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Authors: Rose Marie Ferris

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BOOK: Promises to Keep
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"Yes, about that long."

"That explains it then."

"Explains what?" Garth quickly probed. "Does the countryside seem familiar to you?"

"In a way," she answered vaguely, searching for words that would express her reaction to the region. "It's not that I recognize anything. It's more a feeling I have of—well, of coming home, I guess."

Both of them were lost in their own thoughts after that and they exchanged no further conversation until Garth had signaled for the check. While they stood at the cash register waiting for the hostess to bring Garth's change, he handed her their motel key.

"You could stand to have an early night," he said. "Why don't you go on ahead and turn in."

She looked up at him, puzzled. "Aren't you coming?"

"I want to make a few telephone calls first," he explained. "I'll be along soon."

Partly because she was so sleepy and partly because she recognized that this turn of events would help allay her discomfort over sharing the room with Garth, Julie didn't ask him why he'd elected to use the pay phone in the lobby when it would have been more convenient for him to make his calls from the telephone in their room.

After nearly a month of rushed morning showers, the leisureliness of a bath before retiring was heavenly and Julie stayed in the tub until she was yawning and more than ready for bed.

Unfortunately, while she was brushing her hair dry, she looked at herself in the mirror, and what she saw shocked her awake. There were still hollows beneath her cheekbones and mauve shadows under her eyes, but there was more spirit—more sparkle— in her face than she could recall having seen there before.

Was this rebirth solely a result of being away from the hospital, or was it due to Garth's company? Though she pretended to contemplate this, she realized she was kidding herself. She knew the answer very well, and she found it unnerving that in one short day Garth should have had such an impact on her.

She'd never looked at herself in a full-length mirror before and she felt uncomfortable as she did so now. Perhaps if she started from the floor and worked her way up, it would seem less vain. She tried to judge her figure objectively and concluded it wasn't half bad. A little on the thin side maybe, but one might even say it was quite nice.

She saw that she had small, high-arched feet, finely turned ankles, and long shapely legs that flared softly at the hips. From what she could make out through the folds of the towel, her waist appeared to be hand-span-narrow. And her breasts seemed to be nicely rounded—again based on what the thickness of the towel permitted her to see.

In fact, she amended, as she dared to view herself all at once from the neck down, her figure could be considered damned good!

She badly wanted to know if the reality of her body without the towel lived up to the promise she thought she detected with it. After squaring her shoulders and tilting up her chin, she prepared to peel the towel away and was struck by the combativeness of her posture.

Why should she feel this reluctance to let the towel drop? Even the notion that she might do so caused her face to flame with color.

"Heavens!" she murmured. She wasn't all that prudish, was she? She was behaving like some Victorian maiden—which she damned well couldn't be. Not Victorian in these modern times and certainly, having been married to Garth, no maiden!

With all the strength at her disposal, she willed herself to lower the towel. She was dismayed to find she still couldn't do it. Something inside wouldn't let her. She grimaced disparagingly. Garth had teased her about her modesty, but this was ridiculous!

Was there something terribly wrong with her that was unsightly? She suddenly realized that while she'd never been aware that she was avoiding looking at her body when she was naked, this was precisely what she did. But even so, she'd seen enough to know that she had the appropriate quota of feminine accoutrements and that her parts were normally distributed. So she wasn't disfigured.

"This is stupid!" she cried, and her voice bounced back at her from the beige tile of the walls.

The problem had been blown up out of all proportion. It had become monumental.

"I'm going to bed." She announced her intention belligerently, as if there were someone there to stop her, but there was no one but her to hear the words she shouted.

Once in bed, she tossed and turned until she heard voices in the hall outside and the scraping of a key in the lock. Since he thought she would be sleeping, Garth had apparently prevailed upon the desk clerk to let him into the unit so he wouldn't have to disturb her.

When he entered, moving quietly about the room as he made his own preparations for the night, Julie remained very still, breathing deeply and evenly as she feigned sleep.

Garth is here and everything is going to be all right, she silently encouraged herself. This thought proved to be such an effective opiate that it was the last thing she was conscious of until she awoke before the sun the next morning.

Thanks to the length of time she'd spent in the regimen of the hospital, Julie no longer needed the chirrupy night nurse who would come into her room every day at the crack of dawn to waken her so she could scrub the sleep from her eyes in time to spend an hour or more waiting for the breakfast trays to be delivered to the ward. After having been subjected to four weeks of this, her inner alarm had gone off, and she opened her eyes promptly at six o'clock.

Garth was still sleeping soundly in the bed next to hers, and she envied him his undisturbed slumber. She lay without stirring, watching for daybreak in the minuscule amount of light the heavy weave of the drapes allowed to filter into the room.

