Lacy

Diana Palmer

Th
e party was getting
noisier by the minute.

Lacy Jarrett Whitehall watched it with an air of
total withdrawal. All that wild jazz, the kicky dancing, the bathtub gin
flowing like water as it was passed from sloshing glass to teacup. She wasn't
really as much a participant as she was an onlooker. It made her feel alive to
watch other people enjoying themselves. Lacy hadn't felt alive in a long time.

Many of the neighbors were elderly people, and
she suffered a pang of conscience at what, to them, must have seemed like
licentious behavior. The Charleston was considered a vulgar dance by the older
generation. Jazz, they said, was decadent. Ladies smoked in public and
swore—and some actually wore their stockings rolled to just below the kneecap.
They wore galoshes, unfastened, so that they flapped when they walked—hence the
name given to the new generation: flappers. Shocking behavior to a society that
had only since the war come out of the Victorian Age. The war had changed
everything. Even now, four years after the armistice,

people were still recovering from the horror of
it. Some had never recovered. Some never would.

In the other room, laughing couples were dancing
merrily to "Yes, We Have No Bananas" blaring from Lacy's new radio.
It was like having an orchestra right in the room, and she marveled a little at
the modern devices that were becoming so commonplace. Not that any of these gay
souls were contemplating the scientific advances of the early twenties. They
were too busy drinking Lacy's stealthily obtained, prohibition-special gin and
eating the catered food. Money could almost buy absolution, she mused. The only
thing it couldn't get her was the man she wanted most.

She fingered her teacup of gin with a long,
slender finger, its pink nail perfectly rounded. The color matched the
dropped-waist frock she was wearing with its skirt at her knees. It would have
shocked Marion Whitehall and the local ladies around Spanish Flats, she
thought. Like her friends, she wore her hair in the current bobbed fashion. It
was thick and dark and straight, and it curved toward her delicate facial
features like leaves lifting to the sun. Under impossibly thick lashes, her
pale, bluish gray eyes had a restlessness that was echoed in the soft, shifting
movements of her tall, perfectly proportioned body. She was twenty-four, and
looked twenty-one. Perhaps being away from Coleman had taken some of the age
off her. She laughed bitterly as she coped with the thought. Her eyes closed on
a wave of pain so sweeping that it counteracted the stiff taste of the gin.
Coleman! Would she ever forget?

It had all been a joke, the whole thing. One of
brother-in-law Ben's practical jokes had compromised Lacy, after she'd been
locked in a line cabin all night with Cole. Nothing had happened, except that
Cole had given her hell, blaming her for it. But it was what people thought
happened that counted. In big cities, the new morals and wild living that had
followed World War I were all the rage. But down in Spanish Flats, Texas, a two-hour drive from San Antonio, things were still very straitlaced. And the Whitehalls, while not wealthy, were well known and much respected in the community. Marion
Whitehall had been in hysterics about the potential disgrace, so Cole had
spared his mother's tender feelings by marrying Lacy. But not willingly.

Lacy had been taken in by Marion Whitehall eight
years ago, after Lacy's own parents died on the
Lusitania
when
it was torpedoed by the Germans. Lacy's mother and Cole's had been best
friends. Lacy's one remaining relative, a wealthy great-aunt, had declared
herself too elderly and set in her ways to take on a teenager. The Whitehalls' invitation had been a godsend. Lacy had agreed, but mostly because it allowed
her to be near Cole. She'd worshipped him since her wealthy family had moved to
Spanish Flats from Georgia when Lacy had been just thirteen to be near her
great-aunt Lucy and great-uncle Horace Jacobsen, who had retired from business
after making a fortune in the railroad industry. Great-uncle Horace had, in
fact, founded the town of Spanish Flats and named it for the Whitehall ranch,
which had sheltered him in a time of desperate need. He and Lacy's great-aunt
had been a social force in San Antonio in those days, but it was Spanish Flats
Ranch, not Great-uncle Horace's towering Victorian mansion that had fascinated
Lacy from the beginning—as did the tall cattleman on the ranch property. It had
been love on first impact, even though Cole's first words to her had been
scathing when she'd ridden too close to one of his prize bulls and had almost
gotten gored. That hadn't put her off, though. If anything, his cold, quiet,
authoritative manner had attracted her, challenged her, long before she knew
who he was.

