Dear Reader,

I really can’t express how flattered I am and also how grateful I am to Harlequin Books for releasing this collection of my published works. It came as a great surprise. I never think of myself as writing books that are collectible. In fact, there are days when I forget that writing is work at all. What I do for a living is so much fun that it never seems like a job. And since I reside in a small community, and my daily life is confined to such mundane things as feeding the wild birds and looking after my herb patch in the backyard, I feel rather unconnected from what many would think of as a glamorous profession.

But when I read my email, or when I get letters from readers, or when I go on signing trips to bookstores to meet all of you, I feel truly blessed. Over the past thirty years I have made lasting friendships with many of you. And quite frankly, most of you are like part of my family. You can’t imagine how much you enrich my life. Thank you so much.

I also need to extend thanks to my family (my husband, James, son, Blayne, daughter-in-law, Christina, and granddaughter, Selena Marie), to my best friend, Ann, to my readers, booksellers and the wonderful people at Harlequin Books—from my editor of many years, Tara, to all the other fine and talented people who make up our publishing house. Thanks to all of you for making this job and my private life so worth living.

Thank you for this tribute, Harlequin, and for putting up with me for thirty long years! Love to all of you.

Diana Palmer

DIANA PALMER

The prolific author of more than a hundred books, Diana Palmer got her start as a newspaper reporter. A multi–New York Times bestselling author and one of the top ten romance writers in America, she has a gift for telling the most sensual tales with charm and humor. Diana lives with her family in Cornelia, Georgia.

Visit her website at www.DianaPalmer.com.

Regan’s Pride
Diana Palmer

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For Babs

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 1

The tall, silver-haired man stood quietly apart from the rest of the mourners, his eyes, narrowed and contemptuous, on the slender, black-clad figure beside his sister. His cousin Barry was dead, and that woman was responsible. Not only had she tormented her husband of two years into alcoholism, but she’d allowed him to get behind the wheel of a car when he was drunk and he’d gone off a bridge to his death. And there she stood, four million dollars richer, without a single tear in her eyes. She looked completely untouchable—and Ted Regan knew that she had been, as far as her husband had been concerned.

His sister noticed his cold stare and left the widow’s side to join him.

“Stop glaring at her. How can you be so unfeeling?” Sandy asked angrily. His sister had dark hair. At forty, he was fifteen years older than she, and prematurely gray. They shared the same pale blue eyes, though, and the same temper.

“Am I being unfeeling?” he asked with a careless smile, and raised his smoking cigarette to his mouth.

“You promised you were going to give that up,” she reminded him.

He lifted a dark eyebrow. “I did. I only smoke when I’m under a lot of stress, and only outdoors.”

“I wasn’t worried about secondhand smoke. You’re my brother, and I care about you,” she said simply.

He smiled, and his hand touched her face briefly. “I’ll try to quit. Again,” he said wryly. He glanced at the widow with cold eyes. “She’s a case, isn’t she? I haven’t seen a single tear. They were married for two years.”

“Nobody knows what goes on inside a marriage, Ted,” she reminded him quietly.

“I suppose not,” he mused. “I’ve never wanted to marry anybody, but it seems to work out for a few people.”

“Like the Ballengers here in Jacobsville,” she agreed with a smile. “They go on forever. I envy them.”

Ted wasn’t going to touch that line with a pole. He drew on the cigarette, and his harsh gaze went back to the heavily veiled woman by the black limousine.

“Why the veil?” he asked coldly. “Is she afraid Barry’s mother may wonder why there aren’t any tears in her big blue eyes?”

“You’re so cynical and harsh, Ted, it’s no wonder to me that you’ve never married,” she said with resignation. “I’ve heard people say that no woman in south Texas would be brave enough to take you on!”

“There’s no woman in south Texas that I’d have,” he countered.

“Least of all, Coreen Tarleton,” she added for him, because the way he was looking at her best friend spoke volumes.

“She’s even younger than you,” he said curtly. “Twenty-four to my forty,” he added quietly. “Years too young for me, even if I were interested. Which I am not,” he added with a speaking glance.

“She isn’t what you think,” Sandy said.

“I’m glad you’re loyal to the people you love, tidbit, but you’re never going to convince me that the merry widow over there is grieving.”

“You’ve always been unkind to her,” Sandy said.

He stiffened. “She was a pest once.”

Sandy didn’t reply. She’d often thought that Ted had been in love for the first time in his life with Coreen, but he’d let the age difference stand between them. He was forty, but he had the physique of a man half that age, and the expensive dark suit he was wearing flattered it. He was a working millionaire. He never sat at a desk. He was slender and strong, and as handsome as the late cowboy star Randolph Scott. But he had no use for women now; not since Coreen had married.

“You’re coming back to the house with us, aren’t you?” Sandy asked after a minute. “They’re reading the will after lunch.”

“In a hurry, is she?” he asked icily.

“It was Barry’s mother’s idea, not hers,” Sandy shot back angrily.

“No surprises there,” he remarked, his blue eyes searching for Barry’s small, elegant mother in her black designer suit. “Tina probably would enjoy dumping Coreen on the front lawn in her underwear.”

“She does seem a little hostile.”

Ted ground out the cigarette under the heel of his highly polished dress boot. “Is that a surprise?” he asked frankly. “Coreen killed her son.”

“Ted!”

His blue eyes looked hard enough to cut diamond. “She never loved him,” he told her. “She married him because her father had died and she had nothing, not even a house to live in. And then she spent two years teasing and taunting him and making him unhappy. He used to cry on my shoulder….”

“How? You never went near their house, except once, to visit for a few hours,” she recalled. “You even refused to be best man at his wedding.”

He averted his eyes. “He came to Victoria pretty often to see me,” he said. “And he wasn’t a stranger to a telephone. We had business dealings together. I heard all about Coreen from him,” he added darkly. “She drove him to drink.”

“Coreen is my friend,” she responded. “Even if I believed that about her, it wouldn’t matter. Friends accept the bad with the good.”

He shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I don’t have friends.”

How well Sandy knew it, too. Ted didn’t trust anyone that close, man or woman.

“You could make the gesture of giving her your condolences,” she said finally.

He lifted an eyebrow. “Why should I give her sympathy when she doesn’t care that her husband is dead? Besides, I don’t do a damned thing for the sake of appearances.”

She made a sound in her throat and went back to Coreen.

The ride back to the redbrick mansion was short. Coreen was quiet. They were almost to the front door before she looked at Sandy and spoke.

