Johnston - I Promise Page 5

“Call me later.” Peggy gave Marsh one last surreptitious glance before she hurried over to buy her ticket.

  Marsh didn’t move until Peggy had gone inside. He threw the cigarette down and snuffed it with his boot as he sauntered toward her. He was wearing worn jeans and a clean, long-sleeved plaid Western shirt folded up to reveal muscular forearms. His hair was still damp, as though he wasn’t long out of the shower.

  “Hi,” he said with a lazy smile that belied the tension she saw in his shoulders. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

  She gave him a shy smile in return. “I’m here.”

  He paid for the tickets and took her elbow to usher her inside. To her surprise, she felt the same jolt she had earlier in the day.

  “Popcorn? Milk Duds? Coke?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I just had supper. But you have something if you want.”

  “I’d rather have my hands free for other things . . . like holding yours,” he said in a quiet voice. He reached down and slowly, gently twined his callused fingers in hers, giving her a chance to pull away if she wanted.

  She stared at their joined hands before lifting her gaze to his face. There was no glib smile waiting there, no coaxing glint in his gray eyes. He was big enough to force himself on her, but he wasn’t demanding anything. She tightened her fingers slightly around his as her mouth curved in a warm smile.

  He smiled back, letting what he felt—a corresponding warmth—show in his eyes.

  They walked hand in hand into the dimly lit theater and chose secluded seats in the back near the side wall. They spoke in whispers, never stopping until the theater darkened and someone nearby shushed them.

  The movie playing that evening was Jaws and featured a man-eating shark. Her eyes were riveted to the screen from the opening rumble of chords on the movie sound track. She left crescents in North’s arm with the fingernails of her free hand when the shark attacked its first victim.

  North was a bastion of safety through the next two hours. Her body tightened with unbearable tension, which was released with laughter, only to build again. When the lights came up, it stunned her to realize her legs were still as wobbly as Jell-O from the last dose of adrenaline that had seen her through the destruction of the shark. She needed North’s arm to steady her when she rose.

  “That was incredible!” she said.

  Marsh chuckled. “Once or twice I didn’t think you were going to make it.”

  She had hidden her face several times during the movie against North’s sleeve. Fresh heat washed already pinkened cheeks. “Well, I did, thanks to you.”

  “Would you like to go have some pie and coffee at the Amber Sky?”

  The busy cafe on Highway 90, the main east-west thoroughfare through town, had been run for as long as anybody could remember by Mrs. Black, who made the best chocolate chiffon pie in Texas. A lot of locals ate supper there with their families. “I don’t think that would be a good idea. Someone might see us.”

  The smile left his face. “Oh. I see.” He turned his face away while he waited for her to exit up the aisle.

  “Marsh . . .” She waited until he looked at her. His expression was closed again. “I had a wonderful time. But my parents think I’m out with Peggy. If we go to the Amber Sky, one of my father’s friends might see us and say something to him.”

  “How about the Sonic?”

  The Sonic Drive-In was a hamburger joint frequented by local teens. You could order from one of a dozen microphone boxes under a long red-and-white awning and have a tray of hamburgers and a couple of milk shakes delivered to your car window. Being seen by the wrong kids at the Sonic could be as disastrous to her as being seen by their parents. “I don’t think that would be a good idea, either.”

  “How about if I buy some beer at the 7-Eleven, and we go drink somewhere private?”

  She wasn’t sure that was such a good idea for entirely different reasons. But so far North had been a perfect gentleman. “All right,” she agreed. “But I’d rather have a Coke than a beer, and I need to be home in an hour.”

  “No beer?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “It tastes awful. How can you stand it?”

  He shrugged. “I suppose you learn to like it.”

  “I wouldn’t have guessed you were old enough to buy beer,” she said, as he handed her into the passenger side of his pickup.

  “I won’t be for another month. But a friend of mine works at the 7-Eleven. He’ll usually sell me a six-pack of Pearl or some Dos Equis if no one’s around.”