Coleman Whitehall was an enigma in so many ways.
A loner, like his old Comanche grandfather who'd taken him over in his youth
and showed him a vanished way of life and thought. But he'd been kind to Lacy
for all that, and there were times when she'd glimpsed a different man,
watching him with the cowboys. The somber, serious Cole she thought she knew
was missing in the lean rancher who got up very early one morning, caught a
rattlesnake, defanged it and put it in bed with a cowboy who'd played a nasty
practical joke on him. The resulting pandemonium had left him almost collapsed
with laughter, along with the other witnesses. It had shown her a side of Cole
that she remembered now for its very elusiveness.

Despite his responsibilities at home, the lure
of airplanes and battle had gotten to Cole. He'd learned to fly at a local
barnstorming show, and had become fascinated with this new mode of
transportation. The sinking of the
Lusitania
had brought his fighting
blood up, and convinced him that America would inevitably be pulled into war.
He'd kept up his practice at the airfield, even though his father's death had
stopped him from joining the group of pilots in the French Escadrille Americaine,
which became the exclusive Lafayette Escadrille.

When America did enter the war in 1917, a
neighboring rancher had taken responsibility for the ranch and womenfolk in his
absence, keeping the land grabbers away with financial expertise. Meanwhile
Lacy and Katy and Ben and Marion had watched the newspapers with mounting
horror, reading the posted casualty lists with stopped breath, with sinking
fear. But Coleman seemed invincible. It wasn't until the year after the
armistice, when he'd turned up back at the ranch after a few sparsely worded
letters, an old flying buddy in tow, that they'd learned he'd been shot down by
the Germans. He'd only written that he'd been wounded, not how. But apparently
it hadn't done him any lasting damage. He was the same taciturn, hard man he'd
been before he'd gone to France.

Well, not quite the same. Lacy treasured the
precious few memories she had of Cole's tenderness, his warmth. He hadn't
always been cold—especially not the day he'd left to go to war. There had been
times when he was so human, so caring. Now, there was a coldness that was
alien, a toughness that perhaps the war had created. Not that the family had
any real idea of what the war had been like for him on a personal basis; he
never spoke of it.

Ben had been too young to fight. With Cole's
return, he'd followed after his big brother with wide, dark eyes, all questions
and pleas to hear about it. But Coleman wouldn't tell him a thing. So Ben
hounded Jude Sheridan. Jude, whom Coleman called Turk, had been an ace pilot
with twelve credited kills. He was an easygoing, too-handsome man with a quick
temper and a physique that kept young Katy awake nights sighing over him. Turk
had filled Ben's ear with bloodcurdling tales—until Coleman had gotten tired of
it and stopped Turk from encouraging his young brother.

That was about the same time that he'd had to
stop Katy from tagging along after the tall, blond flyer who'd become his ranch
foreman. Turk was good with horses, and he had a shocking reputation with
women. But that was something Katy wasn't going to find out, Cole had informed
her coldly. Turk was his friend, not a potential conquest, and Katy had better
remember it. Even now, Lacy could see the heartbreak on the slender, green-eyed
girl's face as Cole blasted her dreams away. He'd even gone so far as to
threaten her with firing Turk altogether. So Katy had withdrawn—from her
brother, from her family—and had gone wild with the new morality. She'd bought
outrageous clothes; she began to use makeup. She went to parties in San Antonio and drank outlawed bathtub gin. And the more Coleman threatened her, the
wilder she got.