“Ted was saying something about me, wasn’t he?” she asked, her voice strained. Her face was very pale in its frame of short, straight black hair and her deep blue eyes were tragic.

Sandy grimaced. “Yes.”

“You don’t have to soft-pedal Ted’s attitude to me,” came the wistful reply. “I’ve known Ted ever since you and I became friends in college, remember?”

“Yes, I remember,” Sandy agreed.

“Ted never liked me, even before I married his cousin.” She didn’t mention how she knew it, or that Ted had been the catalyst who caused her to rush headlong into a marriage that she hadn’t even wanted.

“Ted doesn’t want commitment. He plays the field,” Sandy said evasively.

“His mother really affected him, didn’t she?” Coreen knew about their childhood, because Sandy had told her.

“Yes, she did. He’s been a rounder most of his life because of it,” she added on a sigh. “I used to think he had a case on you, before you married,” she added with a swift glance. “He was violent about you. He still is. Odd, wouldn’t you say?”

Coreen didn’t betray her thoughts by a single expression. She’d learned to hide her feelings very well. Barry had homed in on any sign of weakness or vulnerability. She’d made the mistake once, only once, of talking about Ted, during the first weeks of her marriage to Barry. She hadn’t realized until later that she’d given away her feelings for him. Barry had gotten drunk that night and hurt her badly. It had taught her to keep her deepest feelings carefully concealed.

“It will all be over soon,” Sandy remarked.

“Will it?” Coreen asked quietly. Her long, elegant fingers were contracting on her black clutch bag.

“Why did Tina want the will read so quickly?” Sandy asked suddenly.

“Because she’s sure that Barry left everything to her, including the house,” she said quietly. “You know how opposed she was to our marriage. She’ll have me out the front door by nightfall if the will did make her sole beneficiary. And I’ll bet it did. It would be like Barry. Even when we were married, I had to live on a household allowance of a hundred dollars a week, and bills and groceries had to come out of that.”

Her best friend stared at her. It had suddenly dawned on her that the dress Coreen was wearing wasn’t a new one. In fact, it was several years out of style.

“I only have the clothes I bought before I married,” Coreen said with ragged pride, avoiding her friend’s eyes. “I’ve made do. It didn’t matter.”

All Sandy could think about was that Tina was wearing a new designer dress and driving a new Lincoln. “But, why? Why did he treat you that way?”

Coreen smiled sadly. “He had his reasons,” she said evasively. “I don’t care about the money,” she added quietly. “I can type and I have the equivalent of an associate degree in sociology. I’ll find a way to make a living.”

“But Barry would have left you something, surely!”

She shook her head at Sandy’s expression. “He hated me, didn’t you know? He was used to women fawning all over him. He couldn’t stand being anyone’s second choice,” she said enigmatically. “At least there won’t be any more fear,” she added with nightmarish memories in her eyes. “I’m so ashamed.”

“Of what?”

“The relief I feel,” she whispered, as if the car had ears. “It’s over! It’s finally over! I don’t even care if people think I killed him.” She shivered.

Sandy was curious, but she didn’t pry. Coreen would tell her one day. Barry had done everything in his power to keep her from seeing Coreen. He didn’t like anyone near his wife, not even another woman. At first, Sandy had thought it was obsessive love for Coreen that caused him to behave that way. But slowly it dawned on her that it was something much darker. Whatever it was, Coreen had kept to herself, despite Sandy’s careful probing.

“It will be nice not to have to sneak around to have lunch with you once in a while,” Sandy said.

Worried blue eyes met hers through the delicate lace veil. “You didn’t tell Ted that we had to meet like that?”

“No. I haven’t told Ted,” was the reply. Sandy hesitated. “If you must know, Ted wouldn’t let me talk about you at all.”

The thin shoulders moved restlessly and the blue eyes went back to the window. “I see.”

“I don’t,” Sandy muttered. “I don’t understand him at all. And today I’m actually ashamed of the way he’s acting.”

“He loved Barry.”

“Maybe he did, in his way, but he never tried to see your side of it. Barry wasn’t the same with another man as he was with you. Barry bullied you, but most people don’t try to bully Ted, if they’ve got any sense at all.”

“Yes, I know.”

The limousine stopped and the driver got out to open the door for them.

“Thanks, Henry,” Coreen said gratefully.

Henry was in his fifties, an ex-military man with close-cropped gray hair and muscle. He’d been her salvation since he came to work for Barry six months ago. There had been gossip about that, and some people thought that Coreen was cuckolding her husband. Actually Henry had served a purpose that she couldn’t tell anyone about.

“You’re welcome, Mrs. Tarleton,” Henry said gently.

Sandy went into the house with Coreen, noticing with curiosity that there seemed to be no maid, no butler, no household staff at all. In a house with eight bedrooms and bathrooms, that seemed odd.

Coreen saw the puzzled look on her friend’s face. She took off her veiled hat and laid it on the hall table. “Barry fired all the staff except Henry. He tried to fire Henry, too, but I convinced him that he needed a chauffeur.”

There was no reply.

Coreen turned and stared at Sandy levelly. “Do you think I’m sleeping with Henry?”

Sandy pursed her lips. “Not now that I’ve seen him,” she replied with a twinkle in her eyes.

Coreen laughed, for the first time in days. She turned and led the way into the living room. “Sit down and I’ll make a pot of coffee.”

“You will not. I’ll make it. You’re the one who needs to rest. Have you slept at all?”

The shorter woman’s shoulders lifted and fell. She was just five foot five in her stocking feet, for all her slenderness. Sandy, three inches taller, towered over her. “The nightmares won’t stop,” she confessed with a small twist of her lips.

“Did the doctor give you anything to make you sleep?”

“I don’t take drugs.”

“A sleeping pill when someone has died violently is hardly considered a drug.”

“I don’t care. I don’t want to be out of control.” She sat down. “Are you sure you don’t want me to…?”

The front door opened and closed. There hadn’t been a knock, and only one person considered himself privileged enough to just walk in. Coreen refused to look up as Ted entered the living room, loosening his tie as he came. He wasn’t wearing his Stetson, or even the dress boots he usually favored. He looked elegant and strange in his expensive suit.

“I was just about to make coffee,” Sandy said, giving him a warning look. “Want some?”

“Sure. A couple of leftover biscuits would be nice, too. I didn’t stop for breakfast.”

“I’ll see what I can find to fix.” Sandy didn’t mention that it was odd no one had offered to bring food. It was an accepted tradition in most rural areas, and this was Jacobsville, Texas. It was a very close-knit community.

