“She’s a married woman in love with her husband. But I didn’t understand.” She placed her hand on his chest and watched her fingers rise and fall with his breathing. “Now don’t take offense. What happened just now was…” There weren’t words to describe it. “Unbelievable. I had no idea I could feel like…” She pressed up against him. “Is it like this always?”
“Damn it, Freddy.” Reaching to the table beside the bed, he found a cigar and lit it. “This wasn’t grist for your acting mill. This was about doing it right.” He reached behind and propped the pillows against the bedstead and leaned against them.
“Oh you did it right,” she said softly, inhaling the scent of his skin.
“Then you aren’t going to tell me to go to hell?” he murmured against her tangled curls.
“Not yet.” She laughed and combed her fingers through the hair on his chest, giving it a gentle yank. “Dal?” she said after a minute. “I’m glad it was you.”
So glad that it hadn’t been Jack Caldwell or one of the actors she had met or any of the men who had courted her over the years. She thanked heaven that she had waited for Dal Frisco.
“Suddenly I’m famished, are you?”
She laughed, happy and exuberant. Rolling away, she found the nightgown he’d brought and dropped it over her head, then tied her hair with a length of ribbon. When they returned to the table, she felt a moment of unaccustomed shyness. There was something warmly intimate about dining in her nightgown with a half-naked man. This was the sort of thing married people did.
But tonight was not about promises or the future. Tonight was Dal’s insistence on making her first real sexual experience a pleasant one. That was all, and nothing more.
“Tell me about Montana,” she said, forcing a lightness into her tone. “What’s it like? Why do you want to live there?”
Dal took a sip from a cup of coffee that had grown cold, then he grinned. “I’ve dreamed of Montana for years, but I’ve never been there.” Surprise lifted her eyebrows, then she laughed. “I’ve seen paintings, and I’ve talked to cattlemen from Montana. Mostly I want to live there because it isn’t Louisiana, where I grew up, and it isn’t Texas, where my reputation precedes me.”
She understood about reputations. “But you want to be a rancher.”
He broke a chunk off the loaf of bread. “It’s what I know and what I love.”
“Dal? Why did you start drinking?”
“Good God,” he said suddenly. “I told the musicians to keep playing until I signaled them to stop. Do you want more music?”
Smiling, Freddy shook her head. “The deed is done. We don’t need them anymore.”
“Did we need them?” When he saw the color in her cheeks, he smiled, then tossed a purse out the window to the musicians below.
When he returned to the table, he glanced at her wineglass. “I told you about knowing Lola in New Orleans. I was in the Quartermaster Corps, Lola was looking for a way to exploit the war and the times. If she hadn’t found me, she would have used someone else. But she found me,” he said in a hard voice. He told her about the deal to sell his herd to the French, told her about Emile Julie, and Lola skipping out with the money from both sales. “What I did was dishonest. I betrayed what I believed in, and I betrayed my country.”
Freddy thought about his story. “At the end, everyone was scrambling to save what they could and put their lives back together.” She drew a breath. “I’m not excusing what you did. But anyone who lived through those times would understand it.”
“That doesn’t make it right. But maybe I could have convinced myself and lived with it. Unfortunately, selling the troop’s beef wasn’t the worst of it.”
“What was?”
“Learning that the Frenchman who bought my cattle sold them to the Union,” he said in a voice so filled with pain that Freddy winced. “My herd fed the soldiers who were doing their damnedest to kill my neighbors and friends,” he said harshly. “The day I learned what happened to those beeves, I walked into a saloon and ordered a bottle. I didn’t put the bottle down until eighteen months ago.”
“I’m sorry.” They sat in silence for several minutes. Freddy reached a hand across the table and clasped his fingers. “What made you stop drinking?” she asked gently.
“Maybe I’d punished myself enough,” he said at length. “I took care of the problem with Emile Julie, paid my share of what Lola and I owed him.” He shrugged, and his hand tightened around hers. “The war ended for me the day I saw Emile Julie again. It was time to put my life back together, try to salvage something from a long chain of mistakes.”
Freddy leaned forward. “We’ll get our cattle to Abilene, Dal. It’s going to mean a fresh start for all of us.” Now she told him about the deal Jack Caldwell had offered her, getting angry again as she did every time she thought about it. “We can’t trust him.”
“Lola offered to double my fee if I make sure we don’t deliver two thousand beeves.”