Tears of the Renegade (10 page)

Her body burned from his touch, yet she was shaking with something like a chill. It was like a fever, she thought dimly, burning hot and cold at the same time. He
was
a fever, consuming her, and she reached the horrified realization that the way she felt about him was no longer under her control. Without wanting to, she cared too much about him. She was playing Russian roulette with her emotions, but it was far too late to stop.

She stood there in the cool night for several minutes longer, then slipped quietly inside to rejoin the party. Preston came over and touched her arm gently. “Are you all right?” he asked with tender concern, and in his eyes she saw the love that he couldn't quite hide.

She was calm enough now to give him her most reassuring smile, one that made most people feel that everything was right with the world. “Yes, I'm fine.”

“Grant and Mary have gone home. What'd you say to him? He looked like he was in shock when he came in, and he went straight to Mary.”

She shook her head, still smiling. “Nothing, really. I just calmed him down.”

His look said he didn't quite believe her, but he kissed her forehead lightly in tribute. It was inevitable that when Susan glanced around she saw Cord standing across the room, staring at her with cold, unreadable eyes, and a sad pain bloomed in her heart. He'd never trust her, she thought, and wished that it didn't mean so much to her.

Audrey Gregg found the opportunity to thank her for averting a scene, and after that Susan made her excuses and drove herself home where she fell into bed in mental exhaustion, then got up ten minutes later to restlessly pace the house. Finally she turned on the television to watch an old Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin comedy, letting their antics clear her mind. She was engrossed in the movie, chuckling to herself, when the doorbell rang. Frowning, she glanced at the clock. It was almost midnight, the witching hour.

“Who is it?” she called through the door, tying the sash of her robe tighter.

“Cord.”

She unlocked the dead bolt and opened the door to him. He straightened from his slouch against the door frame and walked inside. Her eyes dropped to the whiskey bottle he carried in his hand. A half-empty whiskey bottle.

“Are you drunk?” she asked warily.

“On my way.” He smiled at her and took a drink from the bottle. “It's hard for me to get drunk, but champagne does it to me every time. Something about my chemistry. I'm just trying to finish it off with this.”

“Why do you want to get drunk?” He was walking toward the den, and she followed him automatically. If he was drunk, or even high, he was certainly handling it well. His walk was steady, his speech clear. He sat down on the couch and stretched his long legs out before him, sighing as his muscles relaxed. Susan went over to the television and switched it off in the middle of a Jerry Lewis pratfall.

She repeated her question. “Why do you want to get drunk?”

“It just seems like the thing to do. A sort of tribute to the past.”

“So you lift a glass…excuse me, a bottle…to auld lang syne.”

“That's right.” He drank again, then set the bottle down with a thud and pinned her with his glittering eyes. “Why did
you have to get between us? I wanted to hit him. My God, how I wanted to hit him!”

“Another tribute to the past?” she asked sharply.

“To Judith,” he corrected, smiling a little. “Do you know what he said? He came up to me and said, ‘So the little whore didn't stay with you, either.' I should've broken his neck on the spot.”

Susan hadn't heard the name before, but she knew that Judith had been Grant's first wife, the woman caught in bed with Cord. She sat down beside him and folded her robe around her legs, waiting. Her attitude was calm, her entire attention focused on him. People often talked to her, telling her things that they'd never tell anyone else, without really understanding what it was about her that inspired such trust. Susan didn't understand it herself, unless it was that she truly listened.

He leaned his head back, and his eyelids drooped to half-mast. “She was pure fire,” he said softly. “A total mismatch for Grant Keller. She had red hair and slanted green eyes, just like a cat's. She sparkled. She liked to laugh and dance and have a good time, do all of the things that Grant was too stodgy to enjoy. He wasn't the type to go skinny-dipping at night, or dance in the streets during Mardi Gras. But, as far as I know, she was entirely faithful to him.” He fell silent, staring into the past.

When several moments had passed, Susan prompted him. “Until you.”

