“You had to have a real, true, deep-down lady,” Houston whispered.
“That I did. And I got one. I was a little upset when I first asked you and you turned me down, but I knew you’d come around. I got more money ’n Westfield’ll ever have, and I knew you’d marry me.”
He removed his watch from his pocket. “It’s time to go downstairs. I been waitin’ for this for a long time.”
He took Houston’s elbow and escorted her to the stairs.
Houston was too numb to speak. She’d been asked to marry him because he wanted an instrument for revenge. She’d thought he wanted her because he needed her, that he’d come to like her, if not love her, over the past months, but the truth was, he was only using her.
Chapter 23
Houston sat through the dinner feeling as if her skin had turned as icy as the diamonds around her neck. She moved and spoke as if in a dream. Only her years of training helped her as she led the conversation and directed the servants in serving the meal.
On the surface, nothing seemed to go wrong. Pam seemed aware of the tension and helped as best she could. Ian and Zach talked of sports, Jacob looked at the food on his plate, and Kane watched it all with a look of pride on his face.
What had he planned to do with me after I’d served my usefulness, she kept wondering. Did he plan to go somewhere else, now that he’d done what he wanted to in Chandler? She remembered every complaint he’d made about trying to do business in this boring little town. Why hadn’t she ever wondered why he’d built this house? Everyone in town had asked that question while it was being built, but after Houston had been swept away by him, she’d stopped asking questions.
He’d marched into town and gone straight up to Jacob Fenton and announced his arrival, asking the older man how he liked his house. Why hadn’t Houston realized that everything in Kane’s life was ruled by his feelings for the Fentons?
And Houston had only been a part of the revenge.
That’s all she was to the man she’d given her heart to, a tool to be used in the game he wanted—had—to win.
And the man she’d chosen to love was the sort of man who could dedicate his life to an unholy emotion such as revenge.
The food she ate stuck in her throat, and she had to force herself to swallow. How could she have been so wrong about a man?
When at last the long meal was finally over, Houston rose, preparing to lead Pam into the small drawing room, leaving the men to their cigars.
The two women talked about ordinary matters—clothing, where to buy the best trims, the best dressmakers in town—and did not say anything about the meal they’d just been subjected to. But twice, Houston caught Pam looking at her in a speculative way.
* * *
Kane led Jacob Fenton into his office, where he offered the man one of the cigars that Houston had given him and hundred-year-old brandy in a glass of Irish crystal.
“Not bad for a stableboy, huh?” Kane began, looking at Fenton through a haze of cigar smoke.
“All right, you’ve shown me your big house. Now what do you want?”
“Nothin?
?. Just the satisfaction of seeing you here.”
“I hope you don’t expect me to believe that. A man who would go to so much trouble to show me what he’s done in life isn’t going to stop with a dinner party. But I warn you that if you try to take away what’s mine, I’ll—.”
“You’ll what? Bribe more lawyers? All three of those bastards are still alive, and if I wanted to, I could pay them more than you own just to tell the truth.”
“That’s just like a Taggert. You always take what you don’t own. Your father took Charity, a sweet, pretty little thing, and subjected her to horrors that caused her to hang herself.”
Kane’s face turned red with his rage. “Horace Fenton caused my mother’s death, and you stole everything I owned from me.”
“You owned nothing. It was all mine. I’d been running the business for years, and if you think I was going to stand back and see it all turned over to a squalling baby, I’d have seen it dead first. And then you, a Taggert, wanted to take my daughter away from me. You think I was going to peacefully let you do to my daughter what your father did to my sister?”
Kane advanced on the smaller, older man. “Take a good look at this place. This is what I would have done to your precious daughter. This is how I would have treated her.”
Jacob stubbed out his cigar. “Like hell you would have. Did you ever think that maybe I did you a favor? It’s your hatred of me that’s made you rich. If you’d won Pamela, and received the money from my father, you probably would never have worked a day in your life.”
He started for the door. “And, Taggert, you try to take back from me what you think you own and I’ll prosecute that pretty wife of yours for illegal entry into the coal camps.”