“I’ll find a way. I’m not helpless, even if I am a mere woman in your eyes,” she added with a faint smile.
He looked as formidable as a cold marble statue. “Challenging me?” he asked in a softly dangerous tone. His dark eyes mocked her. “That’s been tried before, but go ahead if you feel lucky.”
She almost did. But those nearly black eyes had made men back down, and she was just a grieving shadow of a woman.
“Please thank your mother for her concern,” she said quietly. “I’m sure you have better things to do than bother with us.”
“Your father was my friend,” he said shortly. “I valued him, regardless of what happened.”
He turned toward the door without glancing at her.
“I’ll be in touch,” he said as he reached for the doorknob and pulled open the big front door with its huge silver knocker. “Don’t worry. We’ll work out something.”
Her eyes closed. She was sick all over. Just last week she’d been planning parties and helping her mother choose flowers for a coming-out party. And now their world was in shreds. Their wealth was gone, their friends had deserted them. They were at the mercy of the courts. Miss Samson of Spanish House was now just plain Bess.
“It’s a long way to fall,” Cade was saying. “From debutante balls to poverty. But sometimes it takes a fall to get us out of a rut. It can be a challenge and an opportunity, or it can be a disaster. That depends on you. Try to remember that it’s not life but our reactions to it that shape us.”
For Cade it was a long speech. She stared at him hungrily, wishing she had the right to cry in his arms. She needed someone to hold her until the pain stopped. Gussie hadn’t noticed that her own daughter was grieving, but Cade had. He noticed things about her that no one else on earth seemed to, but he was ice-cold when he was around her, as if he felt supremely indifferent toward her most of the time.
She smiled faintly, thinking how uncannily he could read her mind. Sleet was mixing with the snow, making a hissing sound.
“Thanks for the wise words. But I think I can live without money,” she said after a minute.
“Maybe you can,” he replied. “But can your mother?”
“She’ll cope,” she returned.
“Like hell she’ll cope.” He tugged the hat closer over his forehead and spared her one last sweeping appraisal. God, she looked tired! He could only imagine the demands Gussie was already making on her, and she was showing the pressure. “Get some rest. You look like a walking corpse.”
He was gone then, without another word. As if he cared if she became a corpse, she thought hysterically. She’d lived for years on the vague hope that he might look at her one day and see someone he could love. That was the biggest joke of all. If there was any love in Cade, it was for Lariat, the Braided L, which had been founded by a Hollister fresh from the Civil War. There was a lot of history in Lariat. In a way the Hollisters were more a founding family of Texas than the Samsons. The Samson fortune was only two generations old, and it had been a matter of chance, not brains, that old man Barker Samson from back East had bought telephone stock in the early days of that newfangled invention. But the Hollisters were still poor.
She went upstairs to see about Gussie. It was an unusual nickname for a woman named Geraldine, but her father had always called her mother that.
Gussie was stretched out on the elegant pink ruffled coverlet of her bed with a tissue under her equally pink nose. Thanks to face-lifts, annual visits to an exclusive health spa and meticulous dieting, and a platinum-blond rinse, Gussie looked more like Bess’s sister than her mother. She had always been a beauty, but age had lent her a maturity that gave her elegance, as well. She’d removed the satin robe, and underneath it she was wearing a frothy white negligee ensemble that made her huge dark eyes look even darker and her delicate skin paler.
“There you are, darling,” she said with a sob. “Has he gone?”
“Yes, he’s gone,” Bess said quietly.
Her mother’s face actually blanched. She averted her eyes. “He’s blamed me for years,” she murmured, still half in shock, “and it wasn’t even my fault, but he’d never believe me even if I told him the truth. I suppose we should be grateful that he hasn’t raided the stables to get his money back in kind. The horses will bring something...”
Here we go again, Bess thought. “You know he wouldn’t do that. He said we’ll work something out, after the funeral.”
“No one held a gun on him and made him invest a penny,” Gussie said savagely. “I hope he does lose everything! Maybe he’ll be less arrogant!”
“Cade would be arrogant in rags, and you know it,” Bess said softly. “We’ll have to sell the house, Mama.”
Gussie looked horrified. She sat straight up, her careful coiffure unwinding in a long bleached tangle. “Sell my house? Never!”
“It’s the only way. We’ll still owe more than we have,” she said, staring out the window at the driving sleet. “But I have that journalism degree. I might get a job on a newspaper.”
“We’d starve. No, thank you. You can find something with an advertising agency. That pays much better.”
Bess turned, staring at her. “Mama, I can’t take the pressure of an advertising agency.”
“Well, darling, we certainly can’t survive on newspaper pay,” her mother said, laughing mirthlessly.
Bess’s eyes lifted. “I wasn’t aware that you were going to expect me to support both of us.”
“You don’t expect me to offer to get a job?” Gussie exclaimed. “Heavens, child, I can’t do anything! I’ve never had to work!”
Bess sat down on the end of the bed, viewing her mother’s renewed weeping with cynicism. Cade had said that her mother wouldn’t be able to cope. Perhaps he knew her after all.
“Crying won’t help.”
“I’ve just lost my husband,” Gussie wailed into her tissue. “And I adored him!”
That might have been true, but it seemed to Bess that all the affection was on her father’s side. Frank Samson had worshipped Gussie, and Bess imagined that Gussie’s demands for bigger and better status symbols had led her desperate father to one last gamble. But it had failed. She shook her head. Her poor mother. Gussie was a butterfly. She should have married a stronger man than her father, a man who could have controlled her wild spending.
“How could he do this to us?” Gussie asked tearfully. “How could he destroy us?”
“I’m sure he didn’t mean to.”
“Silly, stupid man,” came the harsh reply, and the veneer of suffering was eclipsed for a second by sheer, cruel rage. “We had friends and social standing. And now we’re disgraced because he lost his head over a bad investment! He didn’t have to kill himself!”
Bess stared at her mother. “Probably he wasn’t thinking clearly. He knew he’d lost everything, and so had the other investors.”
“I’ll never believe that your father would do anything dishonest, even to make more money,” Gussie said haughtily.
“He didn’t do it on purpose,” Bess said, feeling the pain of losing her father all over again, just by having to discuss what had caused his suicide. “He was taken in, just like the others. What made it so much worse was that he talked most of the investors into going along with him.” She stared at her tearful mother. “You didn’t know that it was a bogus company, did you?”
Gussie stared at her curiously. “No. Of course not.” She started weeping again. “I simply must have the doctor. Do call him for me, darling.”
“Mother,