Ted didn’t have any inhibitions about asking embarrassing questions. He sat down in the big armchair across from the burgundy velvet-covered sofa where Coreen was sitting.

“Why didn’t anybody bring food?” he asked her bluntly. He smiled coldly. “Do your neighbors think you killed him, too?”

Coreen felt the nausea in the pit of her stomach. She swallowed it down and lifted cool blue eyes to his. She ignored the blatant insult. “We had no close neighbors, nor did we have any close friends. Barry didn’t like people around us.”

His expression tautened as he glared at her. “And you didn’t like Barry around you,” he said with soft venom. “He told me all about you, Coreen. Everything.”

She could imagine the sort of things Barry had confided. He liked having people think she was frigid. She closed her eyes and rubbed at her forehead, where the beginnings of a headache were forming. “Don’t you have a business to run?” she asked heavily. “Several businesses, in fact?”

He crossed one long leg over the other. “My favorite cousin is dead,” he reminded her. “I’m here for the funeral.”

“The funeral is over,” she said pointedly.

“And you’re four million dollars to the good. At least, until the will is read. Tina’s on the way back from the cemetery.”

“Urged on by you, no doubt,” she said.

His eyebrows arched. “I didn’t need to urge her.”

The pain and torment of the past two years ate at her like acid. Her eyes were haunted. “No, of course you didn’t.”

She got up from the sofa, elegant in the expensive black dress that clung to her slender—too slender— body. He didn’t like noticing how drawn she looked. He knew that she hadn’t loved Barry; she certainly wasn’t mourning him.

“Don’t expect much,” he said with a cold smile.

The accusation in his eyes hurt. “I didn’t kill Barry,” she said.

He stood up, too, slowly. “You let him get into a car and drive when he’d had five neat whiskeys.” He nodded at her look of surprise. “I grew up in Jacobsville. I’m acquainted with most people who live here, and you know that Sandy and I have just moved back into the old homestead. Everybody’s been talking about Barry’s death. You were at a party and he wanted you to drive him home. You refused. So he went alone, and shot right off a bridge.”

So that was how the gossips had twisted it. She stared at Ted without speaking. Sandy hadn’t mentioned that they were coming home to Jacobsville. How was she going to survive living in the same town with Ted?

“No defense?” he challenged mockingly. “No excuses?”

“Why bother?” she returned wearily. “You wouldn’t believe me.”

“That’s a fact.” He stuck his hands into his pockets, aware of loud noises in the kitchen. Sandy, reminding him that she was still around.

Coreen folded her hands in front of her to keep them from trembling. Did he have to look at her with such cold accusation?

“Barry wrote to me two weeks ago. He said that he’d changed his will and that I was mentioned in it.” He stared at her mockingly. “Didn’t you know?”

She didn’t. She only knew that Barry had changed the will. She knew nothing of what was in it.

“Tina’s in it, too, I imagine,” he continued with a smile so smug that it made her hands curl.

She was tired. Tired of the aftermath of the nightmare she’d been living, tired of his endless prodding. She pushed back her short hair with a heavy sigh. “Go away, Ted,” she said miserably. “Please…”

She was dead on her feet. The ordeal had crushed her spirit. She felt tears threatening and she turned away to hide them, just as their betraying glitter began to show. She caught her toe in the rug and stumbled as she wheeled around. She gasped as she saw the floor coming up to meet her.

Incredibly he moved forward and caught her by the shoulders. He pulled her around and looked into her pale, drawn face. Then without a word, he slid his arms around her and stood holding her, gently, without passion.

“How did you manage that?” he asked, as if he thought she’d done it deliberately.

She hadn’t. She was always tripping over her own feet these days. Tears stung her eyes as she stood rigidly in his hold, her heart breaking. He didn’t know, couldn’t know, how it had been.

“I didn’t manage it,” she whispered in a raw tone. “I tripped, and not because I couldn’t wait to get your arms around me! I don’t need anything from you!”

Her tone made him bristle with bad temper. “Not even my love?” he asked mockingly, at her ear. “You begged for it, once,” he reminded her coldly.

She shivered. The memory, like most others of the past two years, wasn’t that pleasant. She started to step back but his big hands flattened on her shoulder blades and held her against him. She was aware, too aware, of the clean scent of his whipcord lean body, of the rough sigh of his breath, the movement of his broad chest so close that the tips of her breasts almost touched it. Ted, she thought achingly. Ted!

Her hands were clenched against his chest, to keep them honest. She closed her eyes and ground her teeth together.

The hands on her back had become reluctantly caressing, and she felt his warm breath at the hair above her temple. He was so tall that she barely came up to his nose.

Under the warmth of his shirtfront, she could feel hard muscle and thick hair. He was offering her comfort, something she hadn’t had in two long years. But he was like Barry, a strong, domineering man, and she was no longer the young woman who’d worshiped him. She knew what men were under their civilized veneer, and now she couldn’t stand this close to a man without feeling threatened and afraid; Barry had made sure of it. She made a choked, involuntary sound as she felt Ted’s hands contract around her upper arms. He was bruising her without even realizing it. Or did he realize it? Was he thinking of ways to punish her, ways that Barry hadn’t gotten to?

Ted heard the pitiful sound she made, and the control he thought he had went into eclipse. “Oh, for God’s sake,” he groaned, and suddenly wrapped her up tight so that she was standing completely against him from head to toe. His tall body seemed to ripple with plea sure as he felt her against it.

Coreen shuddered. Two years ago, it would have been heaven to stand this close to Ted. But now, there were only vague memories of Ted and bitter, violent ones of Barry. Physical contact made her afraid now.

The tears came, and she stood rigidly in Ted’s embrace and let them fall hotly to her cheeks as she gave in to the pain. The sobs shook her whole body. She cried for Barry, whom she never loved. She cried for herself, because Ted held her in contempt, and even if he hadn’t, Barry had destroyed her as a woman. She wept until she was exhausted, drained.

Sandy stopped at the doorway, her eyes on Ted’s expression as he bent over Coreen’s dark head. Shocked, Sandy quickly made a noise to alert him to her presence, because she knew he wouldn’t want anyone to see the look on his face in that one brief, unguarded moment.

“Coffee!” she announced brightly, and without looking directly at him.

Ted released Coreen slowly, producing a handkerchief that he pressed angrily into her trembling hands. She wouldn’t look up at him. That registered, along with her rigid posture that hadn’t relaxed even when she cried in his arms, and the deep ache inside him that holding her had created.

“Sit down, Corrie, and have a buttered biscuit,” Sandy said as Ted moved quickly away and sat down again. “I found these wrapped up on the table.”