About that time, Ben had turned his attention to
Lacy. It had been embarrassing, because she was twenty-three and Ben only
eighteen. Coleman teased him about it when he got wind of it, which only added
to the frustration. One night, Ben lured Cole and Lacy to a line cabin and
locked them in. He went home to bed, and by the time they were discovered the
next morning, they were hopelessly compromised. So Coleman did the expected
thing and married her. But he resented her, ignored her, put a wall between
them that all her efforts hadn't dented. He refused to let her close enough to
give their marriage a chance.

There had been an attraction between them for a
long time— a purely physical one on his part—that had found its first
expression the day he'd left for the war. Despite the promise of that long-ago
embrace, he hadn't touched Lacy since he'd been home again, not until after the
wedding. The tension between them had reached flash point after an argument in
the barn. Cole had backed her up against the wall that rainy morning in the
barn and had kissed her until her mouth was swollen and her body raging with
unexpected passion. That night, he'd come to her room and, in the darkness, had
taken her. But it had been quick, and painful, and she remembered the strength
in his lean hands as he'd held her wrists beside her head, not even allowing
her to touch him through the brief intimacy while his hard mouth smothered her
cries of pain. He'd left her immediately, white-faced, while she cried like a
hurt child, and he hadn't touched her again. The next morning, he'd acted as if
nothing at all had happened. If anything, he was harder and colder than before.
Lacy couldn't bear the thought of any more of his brutal passion and his
indifference. She'd packed her bags and gone to San Antonio, to be a companion
to her great-aunt Lucy, Great-uncle Horace's widow. Shortly thereafter, the
gentle old lady had died. Now Lacy had the house and plenty of money that she
hadn't even expected to inherit. But without Cole, she had nothing.

She still shuddered, thinking about the morning
she'd left Spanish Flats. Marion had been hurt, Katy and Ben shocked. Coleman
had been.. .Coleman. Revealing nothing. Eight months had passed without a word
from him, without an apology. Lacy had hated him at first because of the pain
he'd inflicted so coldly. But one of her married friends had explained intimacy
to her, and now she understood a little. She'd been a virgin, so it wasn't
unexpected that her first time had been difficult. Perhaps Cole just hadn't
cared enough to be gentle with her. At any rate, if it happened again, it might
be less traumatic, and she might get pregnant. She blushed softly, thinking of
how wonderful it would be to have a child, even under these circumstances. She
was so totally alone. She could never have Cole, but it would have been nice to
have his child.

It was such a good thing that she had Great-aunt
Lucy's inheritance. Added to the unexpectedly small inheritance her parents had
left, it had made it possible for her to live in style and give extravagant
parties. Coleman hated guests, and gaiety. Lacy could have done without them,
too, if she'd had Coleman's love. Even his affection. But she had nothing,
except the contempt that had burned from his dark eyes every time he looked at
her. She had money, and he was losing more of his by the day. That had been a
point of contention between them from the very beginning. Cole had never gotten
over the fact of her wealth.. .and his lack of it. It was an unexpected
prejudice in a man who didn't seem to have a bigoted bone in his lean body.

Lacy sipped her gin quietly, her eyes on the
clock. Marion had written to say that Cole would be in San Antonio today, on
business. She'd asked him to stop by and see Lacy while he was in town. Lovely
Marion, always the matchmaker. But she didn't know the real situation. There
was nothing more hopeless than the relationship the way it was now. Even if
Lacy had thought about asking Coleman for a divorce, as old-fashioned and
proper as he was, she knew Cole would never agree to that. It had been his own
principles, added to his mother's horror of scandal, that had made him drag
Lacy to the altar in the first place after the night in the line cabin, even
though he hadn't touched her. Apparently he was content for things to go on as
they were; for Lacy to live in San

Antonio, while he contented himself with
business-as-usual at Spanish Flats. She laughed bitterly. All her young dreams
of marriage and children and a husband to love and cherish her, and this was
what she had. Twenty-four years old, and she felt fifty.