Читать книгу Ethan - Diana Palmer - Страница 6

The house Ethan and his family called home was a huge two-story Victorian. Set against the softly rolling land of south Texas, with cattle grazing in pastures that seemed to stretch forever, it was the very picture of an old-time Western movie set. Except that the cattle in their fenced pastures were very real, and the fences were sturdy and purposeful, not picture-perfect and overly neat. Jacobsville was within an easy drive of Houston, and Victoria was even closer. It had a small-town atmosphere that Arabella had always loved, and she’d known the people who lived there most of her life. Like the Ballenger brothers, who ran the biggest feedlot in the territory, and the Jacobs—Tyler and Shelby Jacobs Ballenger—whose ancestor the town was named for.

The elegant old mansion with its bone-white walls and turret and gingerbread latticework was beautiful enough to have been featured in lifestyle magazines from time to time. It contained some priceless antiques both from early Texas and from England, because the first Hardeman had come over from London. The Hardemans were old money. Their fortune dated to an early cattle baron who made his fortune in the latter part of the nineteenth century during a blizzard that wiped out half the cattle ranches in the West. Actually, in the beginning, the family name had been Hartmond, but owing to the lack of formal education of their ancestor, the name was hopelessly misspelled on various documents until it became Hardeman.

Ethan looked like the portrait of that earlier Hardeman that graced the living-room mantel. They were probably much the same personality type, too, Arabella thought as she studied Ethan over the coffee he’d brought to the guest room for her. He was a forbidding-looking man with a cool, very formal manner that kept most people at arms’ length.

“Thank you for letting me come here,” she said.

He shrugged. “We’ve got plenty of room.” He looked around the high ceiling of the room she’d been given. “This was my grandmother’s bedroom,” he mused. “Remember hearing Mother talk about her? She lived to be eighty and was something of a hell-raiser. She was a vamp or some such thing back during the twenties, and her mother was a died-in-the-wool suffragette. One of the bloomer girls, out campaigning for the vote for women.”

“Good for her,” Arabella laughed.

“She’d have liked you,” he said, glancing down at her. “She had spirit, too.”

She sipped her coffee. “Do I have spirit?” she mused. “I let my father lead me around by the nose my whole life, and I guess I’d still be doing it if it hadn’t been for the accident.” She glanced at the cast on her wrist, sighing as she juggled the coffee mug in one hand. “Ethan, what am I going to do? I won’t even have a job, and Daddy always took care of the money.”

“This is no time to start worrying about the future,” he said firmly. “Concentrate on getting well.”

“But—”

“I’ll take care of everything,” he interrupted. “Your father included.”

She put the coffee mug down and lay back against the pillows. Her wrist was still uncomfortable and she was taking pain capsules fairly regularly. She felt slightly out of focus, and it was so nice to just lie there and let Ethan make all the decisions.

“Thank you, Ethan,” she said and smiled up at him.

He didn’t smile back. His eyes slid over her face in an exploration that set all her nerves tingling. “How long has it been since you’ve had any real rest?” he asked after a minute.

She shifted on the pillows. “I don’t know. It seems like forever.” She sighed. “There was never any time.” Her stomach muscles clenched as she remembered the constant pressure, the practice that never stopped, the planes and motel rooms and concert halls and recording dates and expectant audiences. She felt her body going rigid with remembered stress as she recalled how she’d had to force herself more and more to go out on the stage, to keep her nerve from shattering at the sight of all those people.

“I suppose you’ll miss the glamour,” Ethan murmured.

“I suppose,” she said absently and closed her eyes, missing the odd look that passed over his dark face.

“You’d better get some sleep. I’ll check on you later.”

The bed rose as he got up and left the room. She didn’t even open her eyes. She was safe here. Safe from the specter of failure, safe from her father’s long, disapproving face, safe from the cold whip of his eyes. She wondered if he was ever going to forgive her for failing him, and decided that he probably wouldn’t. Tears slid down her cheeks. If only he could have loved her, just a bit, for what she was underneath her talent. He’d never seemed to love her.

