The Last Honest Woman

  He could imagine Abby then, open, innocent, trusting. "And Rockwell?"

  "He loved her, I think, as far as he was capable and for as long as he was capable. Some people say weakness doesn't make a person bad." Something flickered in her eyes but was quickly masked. "I disagree with that. Chuck was weak emotionally. I could make excuses for him, knowing that he was raised by an impossibly domineering mother and a workaholic father. Personally, I don't care much for excuses."

  She glanced over, waiting for him to comment. "Go on." Dylan had already researched Rockwell's upbringing.

  "They had trouble almost from the start. She'd cover it up, but it's difficult to hide anything from another triplet. She went with him to Paris, London, wore beautiful clothes and was offered the sort of life-style a lot of women dream of. Not Abby." Chantel shook her head, and her fingers began to drum lightly on the fence rail. "I'm not saying she didn't enjoy it at first, but Abby had always looked for roots. The O'Hurleys have a difficult time sinking them."

  "That's why she wanted this place."

  Chantel dropped her cigarette on the ground and left it to smolder. "Chuck bought it after a particularly messy affair with a girl too young to know any better. Then, almost as soon as he did, he grew bored with it. He made it clear to Abby that if she wanted to keep the place and maintain it she had to do it herself."

  "She told you that?"

  "No. Chuck did." She sent him an odd, self-mocking look. "He breezed into L.A. and decided it might be interesting to put the moves on his wife's sister. Charming. Give me another cigarette."

  While he lit if for her, Chantel composed herself. "As it happened, he wasn't my type, and though my morals are often in doubt, I do have standards. He did manage to get drunk and tell me all the problems he was having with the little woman at home. She was boring." Chantel blew out a vicious stream of smoke. "She was too ordinary, too middle-class. She'd dug into this farm and was holding on, and he had better things to do with his money. If she wanted the damn roof fixed, she could deal with it herself. If she wanted the plumbing brought up to twentieth-century standards, she'd just have to figure out how to manage it on her own. He wasn't interested. He went on about how she had this wild idea to raise horses. He laughed at her." Chantel's jaw stiffened. When she realized she was speaking too quickly, she deliberately slowed. "I didn't throw him out, because I wanted to hear it all. While she'd been going through this, I'd been busy carving out my own career. Too busy, you see, to pay much attention, even though I knew instinctively that things weren't right with Abby."

  And how much attention had he really paid over the past weeks? That thought stung him. He'd expected her trust and honesty-had demanded it-but all he'd given her were questions.

  He'd seen her, listened to her, watched her, and he'd known in his gut that all the preconceptions he'd come with were wrong. Yet why had she stayed with Rockwell? And why did he hate himself for still needing to know?

  He drew back, "Why do you think he told you all this?" he asked his voice unemotional.

  Her look was hard. It was amazing how quickly her expression could change from cool to frigid without her moving a muscle. "Obviously he thought I'd be just as amused as he." She smiled again and drew more calmly on her cigarette. "Anyway, I got rid of him, then I called Maddy and we came here. Abby was living in a place that was nearly ready to fall down around her ears. Chuck wasn't giving her a dime, so she was working part-time at places she could take Ben along. She was glad to see us, but she wasn't ready to listen to any advice that led to divorce."

  "Why?" Dylan touched her for the first time, just a hand on her arm, but she could feel the intensity of his response. "Why did she stay with him?"

  So, that was the crux of it, Chantel realized. He cared, and that made it difficult to hold her grudge against him. "I think you'll need to get that answer from her, but I can tell you this. Abby has a large capacity for hope, and she kept believing that Chuck would come around. Meantime, there was the immediate problem of making the house livable. We went to Richmond and sold her jewelry. Chuck had been very generous in the first six or eight months of their marriage and it brought in enough to get her going. I bought her mink." What she didn't mention was that she hadn't been able to afford it at the time. "She joked later that she saw a picture of me wearing her roof."

  "She sold the mink to fix the roof," he murmured.

  "There were a lot of repairs. It amazed me then how stubborn she was about this place. But when I see her here now, it's obvious how right it is for her and the kids. After that, things settled down a bit. She was pregnant with Chris. I have my own theory on that, but it's best left alone."

  He looked at her and saw that she understood more than Abby would ever have guessed. "It's being left alone."

  "Maybe I do like you." She relaxed a little and tossed the cigarette aside. "After Chris was born, things went from bad to worse. Chuck was blatant about his affairs. I don't consider it a point in his credit, but I believe he wanted to push Abby into a divorce for her own good. When she did, when she finally did, I think he realized just how much he was losing."

  "Are you saying that Abby had filed for divorce?"