  “You won’t get drunk, will you?” she asked as he slid in on the driver’s side. “I’d hate for us to get into an accident.”

  “I tell you what. If it’ll make you happy, I won’t even have the beer.” He put the truck in gear and headed north on Getty Street toward the 7-Eleven near the high school football stadium on the edge of town.

  A thoughtful crease grew on her forehead as she waited in the truck while he went inside and bought the Cokes.

  “Something wrong?” he asked as he headed the rattling truck north again toward the hill country where they had spent the afternoon tubing.

  “Why do people think you’re so bad? You’ve been nothing but nice to me.”

  “Disappointed?”

  She shook her head. “No. I’m glad you asked me to come with you tonight.”

  “You’re not scared I’ll get you off somewhere alone and turn on you, like some Jekyll and Hyde character?”

  “Would you?”

  “Naw. I like you.”

  She arched a brow. “And if you didn’t like me?”

  A devilish grin appeared. “You’d be in serious sh—trouble.”

  He pulled the truck off the paved highway onto a dirt road that ended abruptly. The night was quiet and still, much as it might have been two hundred years ago, before any settlers had come to disturb the wilderness. He pulled the Cokes out of the paper bag, crumpled it, and pitched it on the floor. He pulled the metal tabs from the lids and dropped them inside, then gave a can to her.

  She sipped it gratefully, the fizz easing the dryness in her throat. She thought about how exciting it was to be having her first date with a boy. She would have to call Peggy later, but she didn’t think she could find words to explain what tonight had been like.

  It was too bad she couldn’t share this wonderful experience with her mother and father. But her mother agreed with her father that she was too young to date, and her father . . . He would be furious. Any boy she dated would be bad enough, but someone with Marsh North’s reputation was sure to be ten times worse. Her sister Rachel could have kept her secret, but she was too young to think a date with a boy was anything worth crowing about. Besides, Rachel had to be in bed by 9:00 P.M.

  Marsh got out of the truck, came around to open her door, and held out his hand to her. He set his Coke on the Chevy fender as she stepped down, and eased his arms around her from behind.

  She stiffened immediately.

  “Don’t be afraid. Lean back against me,” he murmured in her ear. “Then look up.”

  She did as he asked and saw an immense black sky filled with a million stars. A full moon was half-hidden by scudding clouds. “Oooh. It’s so beautiful.”

  “Umm,” he agreed. He turned her in his arms, took her Coke from her and set it on the rusted fender next to his, then caught her chin with his forefinger and thumb.

  She stood there, knees quaking, staring up at him, aware of what was coming. Her heart slammed against her rib cage, then climbed all the way to her throat and caught there.

  “I don’t know what it is about you . . .” he said as he stared down at her. He fingered her hair, which she had worn down and parted on the side, and she felt it in the depths of her belly.

  She looked up into his face, but his back was to the moon and all she saw was shadows. “Marsh, I—”

  His fingertip stopped her speech. “Don’t say anything. I know this is crazy, but I have to kiss you. I won’t take adva
ntage, I promise. Just . . . may I?”

  “That wild North boy” asking if he could kiss her? Delia knew she had to be dreaming. She would wake up and be in her bed and it wouldn’t be Marsh at all. She wished she could see North’s features better.

  She reached up with her hand to trace the shape of his brows, his nose—where she found the unfamiliar bump on the bridge—and his mouth. Her father had a scar on his cheek where he had been caught by an unraveling strand of barbed wire. The scar wasn’t there.

  “All right,” she said. “You can kiss me.”

  She stood frozen, waiting, wondering if it would feel different. If it would feel good . . . clean . . . right.

  The lips that settled on hers were utterly soft and searching. He missed her mouth slightly in the darkness, and came back with better aim, slanting his lips more exactly across hers. He pressed more firmly this time, and his tongue danced across the seam of her lips, teasing, titillating.

  It was different. Her body felt tingly, achy, and she was suddenly breathless. She opened her mouth to him hesitantly, and his tongue slipped inside, warm and wet.

