clasped his hand in both of hers. “Oh, thank you! I was so worried, you see. Thank you.” She rebuttoned her dress and stood up. “I brought an apple pie for you cuz you came to see Mark yesterday. I left it in the kitchen with Sam.”
“Sarah, I do love your apple pies, but you don’t owe me anything.” He squeezed her shoulder and walked her to the door of his office. When he heard the front door close he sank down behind his wide oak desk and poured himself a brandy.
So Sarah Rose wanted to marry again. Well, why not? She’d been widowed almost thirty years; she deserved some joy in life. A lot of joy, in fact. He had a particular soft spot for a woman who could run a boardinghouse year in, year out without becoming soured on humanity. He also had a soft spot for anyone willing to risk their heart in marriage. He’d sure as hell never do it again.
Losing Celeste had left his life so bleak that sometimes he didn’t want to go on. But he knew he had to, for Rosemarie.
He lifted his glass to Sarah Rose, downed the contents in one gulp and poured another. This one he nursed while idly leafing through the stack of medical journals on the corner of his desk. Nothing startling and nothing new. Sometimes he thought medicine back East would benefit from a dose of Out West Indian remedies.
He continued to sip and read until he heard the front door open and saw Winifred glide past his window. After a moment he heard the rhythmic creak-creak of the porch swing. She had wanted to speak with him about something, he remembered. Now would be as good a time as any. He gulped the last of the brandy and pushed away from the desk.
A breeze had come up, scented with pine and the honeysuckle that drooped from the porch posts. Celeste had loved the smell of honeysuckle, even though in the summer it made her sneeze. He sucked in a breath at the bolt of anguish that laced across his chest.
Winifred sat rocking in the swing with a sleeping Rosemarie cradled in her arms. She looked up when he closed the front door.
“May I join you?”
“Of course. It’s your porch, and your swing.”
Zane frowned. That sounded unusually crisp for Winifred. Or perhaps he just did not know her well. He settled an arm’s length away and they rocked in silence for a while. He hoped she couldn’t smell the brandy on his breath.
“At breakfast you said you wanted to talk to me about something?” He didn’t really want to talk, but whatever she had on her mind it was better to get it over with.
“Yes, I did. I wanted to... I want...”
Ah. She didn’t really want to talk, either. “We don’t have to talk, Winifred. We could just watch the sun go down behind the hills.” He didn’t like it when a woman “wanted to talk.”
“We do have to talk.” Her voice was oddly flat and a ripple of unease snaked up his spine.
“About?” he prompted.
She bent her head over his daughter, then raised it and looked straight into his eyes. “About Rosemarie. I—I want to take her back to St. Louis with me. I want to raise her.”
He stopped the swing so abruptly her neck jerked back.
“Are you crazy? What on earth makes you—?”
“Think this is a good idea?” she finished for him.
“For starters, yes.” Zane kept his tone civil, but inside he seethed. Suddenly he wished he had another shot of brandy in his hand.
“It is a good idea, Zane. I think Cissy might have wanted it.”
“You know nothing about what Celeste wanted.” His voice was low and angry, and he didn’t care.
“A child,” she continued. “Especially a girl, should have a mother. Cissy and I grew up without a mother, and it was like...like always feeling hungry for something.”
Zane wrapped one hand around the chain supporting the swing and clenched the other into a fist. “I am Rosemarie’s father, Winifred. She is mine. My daughter. My responsibility.”
“But I could give her advantages, living in the East. Good schools. Music lessons. You cannot offer such things out here so far from civilization.”
He counted to twenty to keep his temper from making him say something he’d regret. “What gives you the right to disparage the life I can offer my child? We have a school. I can hire music teachers or art lessons or anything else my daughter needs.” His voice shook with fury and something else. Fear. He could not face losing Rosemarie, too.
“But—”
He waited until she looked directly at him. “Dammit, Winifred, you waltz out here and expect me to give up my daughter to a citified stranger with expensive clothes and high-faluting conservatory training? What do you take me for?”
That hit home. He could see the hurt in her eyes, but he was too angry to soften his words.
“The answer is no,” he shot. “It will always be no. Rosemarie is all I have of Celeste, and I will never—”
“Zane, please listen to me.”
“Winifred, for God’s sake, I love my daughter more than anything on this earth. Nothing, nothing you or anyone else could offer her can make any difference.”
Tears now sheened her cheeks, and while he felt a small hiccup of regret inside his chest, he couldn’t respond. Very slowly she placed Rosemarie in his lap and, keeping her face averted, slipped out of the swing and stepped quickly into the house.
Zane finished two more brandies before Sam called him to supper. Winifred did not appear, and he sent the houseboy upstairs to check on her.
“Lady say she not hungry, Boss.”
“Take her a chicken sandwich and some tea,” he ordered.
Sam folded his hands at his waist. “She not eat it.”
“Take it up anyway, dammit!”
He found he wasn’t hungry, either. His head began to pound with the familiar ache he’d felt ever since Celeste died, and after sitting and staring for an hour at the plate of food before him he stalked into the kitchen, grabbed the warmed baby bottle out of Sam’s hand and plodded up the stairs to feed his daughter.
* * *
The next morning when Winifred entered the dining room, Sam poured her coffee and shook his head. “Eyes look red, missy.”
Winifred brushed her fingers over her swollen eyelids. She had wept most of the night and slept little. “It’s—it’s my hay fever, I expect.” She lifted the cup to her lips.
Sam bent at the waist and tipped his head to peer into her face. “Maybe so,” he pronounced. “Boss eyes look funny, too.”
The houseboy’s keen black eyes glinted.
Winifred took a swallow of coffee. “You don’t miss much, do you, Sam?”
“Miss