He glanced up and gave her a wry look that held a curious overtone of pain and guilt. “Until she met me,” he agreed harshly. With a deft movement he seized the bottle and tipped it to his mouth. She watched in amazed fascination as his strong throat worked, and when he set the bottle down it was empty. He looked at it savagely. “There wasn't enough.”

Warily, she wondered if he would still be able to say that when his body began to absorb the alcohol he'd just consumed, if he would be able to say anything at all.

A fine sheen of perspiration had broken out on his face, and he wiped it away with the back of his hand. “We'd been having an affair for almost a year before we were caught.” His voice was gruff, strained. “I'd asked her over and over to divorce Grant, leave with me, but beneath all of that flash, Judith was strongly conventional. Her reputation meant a lot to her, and she adored her kids. She just couldn't break all her ties. She didn't have any choice after Grant found us together.”

Susan swallowed, trying not to imagine the scene. What would it do to any of the three people involved in a triangle for a husband to walk in while his wife was in bed with her lover?

“She was crucified.” He heaved himself off the couch and walked restlessly around the room, and what she saw on his face frightened her. “She didn't have a friend left; her own children wouldn't speak to her after Grant threw her out of the house. My dear aunt Imogene was the leader in ostracizing her. Preston doesn't know that I know what
he
did, because he made certain he wasn't in the group, but he organized a sort of mob scene; a group of teenage toughs danced around Judith one afternoon in the parking lot of a grocery store and called her ‘Blackstone's Whore.' It sounds almost Victorian, doesn't it? I caught one of the kids that night and…ah,
persuaded
him to tell me who'd set it up. I hunted for Preston, but he flew the coop, and I couldn't find where he'd gone.”

So that was why he hated Preston so fiercely! She could understand his bitterness, but still she stared at him, troubled. Couldn't he see that revenge so often has a backlash, punishing the avenger as cruelly as his victim?

His fists were knotted whitely at his sides, his lips drawn back over his teeth. Alarmed, Susan got up and went to him, putting her soft hands over his fists. He'd removed his tie, and his shirt was open at the throat, revealing the beginning curls
of hair on his chest; her eyes were on a level with those curls, and for a moment she stared at them, entranced, before she jerked her thoughts away from the dangerous direction they were taking and looked upward.

“Where is she now?” she asked, having a vision of Judith in some sleazy bar somewhere, middle-aged and despairing.

“She's dead.” His voice was soft now, almost gentle, as if he had to put some distance between himself and his memories. “My wife is dead, and that bastard called her a whore!”

Susan sucked in a quiet breath, shocked at what he'd just told her. His wife! “What happened?”

“They broke her spirit.” He was breathing deeply, almost desperately, but his hands had unknotted, and now his fingers were twined with hers, holding her so tightly that he hurt her. His face was pulled into a grimace of pain. “We were married as soon as her divorce was final. But she was never Judith again, never the laughing, dancing woman I'd wanted so much. I wasn't enough to replace her children, her friends, and she just faded away from me.”

“She had to love you, to risk all that she did,” Susan said painfully.

“Yes, she loved me. She just wasn't strong enough not to have any regrets, not to let the hurt eat away at her. She came down with pneumonia, and she didn't want to fight it. She gave up, let go. And do you want to know the hell of it?” he ground out. “I didn't love her. I couldn't love her. She'd changed, and she wasn't anything like the woman I'd loved, but I stayed with her because she'd given up so much for me. Damn it, she deserved more than that! I did my best to make sure she never knew, and I hope she died thinking that I still loved her, but the feeling was long gone by then. I'm guilty, too, in what happened to Judith. As guilty as hell!”

His eyes were dry, burning like wildfire, and Susan realized
that though he wasn't able to weep for his dead wife, he was about to fly apart before her. She forcibly tugged her hands away from his death grip and cupped his face in her palms, her cool, tender hands lying along his hot flesh like a benediction. His soft beard tickled her palms, and she stroked it gently. His eyes closed at her touch.

