Shades of Twilight Page 98

want to stay involved with that part of it or not. She says she doesn't like it, but she has the Davenport knack, doesn't she?"

"In a different way." Lucinda smiled.

"She pays more attention to people than she does to numbers on a sheet of paper."

"You know what she really wants to do, don't you?"

"No, what?"

"Train horses."

She laughed softly.

"I might have known! Loyal has been using some of her training ideas for years now, and I have to say we have some of the best-behaved horses I've ever been around."

"She's magic with a horse. They're where her heart is, so that's what I want her to do. You've always had horses just for the pleasure of it, because you love them, but Roanna wants to get into it as a business."

"You have it all planned out, don't you?" She smiled fondly at him, because even as a boy Webb had mapped out his strategy, then followed through on it.

"No one else around here knows about your properties out west. People will talk, you know."

"That I married Roanna for her money? That I was determined to get Davencourt any way I could? That I'd married Jessie for it and then, when she died, moved on to Roanna?"

"I see you've thought of all the angles."

He shrugged.

"I don't give a damn about the angles as long as Roanna doesn't believe any of them."

"She won't. She's loved you for twenty years, and she'll love you for another twenty."

"Longer than that, I hope."

"Do you know how lucky you are?"

"Oh, I've got an idea," he said softly. He was surprised it had taken him so long to get that idea, though. Even though he'd known that he loved Roanna, he hadn't thought of it as a romantic, erotic love; he'd been stuck in the big-brother mode even after they had kissed the first time and he'd almost lost control. He hadn't been jolted out of it until she had walked up to him in the bar in Nogales, a woman, with a gap of ten years between their meetings so he hadn't seen her grow up. That night was burned in his memory, and still he'd struggled with the misapprehension that he had to protect Roanna from his own lust. God, what a dope. She positively reveled in his lust, which made him about the luckiest man alive.

Now, all he had to do was convince her to marry him, and clear up the small matter of attempted murder-his own.

Roanna was standing out on the veranda watching the sunset when he entered her room. She turned and glanced over her shoulder when she heard the door open. She was gilded by the last rays of the sun, turning her skin golden, her hair glinting red and gold. He came on through and out onto the veranda with her, turning to lean against the railing so that he faced the house, and her. Looking at her was so damn easy. He kept rediscovering the angles of those chiseled cheekbones, seeing anew the golden lights in her whiskey-colored eyes. The open collar of her shirt let him see enough of her silken skin to remind him how silky she was all over.

He felt the beginning twinges of lust in his groin but nevertheless asked an utterly prosaic question.

"Did you finish your supper?"

She wrinkled her nose.

"No, it was cold, so I ate a slice of lemon icebox pie instead."

He scowled.

"Tansy made another pie? She didn't tell me.

"I'm sure there's some left," she said comfortingly. She looked up at the vermillion streaks in the sky.

"Are you really going to make Corliss leave?"

"Oh, yes." He let both his satisfaction and determination come through in those two words.

She started to speak, then hesitated.

"Go on," he urged.

"Tell me, even if you think I'm Wrong." '321

"I don't think you're wrong. Lucinda needs peace now, not constant turmoil." Her expression was distant, somber.

"It's just that I remember what it's like to be terrified of having nowhere to live."

He reached out and caught a tendril of her hair, winding it around his finger.

Chapter 19

"When your parents died?"

"Then, and later, until-until I was seventeen." Until Jessie died, she meant, but she didn't say it. "I was always afraid that if I didn't measure up, I'd be sent away."

"That would never have happened," he said firmly.

"This is your home. Lucinda wouldn't have made you leave." She shrugged.

"They were talking about it. Lucinda and Jessie, that is. They were going to send me away to college. Not just to Tuscaloosa; they wanted me to go to some women's college, in Virginia, I think. It was someplace far enough away that I couldn't come home regularly."

"That wasn't why." He sounded shocked. He remembered the arguments. Lucinda had thought it would be good for Roanna to be away from them, force her to mature, and Jessie, of course, had egged her on. He saw now that, to Roanna, it must have seemed that they didn't want her around.

"That's what it sounded like to me," she said.

"Why did it change when you were seventeen? Was it because Jessie was dead and wasn't there to keep bringing up the subject?"

"No." That remote look was still in her eyes.

"It was because I didn't care anymore. Going away seemed like the best thing to do. I wanted to get away from Davencourt, from people who knew me and felt sorry for me because I wasn't pretty, because I was clumsy, because I was so socially graceless." Her tone was matter-of-fact, as if she were discussing a menu.

"Hell," he said wearily.

"Jessie made a career out of making you miserable, didn't she? Damn her. It should be against the law for people under the age of twenty-five to get married. I thought I was king of the mountain when I was in my early twenties, so damn sure I could tame Jessie and turn her into a suitable wife-my idea of suitable, of course. But there was something missing in Jessie, maybe the ability to love, because she didn't love anyone. Not me, not Lucinda, not even herself. I was too young to see it, though." He rubbed his forehead, remembering those last horrible days after her murder.