At the start of the next school year, he had expected to see her again but he hadn’t seen her on campus. Then one day he saw her walking across campus wearing some frothy sort of dress more suited for a dance than for study. He’d stopped her and asked her how she was. He didn’t like what she told him. Her family, which had a little money—nothing like Hank’s, though—had introduced her to the son of an old friend of her father’s. They’d spent all summer together and one thing led to another and at the end of the summer they’d become engaged. It was only after the engagement that Blythe found out that her fiancé didn’t want her to go to college. Under pressure from him, her family and his family, she’d left college and entered a cookery school.
Hank hadn’t liked this idea; he hated the idea of someone else controlling another person’s life, but if it made Blythe happy, it wasn’t any of his concern.
She said she was on her way to luncheon with her fiancé and, on impulse, she asked him to go with her.
Also on impulse, Hank accepted her invitation. Maybe it was impulse but it might have been a tone in Blythe’s voice, a kind of urgency and pleading, or maybe it was the touch of sadness in her eyes.
He went to lunch with them and it was worse than he feared. Blythe’s fiancé was obviously scared to death of a woman who might be as smart—or smarter—than he was. He condescendingly explained the items on the French menu to Blythe, yet Hank knew Blythe spoke and wrote French fluently. He asked Hank about his book, then, before Hank could answer, he patted Blythe’s hand and said they’d better not bore her with an intellectual conversation. And Blythe was the woman who’d last year missed only one question on the toughest final exam he’d ever given!
He didn’t like what he saw but he wasn’t going to interfere. He’d already learned that when you stepped between a pretty woman and her fiancé or husband or father, pretty women expected you to marry them. Ugly women thanked you ever so much for freeing them and went on their way, but pretty women expected you to spend the rest of your life with them.
So he’d walked away from that luncheon and done nothing, not so much as said one word to Blythe about how she was throwing her life away for this pompous young man.
But then, the best-laid plans…
He’d come in the winner of the Harriman Derby and he was exhilarated with winning and he didn’t remotely feel like a professor of economics. He was just a happy, health
y, energetic young man with a silver trophy in his arms and people cheering him, and there, on the sidelines, had stood Blythe Woodley wearing a white dress and all that red hair of hers hanging down her back with this cocky green feather curving around her head. He didn’t think. He just put his free arm out and she came to him, curving her body to his so well that she was like a second trophy he’d won.
At the hotel, after the door was closed, for just a second he’d had a return to sanity and told her she’d better leave. But then she’d slowly raised her skirt above her knee and revealed a black silk stocking. He could resist most anything, but black silk stockings on long, slender legs was not one of them. He thought he might betray his country if a woman asked questions of him while revealing a pretty leg.
They had spent the weekend together—a wonderful, exciting two days of champagne baths and, one morning, a wild ride across the Arizona desert in his newly cleaned racer, then a picnic and lovemaking beneath a saguaro cactus. On Monday he’d kissed her goodbye and had returned home and she, he assumed, had gone back to her fiancé.
But now, a month later, she was at his doorstep bearing a wallpaper sample book, and he knew that wallpaper samples or fabric samples meant marriage.
He glanced longingly at the whiskey decanter but a knock sounded at the door and there was no more time.
Mrs. Soames found him later, sitting in the darkness, sipping more whiskey and, to her dismay, the decanter was half empty. She turned on a table lamp and, except for blinking his eyes, he didn’t move. Scattered about the room were torn pieces of wallpaper as if someone, in fury, had torn sheets and thrown them—which is probably just what happened, she thought with a grimace.
She was not going to let him sit there and feel sorry for himself. “You deserved it, you know,” she said angrily. “You lead these young women on. You make them love you, then you refuse to marry them. And while we’re on that, why don’t you marry one of them? That young lady, Miss Woodley, looked perfectly respectable to me. You’re twenty-eight years old and it’s high time you thought about settling down and raising a family. Maybe then you’d stop this foolish racing of cars and stealing women away from other men.”
She stopped her tirade when she saw how sad he looked. She sat down beside him and patted his hand. “There, dearie, you meant well.”
“The funny thing is,” he said softly, “I would rather like to get married. It’s just that I haven’t found her yet. I can’t think of a thing wrong with Blythe. She’s really quite perfect. She’s smart and interesting, dazzling to look at, great in—well, good company, and she’s from a family good enough to please my grandmother.”
“So marry her,” Mrs. Soames said. “Or at least court her. I don’t think it will take much to fall in love with her.”
He sipped more whiskey. “I could never love her. I don’t know why, but I know she isn’t the one. I have this feeling that someday I’ll see her and I’ll know her.” He turned to grin at Mrs. Soames. “That sounds somewhat metaphysical, doesn’t it?”
“It sounds to me like a man who’s had too much whiskey on an empty stomach.” She heaved herself up. “You come in and eat now.”
Hank didn’t move but just stared blankly ahead. “I’m going to go to Caulden’s ranch,” he said. “I think I’d like a little vacation from this place.”
Mrs. Soames sniffed. “You want to put some distance between you and that poor Miss Woodley is what you want.”
Hank began to look sad again. “I never meant to insinuate marriage. She just—”
“Come on and eat,” Mrs. Soames said, exasperated. “I just pray this Mr. Caulden doesn’t have a daughter who is oppressed or repressed or anything else, so that you feel like saving her.”
Hank smiled crookedly and got off the couch. “If he does have a daughter, I’ll stay away from her, I swear. I don’t care if she wears nothing but black silk stockings and walks into my room in the middle of the night, I’ll still stay away from her.”
Mrs. Soames chose to ignore that remark.
Chapter Three
Amanda suppressed another yawn and tried not to look with dismay at the tall stack of books on her desk. For days she had done nothing but read books on economics in preparation for the professor’s visit. Both her father and Taylor had drilled her about the importance of this man’s visit and how Amanda was to be a gracious hostess. “And keep him away from here,” J. Harker had said. “I don’t want him snooping around my land.”
Taylor had given her a list of museums and places of interest to visit. Perhaps she might go with him to Terrill City to visit the library there. He wanted Amanda to brush up on her local history so she could act as a knowledgeable tour guide.