  "That's right. She could have raked him over the coals-I certainly would have-but she didn't charge him with adultery and she didn't ask for alimony. All she wanted was the farm and some reasonable support for the kids. He was involved with Lori Brewer at the time, and they went on quite a binge. Somewhere along the tine, it must have hit him. He'd compensated for the loss of the thrill of racing with other things. He'd had a wife who'd stuck by him and two wonderful children he'd traded for a life-style that only led to more misery. I know how he felt because he called me a few days before that last race. God knows why. I was hardly sympathetic. He said he'd called Abby and had asked her to reconsider and she'd refused. He wanted me to go to bat for him. I told him to grow up. A couple days later, he crashed."

  "And she was left feeling guilty because she'd planned to divorce him."

  "You catch on." She tapped a beautifully manicured nail against the rail. "There's never been any use telling her not to feel that way, or not to let herself be punished."

  Dylan was having problems enough with his own sense of guilt, but he focused on Chantel's last words. "What do you mean, punished?"

  "Did you ever consider how difficult it is to maintain a place like this, to raise two children-I'm not speaking of emotionally or physically now, but financially."

  "Rockwell had plenty of money."

  "Rockwell did-Janice Rockwell did, and she still does. Abby didn't get a penny." She shook her head before he could interrupt her. Every time she thought of it she tasted venom. "She saw to it that Abby didn't get a penny of Chuck's trust fund, not for herself, not for the farm, not for the children."

  While Chantel tasted venom, something like acid rose in Dylan's throat. Everything he'd said to Abby from the first day in the rain dreary kitchen to the morning he'd watched her drop rubber gloves in her purse came back to him. And he realized, as his stomach twisted, that he'd have to live with that.

  "How has she managed to hold on to the farm?"

  "She took out a loan."

  There was a bitter taste in his mouth that had nothing to do with tobacco. He hadn't believed in her, hadn't trusted his own feelings enough. She'd been too proud to tell him the things Chantel was saying now.

  The hell with her pride, he thought suddenly, viciously. Didn't he have a right to know? Didn't he have a right to- Checking his thoughts, he stared over the paddock and to the hills beyond. No, it was his pride that was bruised, he realized, both the man's and the reporter's. She'd known what he'd thought of her, and she'd accepted it-and him.

  "Why are you telling me this?"

  "Because someone has to convince Abby that it wasn't her fault, that she couldn't have prevented anything that happened. I think you're the one to do it. I think you're the man, if you've got the spine for it, to make her happy."
/>   Her chin was up, her eyes dark as she tossed the challenge at him. Dylan found himself smiling. "You're a hell of a woman. I missed that the first time around."

  She smiled back. "Yeah. I missed a few things about you, too."

  Maddy stuck her head out of the back door. "Chantel, the limo's here."

  "I'm coming." She took a step back, then gave him one last piercing look. "One more thing, Dylan. If you hurt Abby, you're going to have to deal with me."

  "Fair enough."

  He offered his hand. As though she were amused by both of them, Chantel accepted it. "I guess I'll wish you luck."

  "I appreciate it."

  The goodbyes were long, tearful and noisy. Maddy came to Dylan and gave him a surprisingly hard and affectionate hug. "Lucky for you I think you're good for her," she whispered in his ear. Then she backed off with a smile. "Welcome to the family, Dylan."

  Each member made the rounds twice before climbing into the limo. Chris and Ben had to be coaxed out once they discovered all the knobs and automatic buttons inside the car. After they'd raised and lowered the windows half a dozen times, blasting the stereo and the sleek compact TV, Abby pulled them out so that the rest of her family could climb in. Serene as an ocean liner, the limo cruised up the rut-filled lane.

  "I'm going to drive a limo," Chris decided on the spot. "I can wear a neat hat like the one Mr. Donald had and ride in the front seat."

  "I'd rather ride in the back with the TV."

  Laughing, Abby ruffled Ben's hair. "There's a lot of O'Hurley in this boy. I don't know about you, but I want something long and cold before I tackle the mess in the kitchen."

  "Can we go play with the foals?" Ben was already off the porch as he asked.

  "Not too rough," Abby called after them. With a sigh, she turned into the house. "I miss them already."

  "Quite a family."

  "To say the least. Do you want a soda?"

  "No." Restless, he wandered around the kitchen. Chantel's words were still eating at him. That, and everything else he'd learned over the last couple of days. The fact that he'd misjudged Abby so completely and so unfairly left him unsure of himself. "Abby, this place, the farm, it's very important to you."

  "Aside from the boys, it's the most important." She filled a glass with ice.

  "You're not a pushover." He said it so strongly that she turned back to stare at him.

  "I don't like to think so."

  "Why did you let Rockwell push you around?" he demanded. "Why did you let his mother push you out of everything you were entitled to?"