“Mrs. Masterson came early this morning and made breakfast,” Coreen recalled shakily. “I don’t think I ate any.”

“Tina said that she’s staying at a motel,” Ted remarked. He was furious at his own weakness. He hadn’t meant to let it go that far.

She wiped her eyes and looked at him then. “She and I don’t get along. She didn’t want to stay here,” she replied. “I did offer.”

He averted his eyes to the cup of black coffee that Sandy handed him.

“You should take a few days to rest,” Sandy told her friend. “Go down to the Caribbean or somewhere and get away from here.”

“Why not?” Ted drawled, staring coldly at the widow. “You can afford it.”

“Stop,” Coreen said wildly, her eyes like saucers in her white face. “Stop it, can’t you?”

“Ted, please!” Sandy added.

The sound of a car coming up the driveway diverted him. He got up and went to the door, refusing to look at Coreen again. His loss of control had shaken him.

“I can’t stand this,” Coreen whispered frantically. “He does nothing but try to get at me!”

“Barry said something to him,” Sandy revealed curtly. “I don’t know what. He mentioned at the cemetery that he’d seen him quite often and that Barry had told him things about you.”

“Knowing Barry, he invented some of them to make himself look even more pitiful,” Coreen said softly. “I was his scapegoat, his excuse for every terrible thing he did. He drank because of me, didn’t you know?”

“He drank because he wanted to,” Sandy corrected.

“You’re the only person in Jacobsville who believes that,” her friend said. She sipped her coffee, aware of voices in the hall, one deep and gentle, the other sharp and impatient.

“I thought that lawyer would be here by now,” Tina Tarleton said irritably, stripping off her white gloves as she joined the women. She was resplendent in a black suit by Chanel and had on only the finest accessories to match.

“I imagine he had to go by his office and get the paperwork first,” Coreen said.

Tina glared at her. “No doubt he’ll be here soon. I’d start packing if I were you.”

“I already have,” Coreen said. “It didn’t take long,” she added enigmatically.

Another car came up. Sandy went to the hall window. “The lawyer,” she announced, and went to open the door.

“Finally,” Tina snapped. “It’s about time!”

Coreen didn’t reply. She was staring at the chair where Barry used to sit, remembering. Her eyes were suddenly haunted, almost afraid.

Ted glared at her from his own chair. So she felt guilty, did she? And well she should. He hoped her conscience hurt her. He hoped she never had another minute’s peace.

She felt his glare and looked at him. His hands almost broke the arms of the chair he was occupying as he stared into her dead eyes with violence in his own.

The lawyer, a tall, graying gentleman, came into the room with Sandy and broke the spell. Coreen was ready to give thanks. She couldn’t really understand why Ted should hate her so much over the death of a cousin he wasn’t really that close to. But, then, he’d always hated her. Or at least, he’d given the appearance of hating her. He’d been hostile since that first time, two years ago, when he’d found himself forced into her company….

Chapter 2

Coreen had been friends with Sandy Regan for four years, but she was in her second year of college before she really got to know Ted Regan. She was helping her father in his feed store in Jacobsville and Ted had come in with the new foreman at his ranch to open an account.

In the past, he’d always done business with a rival feed store, but it had just gone out of business. He was forced to buy from Coreen’s father, or drive to Victoria for supplies. He was courteous to Coreen, but not overly friendly. That wasn’t new. From the beginning of her friendship with his sister, he’d been cool to her.

Coreen had found him fascinating from the first time she’d looked into those pale eyes, when Sandy had introduced them. Ted had given her a long, careful appraisal, and obviously found the sight of her offensive because he absented himself immediately after the introduction and thereafter maintained a careful distance whenever Coreen came out to the ranch.

Coreen wasn’t hurt; she took it for granted that a sophisticated man like Ted wouldn’t want to encourage her by being friendly. She’d been gangly and tomboyish in her jeans and sweatshirt and sneakers. Ted was almost a generation older, and already a millionaire. His name had been linked with some of the most beautiful and eligible women around Texas, even if his distaste for marriage was well-known.

But he noticed Coreen. Although it might have been reluctant on his part, his pale eyes followed her around the store every week while she filled his orders. But he came no closer than necessary.

As time went by, Coreen heard about him from Sandy and got to know him in a secondhand sort of way. Slowly she began to fall in love, until two years ago, he had become her whole life. He pretended not to see her interest, but it became more obvious as she fumbled and stammered when he came around the store.

It was inevitable that he would touch her from time to time as they passed paperwork back and forth, and suddenly it was like electricity between them. Once, she stood with her back to the counter and suddenly looked up into his eyes. He was standing so close that she could breathe in the very masculine scent of his cologne. He hadn’t moved, hadn’t blinked, and the intensity of the stare had made her knees weak. His gaze had dropped abruptly to her soft, pink mouth and her heartbeat had gone wild. She might be innocent, but even a novice could recognize the sort of desire that had flared unexpectedly in Ted’s hard, lean face at that moment. It was the first time he’d ever really looked at her, she knew. It was as if, before, he’d forced himself not to notice her slender body and pretty face.

Her father’s arrival had broken the spell, and Ted’s expression had become one of self-contempt mingled with anger and something much more violent. He’d left the store at once.

Coreen had built dreams on that look they’d shared. As if Ted was caught in the same web, his trips to the feed store became more frequent and always, he watched her.

In her turn, she noticed that he usually came in on Wednesdays and on Saturdays, so she started dressing to the hilt on those days. Her slender, tomboyish figure could look elegant when she chose the right sort of clothes, and Ted didn’t, or couldn’t, hide his interest. His pale eyes followed her with visible hunger every time he came near her. The tension between them grew swiftly until one day things came to a head.

They were in the storeroom together, looking for a particular kind of bridle bit he wanted for his tack room. Coreen tripped over some coiled rope and Ted caught her easily, his reflexes honed by years of dangerous ranch work.

“Careful,” he’d murmured at her forehead. “You could have pitched headfirst into those shovels.”

“With my hard head, I’d never have felt it.” She laughed, looking up at him. “I’m clumsy sometimes…”

The laughter had stopped when she saw his face. The lean hands holding her had brought her quite suddenly against the length of his body and secured her there. She could feel his chest move against her breasts when he breathed, and his breathing was as ragged as her own.

With a soft laugh full of self-contempt, he bent and brushed his open mouth roughly over her lips, teasing them with a skill that Coreen had never experienced. She stiffened, and he searched her eyes narrowly. Then he did it again, and this time she held her face up for him, poised like a sacrifice in his warm embrace.

