Give Me Tonight(91)

Addie nodded imperceptibly.

"But she didn't have your strength," Ben contin­ued. "She had no hope of finding a way to fit in. I watched her suffocating, and I didn't understand why. I thought the only way to help her was to try to change her. The tighter I held on, the worse it was. I loved her, and she felt the same about me. But everything I wanted from her—marriage, a child, a life together­—all of that would have been a prison. She wanted no part of it. "

Ben took a deep breath and let it out slowly, amazed at the sudden lightness in his chest. It was the first time he'd ever talked about that part of his past. He hadn't planned to tell Addie, but now it made sense to unburden himself to her. Who else was capable of un­derstanding? Who else could begin to know the kind of struggle it had been?

"How did it end?"

"She . . . " Ben cleared his throat and stopped. He couldn't get the words out. Addie said nothing, wait­ing patiently, although inside she wanted to scream with the need to know. "She found out she was going to have a child," he muttered, his eyes flashing with guilt and remembered pain. "My child. I insisted we would get married. It was only a few weeks until grad­uation, and I already had plans to go back to Illinois and get a job at my father's bank. She was miserable, I was thrilled. I wanted the baby. I wanted her. And the day after she told me, she nearly killed herself having the child aborted. When I found out what she'd done, I wished she had died along with the baby. I never saw her again."

Addie's heart was filled with compassion. "How did you manage to get through the rest of the semester?"

"Money in the right pockets. My father was deter­mined to have his son graduate from Harvard. No price was too high to pay. I didn't care one way or the other. I was numb."

"I'm so sorry about what she did," Addie mur­mured. "About the baby."

"Part of it was my fault. I would have used the baby as a chain and manacle to keep her with me—"

"No. She should have talked to you about it. You would have helped her find a way to deal with it. She should have trusted you. You would have listened to her."

"No. I was different then."

"Not that different. Nothing will make me believe you would have ignored a plea for understanding. You wouldn't have made her life a prison."

"How can you be so sure?" he asked gruffly.

"Because I know you. Because my heart tells me so."

He turned his face away. Addie sat in his lap, trying to read his silence. Suddenly he drew his sleeve across his eyes, blotting an unfamiliar dampness, and she wound her arms around his neck, holding him fiercely. She had to convince him she wouldn't become like the other woman he'd loved, her spirit crushed by a disapproving world.

"I'm not like, Ben."

"In some ways you are."

"Well, of course I hate not being able to say what I want or to do what I want, just because I'm a woman. But I'm not a bird in a cage. And I want to belong to you."

"I don't want to trap you—"

"I'm more afraid of being alone. Don't you see I have more freedom with you than without you?"

His hands bracketed her shoulders as he looked at her intently. The combination of innocence and ex­perience in her face had never been so pronounced. He saw the eagerness of a child, the passionate love of a woman, and a depth of understanding that be­longed to someone twice her age.

"God, I'll never let you go, Addie."

"I know that."

"And I won't try to change you."

"I wouldn't let you."

"No, you wouldn't," he said, and relaxed slightly. "You're quite a woman, Adeline Warner."

"Too much for you to handle?" she asked, her voice soft and teasing. Suddenly she found herself fiat on her back, smiling as she stared up at him. His eyes warmed with desire.

"Not by a long shot," he said, proceeding to dem­onstrate in a way that left no doubt in her mind.

The agreements Ben and Russell had made in pri­vate about how to handle the crisis were never detailed to the family, but some things were very clear. Most important, the fence was going back up. Second, Rus­sell had decided to restrain himself from riding rough­shod over the ranch, the Warner family, and the cowboys, contrary to what they had expected. He stayed in the office and kept his distance from the ruins of his fence, while Ben supervised the Construction of extra line shacks, doubled the number of riders who protected the Sunrise borders at night, and appointed men to hammer new fence posts into the ground.

Barrels of precious water were used to soften the ground in order to dig holes for the posts, an outrage to those whose herds of cattle were parched and thirsty. May, Caroline, Addie, and even Leah were kept busy doctoring the gouges and scratches that the barbed wire left on the arms of the men who were engaged in constructing the new fence. After a few days Addie showed Ben ruefully that her fingers were permanently stained brownish-red from handling countless bottles of iodine.

The reactions of the town and neighboring ranches to the attack on Russell's property were mixed. Some cattlemen who had been entertaining the idea of clos­ing in their own land with cheap, durable barbed-wire fencing were- as outraged as if they had been victim­ized along with Russell. But some people said it was just what Russell deserved. Many cowboys hated the idea of fencing over the range they were accustomed to riding so freely. Small cowmen who often gleaned mavericks from the cattle drifting across the bounda­ries of their own properties resented the fence too.