"Doesn't it matter to you?" Lucinda asked abruptly.
"That you'll lose Davencourt if you do this for me?" Nothing matters. That had been her mantra, her curse, for ten years. "It's yours to leave to whomever you want. Webb was your chosen heir. And you're right; he'll do a much better job than I ever could."
She could tell that her quiet, even voice disturbed Lucinda in some way, but injecting any passion in her words was beyond her.
"But you're a Davenport," Lucinda argued, as if she wanted Roanna to justify her own decision for her.
"Some folks would say Davencourt should be yours by right, because Webb is a Tallant. He's my blood relative, but he isn't a Davenport, and he isn't nearly as closely related to me as you are."
"But he's the better choice."
Gloria came into the living room in time to hear Roanna's last comment.
"Who's the better choice?" she demanded, sinking into the depths of her favorite chair. Gloria was seventy-three, ten years younger than Lucinda, but while Lucinda's hair was unabashedly white, Gloria still stubbornly resisted nature and kept her fluffy curls tinted a delicate blond.
"Webb," Lucinda answered tersely.
"Webb!" Shocked, Gloria stared at her sister.
"For goodness sake, what could he possibly be the better choice for, except the electric chair?"
"To run Davencourt, and the business side of things."
"You have to be joking! Why, no one would deal with him-" "Yes, they would," Lucinda said, steel in her voice.
"If he's in charge, everyone will deal with him, or wish they hadn't been so stupid."
"I don't see why you even brought up his name anyway, since no one knows where he-" "I found him," Lucinda interrupted.
"And Roanna is going to talk him into coming back."
Gloria rounded on Roanna as if she had suddenly sprouted two heads.
"Are you out of your mind?" she breathed.
"You can't mean to bring a murderer among us! Why, I'd never be able to close my eyes at night!"
"Webb isn't a murderer," Roanna said, sipping her tea and not even glancing at Gloria. She had stopped thinking of Gloria as Aunt, too. Sometime during the awful night after Webb had walked out of their lives, the titles of kinship had faded from the way she thought of people, as if her emotional distance couldn't accommodate them anymore.
The people in her family now were simply Lucinda, Gloria, Harlan. "Then why did he disappear like that? Only someone with a guilty conscience would run away."
"Stop that!" Lucinda snapped.
"He didn't run, he got fed up and left. There's a difference. We let him down, so I can't blame him for turning his back on us. But Roanna's right; Webb didn't kill Jessie. I never thought he did."
"Well, Booley Watts certainly did!"
Lucinda dismissed Booley's thoughts with a wave of her hand.
"It doesn't matter. I think Webb's innocent, there was no evidence against him, so as far as the law's concerned he's innocent, and I want him back."
"Lucinda, don't be an old fool!"
Lucinda's eyes glittered with a sudden ferocity that belied her age.
"I think it's safe to say," she drawled, "that no one has ever considered me a fool, old or otherwise." And lived to tell it, was the unspoken message in her tone. Eighty-three or not, dying or not, Lucinda still knew the full range of her power as matriarch of the Davenport fortune, and she wasn't shy about letting other folks know it, too.
Gloria backed down and turned on Roanna, the easier target.
"You can't mean to do it. Tell her it's crazy."
"I agree with her."
Fury sparked in Gloria's eyes at the murmured statement.
"You would!" she snapped.
"Don't think I've forgotten that you were crawling into bed with him when-" "Stop it!" Lucinda said fiercely, half rising from her chair as if she would physically attack her sister.
"Booley explained what really happened between them, and I won't let it be blown out of proportion. I won't let you badger Roanna either. She's only doing what I asked her to do."
"But why would you even think of bringing him back? Gloria moaned, dropping her aggressiveness, and Lucinda sank back into her chair.
"Because we need him. It takes both Roanna and me to handle things now, and when I die, she'll be buried in work."
"Oh, pish posh, Lucinda, you're going to outlive-"
"No," Lucinda said briskly, cutting through the statement she'd heard so many times before.
"I am not going to outlive all of you. I don't want to even if I could. We need Webb. Roanna's going to get him and bring him home, and that's that."
The next night, Roanna sat in the shadows of a small, dingy cantina, her back to the wall as she silently watched a man lounging on one of the stools around the bar. She had been watching him for so long and so hard that her eyes ached from the strain of peering through the dim, smoky interior. For the most part anything she might have heard him say was drowned out by the ancient jukebox in the corner, the clatter of billiard balls striking together, the hum of curses and conversation, but every so often she could discern a certain tone, a drawl, that she knew beyond doubt was his as he made some casual comment to either the man beside him or to the bartender.
Webb. It had been ten years since she'd seen him, ten years since she had felt alive. She had known, accepted, that she still loved him, was still vulnerable to him, but somehow the dreary procession of ten years' worth of days had dulled her memory of how sharp her response to him had always been. All it had taken was that first glimpse of him to remind her. The flood of sensation was so intense that it bordered on pain, as if the cells of her body had been jolted back to life. Nothing had changed. She still reacted just the way she had before, her heart beating faster and excitement zinging through every nerve ending. Her skin felt tight and hot, the flesh beneath it pulsing, aching. The hunger to touch him, to be close enough that she could smell the unique, never-forgotten male muskiness of his scent, was so strong that she was almost paralyzed with need.