“Do you know how old I am?” he asked against her mouth in a voice gone deep and gravelly with emotion.

“No.”

“I’m thirty-eight,” he murmured. “You’re nearly twenty-two. I’m sixteen years your senior. We’re almost a generation apart.”

“I don’t care…!” she began breathlessly.

His head lifted. “There’s no future in it,” he said mercilessly as he searched her face with quick, hard eyes. “You’re infatuated and set on your first love affair, but it can’t, it won’t, be me. I’m long past the age of hand-holding and petting.”

She stared at him uncomprehendingly. Her body was throbbing with emotion and she wanted nothing more than his mouth on hers.

“You aren’t even listening,” he chided huskily. His gaze fell to her soft mouth. “Do you know what you’re inviting?” He drew her up on her tiptoes and his hard mouth closed slowly, expertly, on hers, teasing her lips apart with a steady insistent pressure that made her body feel swollen and shivery. She hesitated, frightened by it.

“No, you don’t,” he whispered, containing her instinctive withdrawal. “If I teach you nothing else, it’s going to be that desire isn’t a game.”

One lean hand went to her nape, holding her head steady, and then his mouth began to torment hers in brief, rough, biting kisses. He aroused her so swiftly, so completely, that she pressed into him with a harsh whimper and clung, her legs trembling against his as her young body pleaded for relief from the torment that racked it.

She had no control, but Ted never lost his. Tempestuous seconds later, he lifted his mouth from hers slowly, inch by inch, his hands contracting around her upper arms as he eased her away from him and looked down into her shattered eyes.

She knew how she must look, with her swollen mouth still pleading for his kisses, her body trembling with the residue of what he’d aroused. She couldn’t hide her reaction. But none of his showed in his face.

“Do you begin to see how dangerous it is?” he asked with unusual softness in his deep voice. “I could have you against the counter, right now. You’re too shaken, too curious, to deny me, and I’m fairly human in my needs. I can see everything you feel, everything you want, in your face. You have no defense at all.”

“But you…don’t you…want me?” she stammered.

His face contorted for an instant. Then suddenly, all expression left his face. His hands contracted and one corner of his mouth pulled up. “I want a woman,” he said mercilessly. “You’re handy. That’s all it is.”

The revelation was shattering to her ego. “Oh. Oh, I…I see.”

“I hope so. You’re very obvious lately, Coreen. You hang around the ranch waiting for me, you dress up when I come into the feed store. It’s flattering, but I don’t want your juvenile attention or your misplaced infatuation. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but that’s how it is. You aren’t the kind of woman who attracts me. You have the body and the outlook of an adolescent.”

She went scarlet. Had she been so obvious? She moved back from him, her arms crossing over her breasts. She was devastated.

His jaw tautened as he looked at her wounded expression, but he didn’t recant. “Don’t take it so hard,” he said curtly. “You’ll learn soon enough that we have to settle for what we can get in life. I’ll send Billy for supplies from now on. And you’ll find some excuse not to come out to the ranch to see Sandy. Won’t you?”

She managed to nod. With a tight smile and threatening tears, she escaped the storeroom and somehow got through the rest of the day. Ted had paused at the front steps to look back at her, an expression of such pain on his face for an instant that she might have been forgiven for thinking he’d lied to her about his feelings. But later she decided that it must have been the sunlight reflecting off those cold blue eyes. He’d let her down hard, but if he couldn’t return her feelings, maybe it was kinder in the long run.

From then on, Ted sent his foreman to buy supplies and never set foot in the feed store again. Coreen saw him occasionally on the streets of Jacobsville, the town being so small that it was impossible to avoid people forever. But she didn’t look at him or speak to him. They went to the same cafeteria for lunch one day, totally by chance, and she left her coffee sitting untouched and went out the back way as he was being seated. Once she caught him watching her from across the street, his face faintly bemused, but he never came close. If he had, she’d have been gone like a shot. Perhaps he knew that. Her fragile pride had taken a hard knock.

She was eventually invited out to the ranch to visit Sandy, again, supposedly with Ted’s blessing. Rather than make Sandy suspicious about her motives, she went, but first she made absolutely sure that Ted was out of town or at least away from the ranch. Sandy noticed and mentioned it, emphasizing that Ted had said it was perfectly all right for her to be there. Coreen wouldn’t discuss it, no matter how much Sandy pried.

Once, after that, Ted came upon her unexpectedly at a social event. She’d gone with Sandy to a square dance to celebrate her twenty-second birthday. Neither of them had dates. Sandy hadn’t mentioned that her brother had planned to go until they were already there. In the middle of a square dance, Coreen found herself passed from one partner to the other until she came face-to-face with a somber Ted. To his surprise, and everyone else’s, she walked off the dance floor and went home.

Gossip ran rampant in Jacobsville after that, because it was the first time in memory that any woman had snubbed Ted Regan publicly. Her father found it curious and amusing. Sandy was devastated; but it was the last time she tried to play Cupid.

There was one social event that Coreen hadn’t planned on attending, since Ted would certainly be there. Her father belonged to a gun club and Coreen had always gone with him to target practice and meetings. Ted was the club president.

Coreen had long since stopped going to the club, but when the annual dance came around, her father insisted that she attend. She didn’t want to. Sandy had already told her in a puzzled way that Ted went wild every time Coreen’s name was mentioned since that square dance. She probably wondered if it was something more than having Coreen snub him at the dance, but she was too polite to ask.

Ted’s venomous glare when he saw her at the gun club party was unsettling. She was wearing a sequined silver dress with spaghetti straps and a low V-neckline, with silver high heels dyed to match it. Her black hair had been waist-length at the time, and it was in a complicated coiffure with tiny wisps curling around her oval face. She looked devastating and the other men in attendance paid her compliments and danced with her. Ted danced with no one. He nursed a whiskey soda on the sidelines, talked to the other men present and glared at Coreen.

He seemed angry out of all proportion to her attendance. Ted had been wearing a dinner jacket with a ruffled white shirt and diamond-and-gold cuff links, and expensive black slacks. There was a red carnation in his lapel. The unattached women fell over themselves trying to attract him, but he ignored them. And then, incredibly, Ted had taken her by the hand, without asking if she wanted to dance, and pulled her into his arms.

Her heart had beaten her breathless while they slowly circled the floor. This was more than a duty dance, because his pale blue eyes were narrowed with anger. As the lights lowered, he’d maneuvered her to the side door and out into the moonlit darkness. There, he’d all but thrown her back against the wall.