“She was a grown woman, and she made her choice when she decided to have an affair with you,” she pointed out softly. “The stress was too much for her, but I can't see that it's any more your fault than it was hers.” She wanted to ease his pain, do anything to take that look of suffering off his face. My God, he'd been little more than a boy, to bear so much!

He put his hands over hers and turned his face to nuzzle his lips into her left palm, then rubbed his cheek against her hand. His pent-up breath gusted out of him on a long, soft sigh, and his eyes opened.

“You're a dangerous woman,” he murmured sleepily. “I didn't intend to tell you all of that.”

Looking at him, Susan saw that the whiskey was hitting him hard and fast. Cautiously, she eased him back over to the couch, and he dropped heavily onto it, sighing as he relaxed. For a moment she stood indecisively, then made up her mind; he was in no condition to drive, so he would have to spend the night there. She knelt down and began removing his shoes.

“What're you doing?” he mumbled, his eyelids drooping even more.

“Taking off your shoes. I think you'd better stay here tonight, rather than risk driving home.”

A faint smile quirked his lips. “What will people say?” he mocked; then his eyes closed and he sighed again, a peculiarly peaceful sound.

Susan shrugged at his question; what people would say if anyone knew he'd spent the night here was almost beyond her
imagination, yet she really couldn't see that she had a choice. He was mentally and emotionally exhausted, as well as drunk, and if anyone chose to gossip about that, she couldn't stop them. She wouldn't risk his life for that. She completed her task and set his shoes neatly to one side, then swung his long legs up on the couch.

He grunted and adjusted his length to the supporting cushions, dangling one leg off the side and swinging the other one over the back of the couch. Sprawled in that boneless position, he went to sleep as quietly and easily as a child.

Susan shook her head, unable to repress a smile. He'd told her that he was a mean drunk. Looking at him as he slept so peacefully made her doubt that. She went upstairs to get a pillow and blanket, returning to drape the blanket over him and place the pillow under his head. He didn't rouse at all, even when she lifted his head.

Lying alone in her own bed, she was aware of a deep feeling of contentment at just knowing he was under the same roof. The warm aching of her body told her that she wanted more from him than just his presence; she wanted the completion of his lovemaking. She wanted to be everything to him, every dream he'd ever had, every wish he'd ever made. She wanted to ease him and comfort him, and make him forget his black past. Knowing that he stood too much alone to allow anyone to mean that much to him didn't lessen the way she felt. How odd it was that, when she loved again, she loved someone so different from herself!

Yet Vance had been different. Unlike Cord, Vance had conformed, at least on the surface, but she had always known that Vance could have been a hard, dangerous man if anything or anyone had threatened those he loved. Circumstances had been different for Vance than they had for Cord, and that part of his personality had never developed, but the potential had
been there. With Vance she had felt utterly protected, utterly loved, because she had sensed that he would have put himself between her and anything that threatened her, without counting the cost to himself.

The way I love Cord!
she thought, shocked, her eyes wide in the darkness. It stunned her to think that she could be stirred to violence, but when she thought of the anger that had surged through her that night, she knew that she'd have done anything she could have to keep Grant Keller from punching Cord. She didn't fear for Cord; he was far too capable of taking care of himself. It was simply that she couldn't bear the idea of him suffering the least hurt. She would gladly have taken a punch on the jaw herself rather than let it land on Cord.

She fell asleep quickly and woke before her alarm clock went off. The sun coming in her window, bright and warm, told her that it was going to be another gorgeous spring day. Humming, she took a shower and put on fresh lacy underwear and chose a bright summer dress that reflected her rise in spirits. The pure white fabric, with its fragile lace trim and scattering of brightly colored spring flowers, made her feel as fresh as the new day, as full of hope. Still humming, she went downstairs and peeked into the den, where Cord still lay sprawled on the couch, sleeping heavily. He'd rolled over on his stomach, and his head was turned to the back of the couch, revealing only his tousled dark hair. Quietly she closed the door and went to the kitchen.