry was still out working on the ranch.

Eleanor stared into her plate. “Just the usual irritation,” she said lightly, trying to make a joke out of it.

“Things calmed down for a little while there.”

“So they did,” Eleanor agreed.

“Don't want to talk about it?” the housekeeper said knowingly.

Eleanor smiled wanly and shook her head. “It's best forgotten.”

“Still going over to Jim?”

“Yes, for now.”

“And then?”

Eleanor shrugged. “It's a big world,” she said with a short laugh. “There's no telling where I'll wind up.”

“You'll write?”

She said yes, of course she would, and dug into her meal, knowing full well she wanted no more contact with the ranch, ever, once she left it. It would hurt too much.

Jim Black's phone call the next afternoon came at the best possible time. Curry's continued avoidance, and the lack of work to keep her busy, was driving her to an attack of nerves she'd never experienced before.

“How much longer?” Jim teased. “I'm getting impatient over here, and I just may need your help with a wedding before long.”

“Oh, Jim, congratulations!” she enthused. “See, I told you it would work out!”

“Yes, you did, and Elaine and I will never be able to thank you enough for that ‘double-double dog dare' that started it all. When, Norie?”

She swallowed. “Three more days. I wish it was tomorrow.”

“What about if I talk to Curry?”

“I…I wouldn't do that,” she murmured.

He drew a hard breath. “I knew I should have kept a check on you!” he
grumbled. “If I hadn't been so wrapped up in my own life…hon, I'm sorry. It's been bad, hasn't it?”

The sympathy brought tears to her eyes. “Yes,” she admitted unsteadily. “It has.”

“Are you free the rest of the day?”

She brightened. “Yes. I've got everything out of the way that I need to do.”

“Good. How about if I come get you, and you can have supper with all of us tonight? I'd like you to get to know Elaine.”

She smiled. “I'd like that very much,” she said genuinely.

“I'll pick you up in thirty minutes. That long enough?”

 

She was ready, dressed in a pale green clinging dress with her hair waving softly around her shoulders, when Curry arrived back at the ranch house just as Jim drove up.

The two men studied each other quietly. Jim was neat in a dark sports coat
with matching slacks and a cream-colored shirt. Curry looked as if a whirlwind had hit him, his jeans dusty, his shirt torn and wet with sweat, his hair damp with perspiration.

“I'm taking Norie over for the evening,” Jim said as if he expected an argument.

“That's your business,” Curry said abruptly. His pale eyes speared the other man.

“I'm glad you finally realized it,” Jim replied. “No hard feelings, Curry. I hope you'll come to the wedding.”

Eleanor didn't think she'd ever forget the look on Curry's dark face when Jim told him that. Obviously he thought Jim meant Eleanor, and his jaw locked violently, his face seemed to harden to solid rock.

“Wedding?” he asked in a strange tone.

Jim grinned. “It happens to all of us sooner or later, doesn't it? I hope you and
Amanda will be as happy as we expect to.”

Curry didn't say another word. He turned, sparing Eleanor a glance so hateful she felt as if he'd struck her, and walked straight into the house without a backward glance, slamming the screen door behind him.

“What was that all about?” Jim asked.

She sighed and shook her head. “Beats me,” she told him. “If anything, he'll give a party when I leave. He's that glad to see me go.”

“Is he, now?” Jim's eyes narrowed thoughtfully.

Eleanor got into the car and sat quietly until he started it.

“Thanks for rescuing me,” she told him. “Supper was going to be another ordeal.”

“What's eating him?”

“Amanda won't come and live on the ranch after they get married,” she explained. “He's furious. He doesn't think
she cares enough to stay with him, and he's like a fire-breathing dragon lately.”

“So that's it,” Jim remarked, as if he'd been thinking something very different. “I knew that wasn't going to work out. Amanda's a lovely girl, but she's not ranch stock.”

“It's more than that,” Eleanor said, staring out the window as she spoke. “She doesn't love him, Jim. She's more interested in how much she'll be able to spend, and keeping up her career, than she is in taking care of Curry.”

“Does he love her?”

“Apparently,” she replied, “although he says no. He wants her,” she added in a subdued tone. “I suppose that's as close as he can come to feeling anything for a woman.”

“He doesn't know what he's missing.” Jim grinned.

“You old maverick,” she teased. “You look ten years younger. Elaine's influence, I'll bet!”

“You'd be right, too. Oh, what a girl!”

And she was. The petite little blonde, once she got over her initial reserve when she and Eleanor were introduced, turned out to have a live wire personality. There was a loveliness in her that had nothing to do with exterior beauty. She was a caring person, and everything she felt for Jim was in her eyes when she looked at him.

Maude liked her too, and it showed. Eleanor noticed that Jeff, too had been captured by that bright smile and sunny manner.

“Looks like you're not going to have to win anybody over,” Eleanor teased the older girl when they were washing up the dishes after supper.

“I know,” Elaine replied with a smile. “It was so strange, the way everything seemed to fall into place. I seemed to fit here the first time I walked through the door. I love Maude and Jeff, too, and I'm
crazy about the ranch. Jim's teaching me how to ride.”

“You'll make a good wife,” she told the blonde. “He's needed someone like you for a long time. He got a raw deal with his first wife, I guess you knew that.”