“Why did you come tonight?” he said tersely. His blue eyes flared like matches as he stared at her in the light from the inside.

“Not because of you,” she began quickly, ready to explain that she hadn’t wanted to attend in the first place, but her well-meaning father had insisted. He didn’t know about her crush on Ted. He wanted her to meet some eligible men.

“No?” Ted had challenged. His cold gaze had wandered over her and his lids came down to cover the expression in them. “You want me. Your eyes tell me so every time you look at me. You can walk away from dances or refuse to speak to me on the street, but you’re only fooling yourself if you think it doesn’t show!”

Her dark blue eyes had glittered up at him with temper. “You’re very conceited!”

He’d paused to light a cigarette, but as his eyes swept over her, he suddenly tossed it off the porch into the sand and stepped forward. “It isn’t conceit.” He bit off the words, jerking her into his body.

His hand caught her by the nape and held her face poised for the downward descent of his. Her missed breath was audible.

The look in her eyes made him hesitate. Despite all her denials, she looked as if he was offering her heaven. Her breath came in sharp little jerks that were audible.

That excited him. His free hand went to her bodice and spread at the top of the V-neckline against her soft, warm skin. She gasped and as her mouth opened, his lips parted and settled on it. Her faint, anguished moan sent him spinning right off the edge of the world.

He forgot her age and his conscience the second he felt her soft, warm mouth tremble before it began to answer the insistent pressure of his own. He remembered too well the first taste he’d had of her, because his dreams had tormented him ever since. He’d thought he was imagining the pleasure he’d had with her, but he wasn’t. The reality was just as devastating as the memory, and he couldn’t help himself.

The hand behind her head contracted, bringing her mouth in to closer contact with his, and his free hand slid uninhibitedly down inside her bodice to cover one small, hard-tipped breast.

She protested, but not strongly enough to deter him. The feel of that big, warm, callused hand so intimately on her skin made her tremble with new sensations. She clung to his arms while he tasted and touched. She barely noticed the tiny strap being eased down her arm, or the slow relinquishing of her mouth, until she felt his mouth slide down her throat, over her collarbone and finally onto the warm silkiness of her breast.

She made a harsh sound and her nails bit into his arms.

“Don’t cry out,” he whispered at her breast. “Bite back those exciting little cries or we’re going to become the evening’s entertainment.” His hand lifted her gently to his waiting mouth. He took the hard nipple inside and slowly, tenderly, began to suckle her.

She wept noiselessly at the ecstasy of his touch, clinging, shivering, as his mouth pleasured her. When it lifted, she hung against him, yielded, waiting, her eyes half-closed and misty with arousal. He looked at her face for one long instant before he pushed the other strap down her arm and watched the silky material fall to her waist. His hands arched her and his head bent. He hesitated just long enough to fill his eyes with the exquisite sight of her bare breasts before he took her inside his hungry mouth, and for a few brief, incandescent seconds, she flew among the stars with him.

She slumped against him when he finally managed to stop. She heard him dragging in long, ragged breaths while he lifted her bodice back into place and eased the shoulder straps up to support it. Then he held her while she shivered.

“Am I the first?” he asked roughly.

“Yes.” She couldn’t have lied to him. She was too weak.

The callused hands at her back contracted bruisingly for a minute. He cursed under his breath, furiously. “This is wrong. Wrong!” He bit off the words. “You’re so young…!”

Her soft cheek nuzzled against his throat. “I love you,” she whispered. “I love you more than my own life.”

“Stop it!” He pushed her away. His eyes were frightening, glittery and dangerous. He moved back, his face rigid with controlled passion, tormented. “I don’t want your love!”

She looked at him sadly, her big blue eyes soft and gentle and vulnerable. “I know,” she said.

His face corded until it looked like a mask over the lean framework of his cheekbones. His fists clenched at his sides. “Stay away from me, Coreen,” he said huskily. “I have nothing to give you. Nothing at all.”

“I know that, too,” she said, her voice calm even as her legs trembled under her. At that moment, he looked capable of the worst kind of violence. “You won’t believe me, but I only came tonight because my father wanted me to.”

His face looked drawn, older. His eyes were like a rainy day, full of storms. “Don’t build any dreams on what just happened. It was only sex,” he said bluntly. “That’s all it was, just a flash of sexual need that got loose for a minute. I’ll never marry, and love isn’t in my vocabulary.”

“Because you won’t let it be,” she said quietly.

“Leave it alone, Coreen,” he returned coldly.

She felt the chill, as she hadn’t before. He was as unapproachable now as stone. The song that was playing inside suddenly caught her attention and she laughed a little nervously. “Thanks for the Memory.” She identified it, and thought how appropriate it was.

“Don’t kid yourself that this was any romantic interlude,” he said with brutal honesty as he fought for breath. “You’re just a kid…little more than a stick figure with two marbles for breasts. Now go away. Get out of my life and stay out!”

He’d walked off and left her out there. It was a summer night and warm. Coreen, wounded to the heart by that parting shot, had gone to her father’s car and sat down in it. She hadn’t gone back inside even when her father came out and asked what was wrong. A headache, she’d told him. He’d seen her leave with Ted, and he knew by the look on her face that she was hurt. He made their excuses and took her home.

Coreen had never gone to another gun club meeting or accepted another invitation from Sandy to come out to the ranch and ride horses. And on the rare occasions when Ted came into the store, she’d made herself scarce. She couldn’t even meet his eyes, ashamed of her own lack of control and his biting comment about her body. For a man who thought she was too small-breasted, he certainly hadn’t been reticent about touching her there, she thought. She knew so little about men, though, perhaps he meant the whole thing as a punishment. But if that had been so, why had his hands trembled?

Eventually she’d come to grips with it. She’d put Ted into a compartment of her past and locked him up, and she’d pretended that the night of the dance had never happened. Then her father had a heart attack and became an invalid. It was up to Coreen to run the business and she wasn’t doing very well. That was when Barry had come into her life. Coreen and her father had been forced to put the feed store on the market and Barry had liked the prospect of owning it. He’d also liked the looks of Coreen, and suddenly made himself indispensable to her and her father. Anything they needed, he’d get them, despite her pride and protests.

He was always around, offering comfort and soft kisses to Coreen, who was upset about the doctor’s prognosis, and hungry for a little kindness. Ted’s behavior had killed something vulnerable in her. Barry’s attention was a soothing balm to her wounds.