The time seemed to drag until Garth finally woke up, but when he did, he was instantly alert and immensely vital. He literally bounded out of bed and immediately disappeared into the bathroom. Seconds later Julie heard the shower running and above this the sound of his voice raised in song, its volume amplified by the acoustics of the tub enclosure.

What was he singing? She listened with all of her being, and her mouth curved in a smile when she heard the western twang he'd adopted as he sang "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys." When several choruses of this were followed by "You Are the Sunshine of My Life," her smile became more generous, and when he broke into "Rocky Mountain High" for his finale, she giggled. He'd imitated the styles of Willie Nelson, Stevie Wonder, and John Denver and his impressions were so true to life, she expected half of the recording industry to come through the bathroom door behind him.

When he was dressed and had reentered the bedroom, it didn't take Julie long to realize that, notwithstanding his serenade from the shower, Garth was in a foul mood. His response to her good morning was a quelling stare, and when she'd had her turn in the shower and was ready for the day—dressed, much as he was, in jeans and a plaid shirt—her further attempts at conversation were met with equally dampening monosyllables.

She wondered whether he was always this out of sorts and uncommunicative first thing in the morning or if his grouchiness was due to their awkward situation. In some ways he was a victim of circumstances that were even less enviable than hers. How did he contrive to cope so coolly, trapped in the framework of marriage to a wife who didn't remember him? That, Julie thought, must be a much more bitter pill than the one she'd had to swallow.

Even after they were seated in the restaurant and he'd drunk his first cup of coffee, Garth's manner toward her did not sweeten. He was pleasant to their waitress; smiling and very courteous. It seemed to Julie that she was the only one who provoked his ill-tempered grumbles. In the end she, too, fell silent, and after a few bites of scrambled egg she merely crumbled her. toast and pushed the food around on her plate.

"Aren't you going to finish that?" Garth asked sourly.

"I'm not very hungry."

His eyes roved over her, detached and critical as he conducted his assessment of her. "You look as if you haven't had a decent meal since you left California," he said.

So in Garth's opinion she was too thin, she thought, shrugging ruefully as she said farewell to her inflated estimate of her figure. "Well, you know hospital food," she replied. "You can tell the day of the week by the menu. It's so predictable, it's boring."

For a time after they resumed their journey, Julie occupied herself with watching the scenery. It promised to be another glorious day, though not as warm as the one before. They left the towns of Sage and Cokeville behind, heading toward the Salt River Range of mountains, and the highway began to climb more perceptibly. In whatever direction she looked, there was something to fire the imagination and please the eye.

When they passed a draw that was below the grade of the highway and Julie saw a horse-drawn canvas-covered wagon, she turned to ask Garth if he thought it might have been a chuck wagon, but after one short glance at him she changed her mind.

His eyes were gray and dark as slate—and as hard —rendering his expression more forbidding than ever. As if he knew she'd been about to say something, he put another tape on the stereo. After he'd adjusted the tuning knobs, the measured cadences of a Chopin nocturne filled the moody silence in the car.

Again Julie recognized the performing artist. It had to be Horowitz. Surely no other pianist could shade each nuance of the melody so poignantly and still maintain the fine balance between passion and bathos. It was becoming apparent that Garth had catholic tastes in music and, if one could rely on her familiarity with his selections, so did she.

Reluctantly she turned her eyes away from Garth. Thunderheads were massing above the mountain peaks far to the north, and she had the distinct impression that a storm was brewing inside the car that would rival any fireworks Mother Nature could cook up.

Though she tried not to, she couldn't resist stealing an occasional look at her husband. She thought he resembled some dark angel when he frowned at something he saw in the road ahead. Despite the warmth of the day, she shivered. She had the notion that being Garth's wife—really his wife—might be, for her, the most direct pathway to hell. But she had no doubt that if only he wanted to, he could make even that seem like heaven.

When they reached the summit of the Salt River Pass, Garth pulled into the parking area by the side of the highway and they left the car to stretch their legs. They walked along the ridge, gazing at the previously unnoticed face of Wyoming that was revealed to them from this vantage point.

A panorama of the rolling flanks of the mountains stretched out before them as far as they could see. It was a peaceful vista in variegated green, stimulating to the senses but so gentle to the soul that Julie felt a sharp pang of regret that, for practical purposes, she was seeing it alone.

But as if Garth felt as keenly as she did that it was somehow wrong to experience such sublime tranquillity and remain willfully hostile, as if he longed as she did to share it with someone, he touched the back of her hand. Although his touch might have been purely accidental, she responded by turning her hand into the encompassing warmth of his and he held her fingers tightly, almost painfully.

For a long time they stood side by side, joined as much by the similarity of their reactions to the view as by their clasped hands. And they did not let go of each other when at last they retraced their steps to the car.

Chapter Five

BOOK: Promises to Keep
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