Elaine nodded. “I'll try to make it up to him.”

Eleanor grinned. “I don't think you'll have to try too hard.”

“You're still coming to work for him, aren't you?” Elaine asked suddenly, as if it really mattered to her. “Jim's told me what you had to put up with over there. I hope you'll still feel welcome—I'd like very much to have someone my own age to talk to. We could go shopping together and everything.”

“If you and Jim don't mind,” Eleanor replied, “I'll come for a few weeks.” She looked down at the soapy water. “I…I don't know where I'll wind up eventually. Even ten miles away from
Curry may not be enough, I'll just have to play it by ear.”

“Do you love him that much?” Elaine asked softly.

Eleanor bit her lip. She nodded, hating the tears that misted in her eyes.

“I'm sorry it didn't work out.”

She shrugged. “We don't always get everything we want in life,” she said philosophically. “And sometimes there's a good reason. I'll live.”

“Couldn't you come sooner?”

“I promised him two full weeks, and that's what he's going to get if it kills me. Anyway,” she laughed, “it's just a couple more days. After the time I've already put in, it's going to be a piece of cake.”

 

Curry was waiting for her in his den when she finished breakfast the next morning, dressed in a gray business suit that matched his eyes. He spared her a grudging glance when she walked in the door.

“I've left a couple of letters on the
Dictaphone,” he said in a voice like ice. “I'm going to be out of town today; you might tidy up in here so that your replacement can find things.”

Your replacement. He made it sound so impersonal, as if the three years she'd spent working in this room weren't worth anything at all to him. And that was probably true. Curry wasn't sentimental. He'd tried to keep her, he'd failed, and now he wasn't even making an effort to be courteous. She'd refused his generous offer and he had no more time for her.

“Yes, sir,” she said in a subdued tone.

“When's the wedding?” he asked with his back to her.

“I don't know. Soon,” she said vaguely.

“You don't sound enthusiastic.”

“I think it's wonderful,” she corrected. “It's going to be a good marriage. One of the best.”

Curry's hands jammed hard into his pockets. He drew in a deep, harsh breath.
“I'm going to bring Amanda home,” he volunteered into the silence. “It's time she faced up to what marriage means. I'm not going to have my wife living one place while I live in another. She's going to understand that from the beginning.”

“You don't give an inch, do you?” she asked sadly, turning away so that she didn't have to meet his eyes. “She's the one who's going to have to make all the sacrifices.”

“If she loved me, giving up her career to be a mother wouldn't constitute a sacrifice, and you damned well know it!”

She did, but she wasn't going to puff up his ego by admitting it.

“Does Black want children?” he asked suddenly.

She laughed softly, remembering what Elaine had told her. “Oh, yes,” she said with a smile, “a whole huge houseful of them, assorted.”

There was a tense silence between them. “Damn him!” Curry breathed vi
olently. “Damn him, and damn you, too!”

She turned, astonished by the emotion in his dark face, his blazing eyes, trying to puzzle out what in the world was wrong with him.

“Don't be here when I get back,” he told her in a voice so cold it seemed to choke him. “Get your bags packed today, and get out! I never want to set eyes on you again, do you hear?”

She could only nod, strangled by the demand, her voice buried.

He spared her one last, scathing glance as he opened the door. “Good riddance,” he murmured. “I've had enough puritans to last me a lifetime. I wish him joy of you.”

And with that last, puzzling statement, he was gone. She stood there white-faced, half relieved that the stress was finally over, that she wouldn't have to stay here and watch him with Amanda while another part of her was already wilting
like a flower suddenly thrust from full sunlight into the cool shade.

Tears were pouring down her cheeks when she put the cover on her typewriter for the last time and left the room.

 

Leaving was harder than Eleanor had ever imagined. It was one thing to know she was going to do it, quite another to make it an accomplished fact.

Three years was a long time to leave behind. There were so many memories in the sprawling ranch house. Nights when she and Curry sat up and watched the late show together while he dictated correspondence during the commercials. Long, lazy afternoons when he'd stop her in the middle of something and they'd go driving, or riding out to see the new calves. Periods of such comradeship that they seemed infinitely closer than boss and secretary. And now, all of it was only a memory.

Jim came to get her, bag and baggage, and Bessie cried.

“Fool man,” the housekeeper sobbed, “hasn't got eyes in his head to see with! Amanda'll never satisfy him!”

“It's his life, Bessie, he has to do what he thinks is best,” she replied tearfully, defending him unconsciously, as she always had.

“He had such a jewel in you.” Bessie tried to smile. “If only he'd realized it.”

“Secretaries are easy to come by,” Eleanor reminded her. “Remember the first day I came here, and there were four very efficient ones in front of me for an interview? He won't have any trouble replacing me—he may have already done it for all I know.”

“He's hired Betty Maris, is what he's done,” Bessie scoffed.

“Miss Betty?” Eleanor blinked. “Old Miss Betty who lives just past Smith's store and raises the African violets and hates men?”

“That's right. Oh, she'll make a dandy secretary, and Curry won't cow her,”
Bessie admitted. “But she's a far cry from you.”

“Mandy will love her,” Eleanor teased lightly. Her lower lip trembled with tears that wanted to escape. “I'll miss you, Bessie.”