  "Wait a minute." She'd expected a day, even a few hours, before she had to plunge into it all again. "Janice had virtually nothing to do with the rest of it, certainly nothing to do with Chuck's biography."

  "The hell with the biography." He took her by the arms. It wasn't until that moment that he realized the book meant nothing, had meant nothing for some time. Abby meant everything. He could only see what she'd been through, what she had done, what had been done to her. If she wouldn't hate, he would hate for her. "She made certain you didn't get a penny of Rockwell's trust fund. With that money the farm would have been free and clear. You were entitled, your children were entitled. Why did you tolerate that?"

  "I don't know where you got your information." She struggled to keep her voice calm. There had been bitterness long ago, and she'd swallowed it. She had no desire to taste it again. "Janice had control of the trust. Chuck would have inherited at thirty-five, but he didn't live that long. The money was hers."

  "Do you really think that would have stood up in court?"

  "I wasn't interested in going to court. Chuck left us some money."

  "What was left after he'd blown most of it away."

  Abby nodded, keeping her voice even. This was an old argument, one she'd had with herself years before. "Enough so I can be sure that the kids can go to college."

  "In the meantime you had to take out a loan just to keep a roof over their beads."

  It humiliated her. He couldn't know how it had humiliated her to ask for money, how it embarrassed her that Dylan was now aware of it. "Dylan, that isn't your concern."

  "I'm making it my concern. You're my concern. Do you know how it made me feel to know that you're scrubbing some woman's floors?"

  She let out an impatient huff of air. "What difference does it make whose floors I scrub?"

  "It makes a big difference to me because I don't want you-I can't stand thinking of you-" He swore and tried again. "You could have been honest with me, maybe not at first, but later, after we'd come to mean something to each other."

  To mean what? she wanted to ask. At least she'd been honest about her feelings. She took the coffeepot from the stove and calmly moved to the sink to fill it with soapy water. "I was as honest as I could be. If it had only been me, I might have told you everything, but I had to think of the boys."

  "I wouldn't do anything to hurt them. I couldn't."

  "Dylan, why should any of this be important?" She wasn't calm, she thought. Damn it, she wasn't calm at all. She could feel anger building up and throbbing in her head. "It's only money. Can't you just let it go?"

  "It's not just about money, and no, I can't let it go. You haven't let it go either or you'd have been able to tell me about it." The frustration bit him, the guilt, the anger. And suddenly he flashed back to the picture of her, wrapped like a princess in white fur. "You sold that damn white mink to fix the roof."

  Baffled, she shook her head. "What difference does that make? I hardly need a mink to feed the stock."

  "You knew what I thought of you." Dylan's anger with himself only made him more unreasonable with her. "You let me go on thinking that. Even when I was busy falling in love with you, you never really trusted me with all of it. Double-talk and evasions, Abby. You never told me you were going to divorce him, you never told me you had to struggle just to keep food on the table. Do you know how it makes me feel to find out all of these things in bits and pieces?"

  "Do you know how it makes me feel?" Her voice rose to match his. "Do you know how it feels to rake it all up, to remember what a miserable failure I was?"

  "That's ridiculous. You have to know how foolish that statement is."

  "I know how foolish I was."

  "Abby." His tone roughened, but his hands grew gentle on her arms. "He failed you, he failed his children, and he failed himself." He gave her a quick shake, desperate to make her see what she'd done and how much he respected her for it. "You were the one who made things work. You're the one who built a home and a life."

  "Stop yelling at my mom."

  Rigid and pale, Ben stood just inside the kitchen doorway. Already upset, Abby could do little more than stare at him. "Ben-"

  "Let go of my mom." His bottom lip quivered, but the look he sent Dylan was devastatingly man-to-man. "Let go of her and go away. We don't want you here."

  Disgusted with himself, Dylan released Abby and turned to the boy. "I wouldn't hurt your mother, Ben."

  "You were, I saw you."

  "Ben." Abby stepped between them quickly. "You don't understand. We were angry with each other. People sometimes yell at each other when they're angry."

  His jaw was set in a way that reminded Abby almost painfully of her father in full temper. "I don't want him to yell at you. I'm not going to let him hurt you."

  "Honey, I was yelling back." She said it softly, dropping her hand to stroke his head. "And he wasn't hurting me."

  His eyes shone with a mixture of humiliation and anger. "Maybe you like him better than me."

  "No, baby-"

  "I'm not a baby!" His pale face filled with color as he pushed away. "I'll show you!" Abby was still crouched on the floor as the back door slammed behind him.

  "Oh, God." Slowly Abby rose to her feet. "I didn't handle that very well."

  "It was my fault." Dylan dragged both hands through his hair. He'd wanted to give, to offer whatever he could to all of them. Instead, he'd mana
ged to hurt Abby and alienate Ben in one instant. "Let me go talk to him."