Ted had heard that his favorite cousin, Barry, was seeing a lot of Coreen. Ted stopped by often to see her father, and he watched her now, in an intense, disturbing way. He was gentle, almost hesitant, when he spoke to her. But Coreen had learned her lesson. She was distant and barely polite, so remote that they might have been strangers. When he came close, she moved away. That had stopped him in his tracks the first time it happened.

After that, he became cruel with her, at a time when she needed tenderness desperately. He began to taunt her about Barry, out of her father’s hearing, mocking her for trying to entice his rich cousin to take care of her. Everyone knew that the feed store was about to go bankrupt because of the neglect by her sick father and his mounting medical bills.

The taunts frightened her. She knew how desperate their situation was becoming, and she daren’t ask Ted for help in his present mood. Ironically his attitude pushed her further into Barry’s waiting arms. Her vulnerability appealed to Barry. He took over, assuming the debts and taking the load from Coreen’s shoulders.

The night her father died, Barry took charge of everything, paid all the expenses and proposed marriage to Coreen. She was confused and frightened, and when Ted came by the house to pay his respects, Barry wouldn’t let him near her. Ted left in a furious mood and Barry convinced Coreen that his cousin hadn’t wanted to speak to her, anyway.

Barry was beside her every minute at the funeral, keeping her away from Ted’s suspicious, concerned gaze and making sure he had not a minute alone with her. The same day, he presented her with a marriage license and coaxed her into taking a blood test.

Ted left on a European business trip just after he refused Barry’s invitation to be best man at the wedding. Ted’s face when Barry made the announcement was indescribable. He looked at Coreen with eyes so terrible that she trembled and dropped her own. He strode out without a word to her and got on a plane the same day. It was confirmation, if Coreen needed it, that Ted didn’t care what she did with her life as long as it didn’t involve him. She might as well marry Barry as anyone, she decided, since she couldn’t have the one man she loved.

But she was naive about the demands of marriage, and especially about the man Barry really was behind his social mask. Coreen lived in agony after her marriage. Barry knew nothing of tenderness and he was incapable of any normal method of satisfaction in bed. He had abnormal ways of fulfillment that hurt her and his cruelty wore away her confidence and her self-esteem until she became clumsy and withdrawn. Ted didn’t come near them and Sandy’s invitations were ignored by Barry. He all but broke up her friendship with Sandy. Not that it wouldn’t have been broken up, anyway. Ted moved to Victoria and took Sandy with him, keeping the old Regan homestead for a holiday house and turning over the management of his cattle ranch to a man named Emmett Deverell.

Barry had known how Coreen felt about Ted. Eventually Ted became the best weapon in his arsenal, his favorite way of asserting his power over Coreen by taunting her about the man who didn’t want her. They’d been married just a year when Ted finally accepted Barry’s invitation to visit them in Jacobsville. Coreen hadn’t expected Ted to come, but he had.

By that time, Coreen was more afraid of Barry than she’d ever dreamed she could be. He was impotent and he made intimacy degrading, a disgusting ordeal that made her physically sick. When he drank, which became a regular thing after their marriage, he became even more brutal. He blamed her for his impotence, he blamed her infatuation for Ted and harped on it all the time until finally she stiffened whenever she heard Ted’s name. She tried to leave him several times, but a man of such wealth had his own ways of finding her and dealing with her, and with anyone who tried to help her. In the end she gave up trying, for fear of causing a tragedy. When he turned to other women, it was almost a relief. For a long time, he left her alone and she had peace, although she wondered if he was impotent with his lovers. But he began to taunt her again, after he’d run into Ted at a business conference. And he’d invited Ted to visit them in Jacobsville.

Ted had watched her covertly during that brief visit, as if something puzzled him. She was jumpy and nervous, and when Barry asked her for anything, she almost ran to get it.

“See?” Barry had laughed. “Isn’t she the perfect little homemaker? That’s my girl.”

Ted hadn’t laughed. He’d noticed the harried, hunted expression on Coreen’s face and the pitiful thinness of her body. He’d also noticed the full liquor cabinet and remarked on it, because everyone knew that it was Tina’s house that Barry and Coreen were staying in, and that Tina detested liquor.

“Oh, a swallow of alcohol doesn’t hurt, and Coreen likes her gin, don’t you, honey?” he teased.

Coreen kept her eyes hidden. “Of course,” she lied. He’d already warned her about what would happen if she didn’t go along with anything he said. He’d been even more explicit about the consequences if she so much as looked longingly at Ted. He’d invited his cousin to torment Coreen, and it was working. He was in a better humor than he’d enjoyed in months.

“Get us a drink. What will you have, Ted?”

The older man declined and he didn’t stay long. Ted had never come back to visit after that. Barry met his cousin occasionally and he enjoyed telling Coreen how sorry Ted felt for him. She knew that Barry was telling him lies about her, but she was too afraid to ask what they were.

Her life had become almost meaningless. It didn’t help that her earlier clumsiness had been magnified tenfold. She was forever falling into flowerpots or tripping over throw rugs. Barry made it worse by constantly calling attention to it, chiding her and calling her names. Eventually she didn’t react anymore. Her self-esteem was so low that it no longer seemed important to defend herself. She tried to run away. But he always found her…

He mentioned once how his mother, Tina, had controlled him all his life. Perhaps his weakness stemmed from her dominance and the lack of a father. His drinking grew worse. There were other women, scores of them, and in between he was cruel to Coreen, in bed and out of it. He was no longer discreet with his affairs. But he was less interested in tormenting Coreen as well. Until that card came from Sandy on Coreen’s birthday, the day before the tragic accident that had killed Barry. It had Ted’s signature on it, too, a shocking addition, and Barry had gone crazy at the sight of it. He’d gotten drunk and that night he’d held Coreen down on the sofa with a knife at her throat and threatened to cut her up….

A sudden buzz of conversation brought Coreen back to the present. Shivering from the memory, she focused her eyes on the big oak desk where the lawyer was sitting and realized that he was almost through reading the will.

“That does it, I’m afraid,” he concluded, peering over his small glasses at them. “Everything goes to his mother. The one exception is the stallion he willed to his cousin, Ted Regan. And a legacy of one hundred thousand dollars is to be left to Mrs. Barry Tarleton, under the administration of Ted Regan, to be held in trust for her until she reaches the age of twenty-five. Are there any questions?”

Ted was scowling as he looked at Coreen, but there was no shock or surprise on her face. There was only stiff resignation and a frightening calmness.

Tina got to her feet. She glanced at Coreen coldly. “I’ll give you a little while to get out of the house. Just to stem any further gossip, you understand, not out of any regard. I blame you for what happened to my son. I always will.” She turned and left the room, her expression foreboding.

