Bess slept for the first time in a long time without images of her boyish, blond husband lying in a pool of blood waking her to a cold sweat. Some days, the fact that she’d ever met a man like Daniel, much less been married to him, seemed more like a dream than reality.
She had been working at a laundromat, where she also did alterations, living in a one-bedroom apartment she shared with three other girls in order to make ends meet. The roommates had gone to a country and western bar for the evening, where they worked at flirting for their drinks and enjoyed dancing to the easy rhythms.
Daniel had walked into the bar looking like a movie star with his tall Stetson perched at an angle on his buzz cut, his body lean and fit. All the girls stared as if they’d never seen a man before. Bess, nursing the only beer she’d planned to drink all night, watched him stride to the bar and thought she’d never seen a man more confident.
The last thing in the world she had expected when Daniel spotted the group of women ogling him was that he would walk right up to their table and ask Bess to dance. She followed him into the simple two-step, her skin tingling where his warm hand held hers.
From that moment, they had been inseparable. She loved to hear about his youth, about early mornings fetching eggs from the chicken coop and feeding his mother’s rag-tag collection of strays, the ones who wandered into the yard and found themselves housed in large pens where they could safely be dogs. He talked about his mother with a soft voice that made Bess feel as if she were wrapped in a warm blanket. He worshiped his brother Judd so that Bess pictured a man seven-foot tall and built like a tank, impenetrable.
She never spoke about her past, only about her dreams, which were simple but so far from reach. She wanted to know what it meant to have a family. She wanted to go to sleep at night without wondering if she’d have money for food the next week. She wanted her own bed, one she didn’t have to share with another girl and even then only on a rotation schedule so that no one slept on the floor every night.
Daniel didn’t believe in intimacy without wedding vows, and so Bess really wasn’t all that surprised when, after a particularly intense kissing session, he proposed they go to the courthouse the next day to see about a license. It had been a muggy night, with the dark sky twinkling a thousand stars and the ocean making its own music as the waves spit foam toward the blanket they had laid on the brawny sand.
“I ship out in a couple of weeks,” he told her, his breath warm against her ear, sending shivers down her neck and spine. “I love you, Bess.”
She couldn’t say the same. She wasn’t even sure she knew what love really was. But, Daniel was so handsome and so very kind, much kinder than any of the other men she’d ever been around. It seemed poor sportsmanship to deny a man who was headed off to war, anyway.
So, they’d been married three days later, and Daniel had splurged on a room at the Hotel Galvez, an elegant building with thick carpets and decorations that oozed money. Bess had leaned more heavily on Daniel’s arm as they walked through the fancy lobby, feeling shabby in her clean but out-of-fashion dress suit, hoping silently that no one noticed the scuff marks on her sensible heels.
—
A knock sounded on the bedroom door, pulling Bess from her memories. She didn’t want to get out of the warm bed, so she called out. The door opened wide, and Agnes stepped into the room, a tray laden with food in her hands.
“You slept straight through the night, dear,” she explained as she approached the bed. “You must be famished.”
Bess pulled herself up against the headboard, her mouth salivating at the sight and smell of pancakes and biscuits, eggs and bacon. Her eyes grew wide.
Agnes chuckled. “You just eat what you want and don’t worry about the rest.” She walked over to the window and pulled the curtain aside, letting in a bright shaft of light. “Would you like some company, or do you prefer to eat alone?”
She couldn’t know that Bess had eaten more meals in the quiet of her own mind than in the company of other people. Still, she felt her old defenses go up around her. The sooner she let people in, the sooner they were back out of her life again.
As if she could sense the indecision in the younger woman, Agnes stepped closer to the bed. “I’m anxious to hear about my Daniel.”
Bess forced a smile on her face and nodded. This was going to be tricky, but she’d known that before she’d boarded the bus back in Houston. If Judd knew just how little Bess had known of Daniel before marrying him, he’d probably boot her out of the house regardless of what Agnes had to say about it. She had plenty of practice telling people what they wanted to hear in order to survive. Somehow, this situation felt different.
“Eat,” Agnes ordered when Bess sat perfectly still on the bed. Because Bess thought the older woman might pick up the fork and start feeding her as if Bess were a child, she dug into the stack of pancakes and took a large bite. “Those were my Daniel’s favorite,” Agnes said.
Bess nodded, savoring the buttery, fluffy perfection in her mouth. “For good reason,” she said, then, “I like dogs, too.”
The older woman smiled, and her teeth flashed a blazing white against her deeply tanned skin. “I’d let them all roam free if the coyotes wouldn’t get them. I’m lucky my sweet husband, God rest his soul, let me put those pens up. Daniel’s job was to feed them every morning. Did he tell you?”
“There you are,” a deep voice interrupted their conversation, and Bess looked toward the door, where Judd stood scowling at her. “The pastor’s wife is on the phone for you, Mom. I think it’s about the meal on Sunday.”
Agnes motioned for Bess to continue eating as she rose and left the room, and Bess hoped that she would close the door on her way to the phone, shutting out the tall man with his black eyes. Unfortunately, Judd took the opportunity to step further into the room, where he crossed his arms over his chest.
Bess laid her fork on her plate and took a deep breath. “Look, it’s pretty obvious you don’t want me here, but this situation,” she motioned to her belly, “isn’t going anywhere. I can do this alone, but this baby is going to be better off if I don’t.”
He shifted on his feet and sniffed. “You do look a touch pale, kind of like you’ve been living under a rock.”
She snorted. “Oh, I like that. I’m sure you think I crawled out from the gutter and scammed your brother into marrying me, too! Your mother is right. The two of you are nothing alike.”
He clenched and relaxed his fist, then harrumphed. “I’m alive, for one thing.”
Bess had had enough. She focused her most intimidating glare on him, studying his stature from the top of his head to the tips of his shiny boots. “If you can call it that,” she spat.
He shoved his hands into his pockets and jangled the change in them, making a light clinking sound in the tense atmosphere. Then, his shoulders dropped just a smidgen and something like a grim smile played across his thin lips. “Daniel always had a soft spot for stray things. You’re right. The baby deserves to be born in a healthy environment. But, I’ve got my eyes on you. Depend on it.”
Before she could respond, he spun on one heel and stalked out of the room. Bess felt the baby move inside her, distracting her from the spiral of fear that the encounter sent up her spine. A tear escaped her, dropping onto her bump of a belly, staining the faded flannel of her gown, a sign of weakness she could ill afford.
She swiped at her eyes and blew the air between her lips to stop the pain. Judd Taylor wasn’t the first bully she’d had to deal with in her life. One particularly large boy in the home still had a light scar under his right eye where the metal chair she’d lobbed at him made contact and sliced open his cheek, splaying blood across the polished white rec room floor.
A laugh exploded from her chest as she imagined Judd Taylor with the syrup from her pancakes running in trickles down his head. If it weren’t for the baby in her belly, she’d have dumped her entire breakfast on top of the man.
As it was, she was going to do her best to avoid him for now. And once the baby was born and she was physically recovered, well then, she was perfectly able to take care of herself. And she would worry about what was best for the baby when it was finally living outside her body.
She refused to acknowledge the voice that kept telling her even the taciturn Sheriff would make a better parent than little orphan Bess, the laundromat queen. Avoiding that voice got her out of the bed, forced her into Agnes’ company, where she searched for every chore to keep her busy until she fell into the bed again in the early evening, enjoying another deep and dreamless sleep.
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Eagerly awaiting the next segment!