  "I don't know. Maybe I should-oh, my God! Ben, Ben, stop!" She was through the back door before Dylan could call out. He was behind her in an instant, then past her. Ben was mounted on top of Thunder, and the high-strung stallion was bucking nastily.

  Abby's heart lodged in her throat as the boy clung to the horse's back and she couldn't even call his name again. For a moment she thought he'd be able to control the horse and slip off safely, but then the stallion reared so violently that for an instant horse and boy were one form, raised high against the blue sky behind them. Then Ben was tossed off as carelessly as a fly.

  She beard his cry mingle with the shrill whinnies of the animal. Slowly, as if suspended in time, she watched, devastated, as hooves danced around Ben's body, miraculously missing him. She tasted her own fear, which rose like rust in her mouth as she raced over the last few feet of ground.

  "Ben. Oh, Ben." She wasn't weeping, but along with Dylan began to check his limp body for signs of life.

  "He's okay, but he's unconscious. I think his arm's broken." His own hands were shaking. If he'd only been quicker, just a few seconds- "Abby, can you pull the car around?"

  Ben lay quietly, his face pale as milk. She wanted to cover his body with hers and weep. "Yes." Glancing up, she saw Chris standing beside her, shaking like a leaf. "Come on, Chris." She took his hand in hers. "We've got to take Ben to the hospital."

  "Is he okay? Is he going to be okay?"

  "He's going to be fine," she murmured as she hurried for the car.

  "Can you drive?" Dylan asked her when she came back. "I don't know the way."

  With a nod, she helped him settle her firstborn on his lap in the front seat. Teeth set, she went slowly down the lane, terrified of jolting him with bumps. The moment she got onto the highway, she pressed the accelerator and stopped thinking.

  When Ben stirred, she felt tears well up and forced them back. The first whimpering sounds he made became full-fledged sobbing as he regained consciousness fully. She began to talk to him, nonsense, anything that came into her head. From the back seat, Chris leaned up and tentatively stroked Ben's leg. Not knowing what else to do, Dylan held the boy tight in his arms and brushed gently at his hair.

  "Almost there, Ben," he murmured. "Just hang on."

  "It hurts."

  "Yeah, I know." When the boy turned his face into his shirt, Dylan held on. For the first time in his life, he fully understood what it meant to feel someone else's pain.

  Abby left the car by the curb outside the emergency room and leaped out to help Dylan with Ben.

  It seemed to take hours. Her teeth began to chatter as she gave the admissions clerk insurance information and Ben's medical history. She took deep, gulping breaths and tried to compose herself when they wheeled Ben away for X rays. Her little boy had tried, in his angry way, to prove he was a man. Now he was hurt, and she could only wait. Beside her, Dylan stood holding Chris in his arms.

  "Sit down, Abby. It's bound to take some time."

  "He's just a little boy." She couldn't fall apart now. Ben was going to need her. But the tears poured out and ran silently down her cheeks. "He was so angry. He'd never have gotten on the stallion if he hadn't been angry."

  "Abby, boys are always breaking bones." But his own stomach was knotted and rolling.

  "What's going to happen to Ben?" When he saw his mother's tears, Chris's breath began to hitch.

  "He's going to be all right." Abby pushed both hands over her cheeks to dry them. "The doctors are taking care of him."

  "I think he's going to have a cast." Dylan ran his hands down Chris's short, sturdy arm. "When it's dry you can sign your name on it.''

  Chris sniffed and thought about it. "I can only print."

  "That'll be fine. Let's sit down."

  Abby forced herself not to pace. When Chris climbed into her lap, she had to stop herself from clinging too tightly. With each minute that passed, the empty feeling inside her increased until she knew she was hollow.

  She was up and dizzy with fear when the doctor came out.

  "A nice clean break," he said to her. Recognizing her anxiety, he gave her shoulder a quick squeeze. "He's going to be a sensation at school with that cast."

  "He's- Is there anything else?" Everything from concussion to internal injuries had passed through her mind.

  "He's a strong, sturdy boy." His hand still resting lightly on her shoulder, the doctor felt the relief run through her. "He's a little queasy, and he's got some bruises that'll be colorful. I'd like him to rest here for a couple of hours, keep an eye on him, but I don't think you've got anything to worry about. We'll give you a prescription and a list of dos and don'ts. I've already told him he has to stay off wild horses for a while."

  "Thank you." She pushed her hands against her eyes for a moment. A broken bone. Bones healed, she thought with relief. "Can I see him now?"

  "Right this way."

  He looked so small on the white table. She fought back a fresh bout of tears as she went over to hold him. "Oh, Ben, you scared me to death."