  She made a sound in her throat, half surprise, half pleasure. Her fingers curled around handfuls of his cotton shirt as she rose on her toes to make their bodies meet more completely. And felt his arousal.

  A moment later she had freed herself from his grasp and was standing across from him, eyes wide with fright, panting for breath.

  “Delia, I’m sorry,” Marsh hurried to say. “I . . . I know you’re not that kind of girl. I can’t help it if I’m attracted to you that way. I want to touch you. I want—”

  “No,” she said abruptly, harshly. “Take me home, Marsh.”

  She crossed past him toward the truck, expecting him to try to stop her. But he stepped aside and opened the pickup door and let her get in without touching her.

  She felt sick. Not because of what had happened between them. The kiss had felt good . . . wonderful. But if she had let it go any further, if she ever let things move toward their logical conclusion, Marsh would find out the truth. He would know she wasn’t a good girl, like he thought, that she was worse than he could ever dream of being. She wouldn’t be able to bear the look in his eyes if he ever found out the truth.

  They made the trip south out of town on Highway 83 toward the Circle Crown in silence. Twenty minutes later he turned off the highway and drove down the winding road to her house, which led through what was left of a pecan orchard. He stopped the pickup and turned out the headlights before they illuminated the white columns along the front of the two-story mansion.

  Delia had no idea why her ancestors had built a Southern mansion more suited to Mississippi or Georgia instead of the more typical Texas dogtrot home. Four two-story white columns held up a railed veranda, and the double-wide doors downstairs led up an impressive staircase inside. A single twisted live oak shadowed the house.

  “Will you go out with me again?” Marsh asked.

  “I don’t think I should.”

  “How about riding horseback with me tomorrow afternoon?”

  She glanced at his face in the glow of the dash lights he had turned up to give them some relief from the darkness. “I want to, but my father . . .” She swallowed hard. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

  “If you change your mind, I’ll be at the windmill by your north pasture gate, under the live oak, around one. Good night, Delia.”

  “Good-bye, Marsh.”

  She closed the pickup door quietly and watched him back a ways down the road before he whipped the truck around, nearly hitting one of the pecan trees that stood sentinel on either side of the drive. He punched the headlights on and headed off of Circle Crown property.

  She turned to look at the house. There were no outside lights on, but she could see a yellow glow upstairs in her mother’s bedroom, which opened onto the veranda. She knew the kitchen light would be on, too, because everyone in this part of the country entered and left their homes from the back door. The front door served only for funerals and strangers.

  She half expected her father to be sitting at the kitchen table waiting for her, and heaved a sigh of relief when he wasn’t.

  Ray John Carson wasn’t really her father, he was her stepfather. He had adopted her and her sister four years after he married their mother. She had loved him dearly at the time.

  When Ray John had come into her life, he had been the third man in as many years wanting her to call him “Daddy.” Her own father had been gored to death by a rodeo bull when she was five. Her mother had remarried a year later to another cowboy, a drifting man. He was gone within a year, but not before he had stolen her six-year-old heart with his big smile and throaty chuckle. He had left her sister, Rachel, as a parting gift.

  Two years later Ray John Smith, another devil-may-care cowboy, had entered their lives. Delia had been wary of liking him, certain that he, too, would abandon them. Gradually, Ray John Carson—her mother had insisted, as she had with her first two husbands, that it made more sense for Ray John to change to the venerable Carson name when they married—had won her over. He always had been a glib talker.

  Delia headed toward the stairs at the front of the house that led to her bedroom, which took her past her father’s gun room. A single light was on over the massive pine desk Ray John used as a work surface when he was cleaning his guns. The glass door to one of her father’s gun cabinets hung open.

  “Daddy?” She stepped tentatively into the high-ceilinged room. It was a totally masculine place, with a saddle brown leather couch, built-in bookshelves along one wall filled with dark tomes some long-ago Carson had purchased, and which she was certain none of Hattie’s three husbands had ever touched. It also contained Ray John’s pride and joy: several locked wood and glass cabinets full of antique rifles and revolvers her father had collected since his marriage to her mother.

