Amelia. Diana Palmer
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with a pale smile. “She likes to bathe them about this time, I notice.”
“Certainly, if you like, my dear. Marie will be leaving in the morning for home, so I’m certain she’ll appreciate your help with the packing as well.”
“She’s leaving?” Amelia couldn’t know how upset she sounded.
King arched an eyebrow. “You sound as if you feel she is deserting you in the face of doom, Miss Howard,” he mused.
“I don’t feel that way at all, Mr. Culhane,” she assured him. “I’ll just get back to the house,” she added quickly and, sidestepping King, lifted her skirts and ran toward the house.
He watched her with cold, narrow eyes.
“What is wrong with you?” his mother demanded icily. “Why are you so cruel to her?”
He shrugged and moved to swing into the saddle, pausing to relight his cigar. “I won’t be away long,” he said carelessly.
“What you see in that Valverde woman is beyond me,” she told him. “She’s cold and calculating and the most mercenary human being I’ve ever known.”
He leaned over the pommel. “You left out honest. She has the virtue of being exactly as she appears. She wants me for the ranch and my lineage, just as every other woman has,” he added with a cold smile. “I admire her cold-blooded approach. It appeals to my sense of irony.”
“I know what caused this cynicism, but you were very young when it happened,” Enid said softly, “and even such a deep scar should fade in time. It is not her death you can’t forget, anyway, it is the fact that she had deserted you.” He didn’t speak. He looked explosive. “King, there are many women who look for qualities in men that bear no relevance to wealth.”
“Indeed? Women such as our fleeing guest?” he asked, watching Amelia’s dash onto the porch. “She’s still little more than a child; a rough hand would destroy her,” he said, almost to himself. “She is drawn to Alan’s smooth profile and parlor manners. Her father,” he added, glancing at her, “is much more drawn to the possibility of a partnership through marriage, don’t you think?”
“Alan should marry,” she returned curtly. “And Amelia is a lovely, sweet girl.”
“A spineless jellyfish with no spunk and no grit,” he said shortly. “She lacks the nerve to speak back even to her father, despite his deplorable treatment of her. You ask me to admire such spinelessness? The girl may have a pretty face, but she is a coward. I had rather marry an ugly wild mustang than a broken pretty filly.”
“Women are not horses,” Enid reminded him.
“They yield to the same treatment,” King said carelessly, with a last glance at Amelia’s retreating figure. “A sugar cube and a soft word, and the wildest of them will submit,” he added as he gathered the reins.
Enid still stared up at him quietly. “She fears her father. It is not the sort of fear that is engendered by a loud voice, King.”
“And how would you know?”
“I am a woman,” Enid replied simply. “There is an unspoken language that we share.”
“And the tendency to look for drama where none exists,” he murmured with a chuckle at her glower. “I shan’t be long.”
Enid watched him canter away with impotent rage. Sometimes he and his father maddened her with their arrogant manners. She knew all too well how brutal a man could be, and how overpowering, when he took to drink. Amelia’s fear the night before had not been of her father’s voice, she knew it. There had been something more there, and this afternoon she was certain of it when she saw the girl’s look of relief mingled with anxiety as her father left the ranch. Perhaps during his absence she could draw her out and discover what the problem was. If she could help, she decided, she would, men or no men.
* * *
Amelia helped bathe the girls and then sat in the parlor with Marie and Enid, chatting, while she worked the intricate crochet pattern Enid had taught the women.
“Did your mother not do handwork, Amelia?” Enid asked curiously.
“Mama was much too busy trying to watch the children and keep house and cook,” Amelia said gently. “As I was.”
“King mentioned that you never seemed to rest when he visited Quinn those few times,” she added.
“I wonder that your eldest son even noticed,” she replied colorlessly. “He never looked at me.”
Enid lifted a quick eyebrow, but she didn’t say anything. Alan had gone with King on one visit to the Howards while the youngest boys were still alive. King had come home brooding and austere for days. He seemed to find nothing to relate about Amelia, but Alan must have seen a different side of her. He let slip little glimpses of Amelia’s life. A particular one came to mind, that of Amelia playing Indian with two little boys in the backyard late in the afternoon, laughing and radiant in the sunset. Alan had told King about it, and King had made the cold remark that Amelia was hardly the type to roughhouse with children.
Enid recalled that the little boys had died only a few months later of a vicious bout of typhoid. The family had grieved and grieved. Alan had gone back with Quinn for the funeral. King had told his mother, and no one else, that he refused flatly to stay in the same house with Amelia. So Alan had gone instead to represent the family. He had noticed a change in Hartwell Howard, a violence in his manner and a building affinity for hard liquor that seemed to grow by the day. His wife, Amelia’s mother, had quickly begun to fail.
“How is your brother?” Enid asked.
“Very well. Quinn writes to us,” she said with a smile as she finished a row and turned the piece she was working on. “Isn’t that unusual, for a man? But he writes a very elegant and literate letter. He is in New Mexico, searching for a man who killed a banker in El Paso. Imagine, my brother, a Texas Ranger.”
“And a very good one, for all we hear,” Enid replied.
“Your brother is a Ranger?” Marie asked, aghast. “Oh, but how delightful! And I will not get to meet him. My father was employed with the police in Paris. I am certain that they would have had so much to discuss, if they met!”
“Indeed they would,” Amelia said, smiling. “Perhaps you will come to visit again and Quinn will be in town.”
“Certainement,” Marie agreed. “But for now, alas, I must return home, must I not, Enid?”
“As you say, my dear,” Enid replied with a twinkle in her brown eyes, “certainement!”
* * *
The women said good night to Marie, and she went to settle down with her children.
“I will lock up before I come to bed,” Enid told Amelia. “Good night, my dear.”
“Do wake me before Marie leaves,” Amelia pleaded. “I wouldn’t want to miss seeing her off.”
“Of course you don’t. Sleep well.”
“And you.”
Amelia closed the door of her bedroom and changed into her long, cotton gown. It had a pretty row of pink lace around the high collar and lace at the wrists as well. She took down her long, blond hair and sat before the vanity mirror, combing it with long, lazy strokes.
She was twenty. As she watched her arm lift and fall, watched the brush pull through the silken skeins of hair, she wondered if she would ever marry and have children, like those of Marie. It would be nice to have a husband. The brush poised in midair, and her brown eyes grew cold and fearful. Or would it?
What if she chose badly? Her father had seemed so kind and good, and then he had changed. What if Amelia unknowingly chose a man who liked to drink or gamble or had no control over his temper? What if she married a brutal man who thought of her as