* * *

Coreen sat with her for most of the day. Ethan’s little mother was a holy terror when she was upset, but everyone loved her. She was the first person in the door when someone was sick or needed help, and the last to leave. She gave generously of her time and money, and none of her children had a bad word to say about her, even in adulthood. Well, except Ethan, and sometimes Arabella thought he did that just for amusement because he loved to watch his mother throw things in a temper.

Arabella had seen the result of one memorable fight between mother and son, back during her teenage years when she was visiting Ethan’s brother and sister with Mary. Arabella, Mary, Jan and Matt had been playing Monopoly on the living-room floor when Ethan and his mother got into it in the kitchen. The voices were loud and angry, and unfortunately for Ethan, his mother had been baking a cake when he provoked her. She threw a whole five-pound bag of flour at him, followed by an open jar of chocolate syrup. Arabella and Mary and Jan and Matt had seen Ethan walk by, covered from Stetson hat to booted feet in white flour and chocolate syrup, leaving a trail of both behind him on the wooden floor as he strode toward the staircase.

Arabella and the others had gaped at him, but one cold-eyed look in their direction dared them to open their mouths. Arabella had hidden behind the sofa and collapsed in silent laughter while the others struggled valiantly to keep straight faces. Ethan hadn’t said a word, but Coreen had continued to fling angry insults after him from the kitchen doorway as he stomped upstairs to shower and change. For a long time afterward, Arabella had called him, “the chocolate ghost.” But not to his face.

Coreen was just a little over five foot three, with the dark hair all her children had inherited, but hers was streaked with silver now. Only Ethan shared her gray eyes. Jan and Matt had dark blue eyes, like their late father.

“Do you remember when you threw the flour at Ethan?” Arabella asked, thinking aloud as she watched Coreen’s deft fingers working a crochet hook through a growing black-and-red afghan.

Coreen looked up, her plump face brightening. “Oh, yes, I do,” she said with a sigh. “He’d refused to sell that bay gelding you always liked to ride. One of my best friends wanted him, you see, and I knew you’d be away at music school in New York. He wasn’t a working horse.” She chuckled. “Ethan dug in his heels and then he gave me that smile. You know the one, when he knows he’s won and he’s daring you to do anything about it. I remember looking at the open flour sack.” She cleared her throat and went back to work on the afghan. “The next thing I knew, Ethan was stomping down the hall leaving a trail of flour and chocolate syrup in his wake, and I had to clean it up.” She shook her head. “I don’t throw things very often these days. Only paper or baskets—and nothing messy.”

Arabella smiled at the gentle countenance, wishing deep in her heart that she’d had a mother like Coreen. Her own mother had been a quiet, gentle woman whom she barely remembered. She’d died in a wreck when Arabella was only six. Arabella didn’t remember ever hearing her father talk about it, but she recalled that he’d become a different man after the funeral.

She twisted her fingers in the blue quilted coverlet. Her father had discovered by accident that Arabella had a natural talent for the piano, and he’d become obsessed with making her use it. He’d given up his job as a clerk in a law office, and he’d become a one-man public relations firm with his daughter as his only client.

“Don’t brood, dear,” Coreen said gently when she saw the growing anguish on Arabella’s lovely face. “Life is easier when you accept things that happen to you and just deal with them as they crop up. Don’t go searching for trouble.”

Arabella looked up, shifting the cast with a wince because the break was still tender. They’d taken out the clamps that had held the surgical wound together before they put on the cast, but it still felt as if her arm had been through a meat grinder.

“I’m trying not to,” she told Ethan’s mother. “I thought my father might have called, at least, since they put me back together. Even if it was just to see if I had a chance of getting my career back.”

“Being cynical suits my son. It doesn’t suit you,” Coreen said, glancing at her over the small reading glasses that she wore for close work. “Betty Ann is making a cherry cobbler for dessert.”