  Wooden shutters kept the ivy-papered room perpetually dark, and Ray John used an elbow lamp on the desk to give him enough light to work. The lamp highlighted the ring of old skeleton keys that opened the various gun cabinets. That was odd, because usually Ray John kept the key ring locked inside the rolltop desk. He kept the desk key in his wallet.

  Delia watched for Ray John in the shadows as she made her way on tiptoe up the carpeted stairs. She didn’t want to run into her father tonight, didn’t want to remind him of her existence, fearful that the sight of her would make him decide to visit her later, when the house was asleep.

  Her bedroom was at the opposite end of the upstairs hall from her mother’s bedroom. Rachel slept across the hall from Delia, and more than once Delia had cautioned Ray John to be quiet, lest he wake her sister. She knew where the creaks were in the old hardwood, and walked along the edge near the wall to avoid making a sound.

  Her bedroom door was closed, the way she had left it, and a glance showed that Rachel’s door was closed as well. She glanced back down the hall over her shoulder and saw light spilling into the hall from her parents’ bedroom. Her mother was probably reading. She wondered where her father was.

  Her bedroom was a place of moonlit shadows when she stepped inside. She leaned back against the door as she closed it behind her and waited for her eyes to adjust to the absence of light. Soon she could make out the familiar shapes in her room. And realized someone was lying on her bed.

  “Daddy?” she whispered.

  Her heart pounded as the dark figure rose from the bed without saying a word. Had someone broken into the house? Was that why her father’s gun room had been left in such disarray?

  “Daddy?” she said, her heart thundering so loud and fast she was afraid it was going to burst.

  “Shh,” her father said. “Don’t make a sound.”

  “Mama’s door is open, and her light is on. What are you doing in here?”

  “Shut up!” He snarled. He grabbed her arm in a viselike grip, and she felt something small and cold pressed painfully against her temple. It took her a second to realize
it was the bore of a gun.

  “Where were you tonight?” he demanded.

  “I went to the movies.”

  “Who was with you?”

  “Peggy and I—”

  “Don’t lie to me!”

  Her stomach shifted sideways. He knew. Somehow he had discovered she was out with a boy. Someone in the theater must have seen her holding hands with Marsh. Or maybe someone had seen her waiting in the truck while Marsh went inside the 7-Eleven to buy Cokes.

  “I was with a boy,” she said hurriedly.

  “What boy?”

  “I won’t see him again, Daddy. I promise. I—”

  He manhandled her over to the bed. “Sit down.”

  She perched at the very edge of the bed, poised to run if that became necessary, unsure what he was going to do next.

  He turned on the light beside the bed and sat down beside her. “I thought I’d made it clear I don’t want you going out with boys.”

  “You did, Daddy.”

  “You stay away from them. All of them,” he said. “Otherwise, I’m going to have to take matters into my own hands and get rid of the next boy myself. It would be just this easy.”

  He rolled the chamber, put the revolver to his temple, and pulled the trigger.

  Delia gasped.

  The gun clicked on an empty chamber. “Bang,” Ray John said with a ghoulish grin.

  Delia shivered with revulsion.

  It was something she had seen him do before when he had his guns out cleaning them. He almost always had a grin on his face, and he made a big production out of pointing the revolver at his head, knowing she was scared to death he would get hurt.

  She would beg him to put the gun down. Before he did, he would pull the trigger while she waited with her heart in her throat to see if he really was going to splatter his brains all over the room. He never had. His behavior had always seemed stupid to her, but never sinister, as it did now.

  He spun the chamber and put the gun to her temple again.

  Fear constricted her chest, because as crazy as Ray John was acting, she wasn’t sure whether there might not be a bullet—perhaps more than one—in the gun. She squeezed her eyes shut and made a whimpering sound as he pulled the trigger.