Coreen didn’t reply. She stared at her hands in her lap. She couldn’t look at Ted. She was homeless, and Ted controlled the only money she had. She could imagine that she’d have to go on her knees to him to get a new pair of stockings. She was going to have to get a job, quick.

“She could have waited until tomorrow,” Sandy muttered to Ted when they were back outside, watching Tina climb into the Lincoln.

“Why did he do that?” Ted asked with open puzzlement. “For God’s sake, he was worth millions! He’s involved me in it, and she’ll have literally nothing for another year, until she turns twenty-five! She’ll even have to ask me for gas money!”

Sandy glanced at him with faint surprise at the concern he’d betrayed for Coreen. “She’ll cope. She knew Barry wasn’t leaving her much. She’s prepared. She said it didn’t matter.”

“Hell, of course it matters! Someone needs to talk some sense into her! She could sue for a widow’s allowance.”

“I doubt that she will. Money was never one of her priorities, or didn’t you know?”

He didn’t reply. His eyes were narrow and introspective.

“She looks odd, did you notice?” Sandy asked worriedly. “Really odd. I hope she isn’t going to do anything foolish.”

“Let’s go,” Ted said as he got in behind the steering wheel, and he sounded bitter. “I want to talk to that lawyer before we go home.”

Sandy frowned as she looked at him. She was worried, but it wasn’t about Coreen’s money problems, or the will. Coreen was hopelessly clumsy since she’d married Barry. She said that she liked to skydive and go up in sailplanes, especially when she was upset, because she said it relaxed her. But she’d related tales of some of the craziest accidents Sandy had ever heard of. Sometimes she thought that Barry had programmed Coreen to be accident-prone. The few times early in their marriage that she’d seen her friend, before Barry had cut her out of Coreen’s life, he’d enjoyed embarrassing Coreen about her clumsiness.

Ted didn’t know about the accidents. Until the funeral, he’d walked away every time Sandy even mentioned Coreen, almost as if it hurt him to talk about her. He had the strangest attitude about her friend. He didn’t care much for women, she knew, but the way he treated Coreen was intriguing. And the most curious thing had been the way he’d looked, holding Coreen in the living room earlier. The expression on his face had been one of torment, not hatred.

She was never going to understand her brother, she thought. The violence of his reaction to Coreen was completely at odds with the tenderness he’d shown her. Perhaps he did care, in some way, and simply didn’t realize it.

Sandy insisted on staying with Coreen overnight, and she offered her best friend the sanctuary of the ranch until she found a place to live. Coreen refused bluntly, put off by even the thought of having to look at Ted over coffee every morning.

Coreen got her friend away the next morning, after a long and sleepless night blaming herself and remembering Ted’s accusation of the day before.

“We’re just getting moved in. Remember, Ted leased the place, along with the cattle farm, and we moved to Victoria about the time you married Barry. Ted’s away a lot now, over at our cattle farm on the outskirts of Jacobsville, that Emmett Deverell and his family operate for him. We’re going to have thoroughbred horses at our place and some nice saddle mounts. We can go riding like we used to. Won’t you come with me? I’ll work it out with Ted,” Sandy pleaded.

“And let Ted drive me into a nervous breakdown?” came the brittle laugh. “No, thanks. He hates me. I didn’t realize how much until yesterday. He would rather it had been me than Barry, didn’t you see? He thinks I’m a murderess…!”

Sandy hugged her shaken friend close. “My brother is an idiot!” she said angrily. “Listen, he’s not as brutal as he seems when you get to know him, really he isn’t.”

“He’s never been anything except cruel to me,” Coreen replied, subdued. She pulled away. “Tell him to do whatever he likes with the trust, I won’t need it. I can take care of myself. Be happy, Sandy. You’ve got a great career with that computer company, even a part interest. Make your mark in the world, and think of me once in a while. Try to remember all the good times, won’t you?”

Sandy felt a chill run up her spine. Coreen had that restless look about her, all over again. There had been two bad accidents over the years because of Coreen’s passion for flying and skydiving: a broken leg and two cracked ribs. Sandy had gone to see her in the hospital and Barry had been always in residence, refusing to let Coreen talk much about how the accidents had happened.

“Please be careful. You really are a little accident-prone,” she began.

Coreen shivered. “Not really,” she said. “Not anymore. Anyway, the people I skydive with watch out for me. I’ll get better. I’m not suicidal, you know,” she chided gently, and watched her friend blush. “I wouldn’t kill myself over Ted’s bad opinion of me. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.”

“Ted wouldn’t want to see you hurt,” Sandy said gently.

“Of course not,” she said placatingly. “Now, go home. You’ve got a life of your own, although I really appreciate having you here. I needed you.”

“Ted came voluntarily,” she said pointedly. “I didn’t ask him to.”

Coreen’s blue eyes darkened with pain. “He came to make me pay for hurting Barry,” she said. “He’s always found ways to make me pay, even for trying to care about him.”

“You know why Ted won’t let anyone close,” Sandy said quietly. “Our mother was much younger than Dad. She ran away with another man when I was just a kid. Dad took it real hard. He gave Ted a vicious distrust of women, and I was the scapegoat until he died. Ted’s kind to me, and he likes pretty women, but he wants no part of marriage.”

“I noticed.”

Sandy watched her closely. “He changed when you married. For the past two years, he’s been a stranger. After he came back from that visit with you and Barry, he took off for Canada and stayed up there for a month and then he moved us to Victoria. He couldn’t bear to talk about you.”

“God knows why, I never did anything to him,” Coreen said. “He knew Barry wanted to marry me and he thought I was after Barry’s money, but he never tried to stop us.”

Sandy let it drop, but not willingly. “Send me a postcard from wherever you move. I’ll phone you then,” she suggested. “We could meet somewhere for lunch.”

Coreen’s eyes were distracted. “Of course.” She glanced at Sandy. “The birthday card…”

“Surprised, were you?” Sandy asked. “So was I. Ted had just talked to Barry. A day or two later, he saw a photograph of you and Barry in the Jacobsville paper he got in Victoria. He became very quiet when he saw it. You weren’t smiling and you looked…fragile.”

Coreen remembered the photograph. She and Barry had been at a charity banquet and he’d been drinking heavily—much more so than usual. She’d been at the end of her rope when the photographer caught them.

“Then Ted remembered that your birthday was upcoming,” Sandy continued, “and he picked out a card to send you. For a man who hates you, he’s amazingly contradictory, isn’t he?”

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