“Darlin’, I’m sure you weren’t a disappointment to your Pa. Little girls are special to their fathers.”
Tears stung her eyes. She turned around and let the night rail drop to her waist.
His curses were harsh. Angry. She kept her head up and her back straight. She knew what he was seeing. The three white scars crossing her back. Marks of failure. Marks no father would put on a child he was proud of. Marks she’d earned with her impulsive nature. The swearing behind her stopped. The silence was oppressive. The bed ropes creaked. A log popped and hissed in the fire. She couldn’t stand the tension anymore.
“I didn’t do my father proud.” She took a breath, counted to three and then explained, “I don’t want to fail you, too. I just don’t know what you want, how I’m supposed to act. You seem happy when I’m arguing, but I don’t think I can argue with you all the time…”
The feel of cotton rising up her back silenced her words. She hadn’t heard him move, but he was behind her. His hands on her shoulders turned her around.
“Why?”
One grated word and she had to bare all, exposing her weakness, her foolishness, maybe forever ruining his opinion of her. Her gaze was level with the center of his chest. She held onto her dignity by counting the hairs as she explained, “I told you I knew Cougar.”
“Yeah.”
Was that suspicion she heard in his voice? “I got kicked by a calf in the face during branding. It was hard to eat. Cougar brought me soup.”
His silence was deafening. She finished the bottom row of hair. Twenty-five.
“He was very nice. Kind.” She kept her gaze on his chest, almost desperately counting. Her fingers clenched to fists. At fifty, she had to resume speech. Oh God. “I let him kiss me.” She held her breath and waited for the outrage, the disbelief.
“And?”
Seventy-five. Seventy-six. Seventy-seven.
“My Father saw. He was furious.”
“Over a kiss?”
Oh, yes. Over a kiss. She remembered her father’s face. His rage. Her terror when he’d turned into someone else. Turned on her.
“He called Cougar a dirty Indian. Called me a fool for throwing myself away on him.”
No response. Not by a twitch of a muscle did Asa give his thoughts away.
Eighty. Eighty-one. Eighty-two.
“He said I couldn’t be trusted.”
Finally, he moved. His hands slid down her shoulders. In an agony of hope, she waited for him to catch her hands in his. To offer her one sign of comfort. Of trust. While their fingers brushed, he didn’t take her hand, didn’t tell her it didn’t matter, and he didn’t say the words she’d so pathetically hoped for. She had no option but to confess the last. “He sent me away.”
God! How could that still hurt?
“Damn!”
Asa’s harshly spat word shattered her concentration. She was either at one-hundred-and-one or one-hundred-and-ten, but what did it matter? The anger in that one word told her what he was thinking. If it had been just a kiss, why would her father have sent her away? She knew because, for every day of the four years she’d spent at Miss Penelope’s, she’d been reminded of what crime she’d been making up for. It didn’t matter how many times she’d protested her innocence. Or to whom. The doubt was always there. There was no reason to expect Asa to react any differently.
She wanted to whither into a defeated ball at the realization. Instead, she cleared her throat and locked her gaze on the bunched muscles in his cheek. She needed to finish this. She needed to tell him the truth. Whether he believed her or not, she had to try.
“I swear it was only a kiss, and I never, ever let anyone kiss me again.”
The declaration hung for a breathless moment in the silence.
Asa was the one to bring an end to the standoff between them. But he didn’t use the words she hungered for. Instead, with a move too slow to be startling, he reached for her. So desperately attuned to his response, she swore she could feel the slight breeze ruffling her gown as he did. Her night rail rustled and shifted against her body as he did up the buttons at her waist. His knuckles brushed her breast impersonally as he fastened the buttons over her chest. Slow and deliberate, there was no way she could interpret his gesture as anything but disinterest. The realization was like a knife wound to her soul.
“Now you don’t even want me anymore.” It was a simple statement of the inevitable.
He stopped, the backs of his hands resting on her collarbones. “Why do you say that?”
It was a logical question. She made her response just as rational. “If any other woman was standing here half-naked, you wouldn’t be putting her back into her clothes.”