Confessing to the Cowboy - By Carla Cassidy Page 0,36
“Why don’t we sit at the table,” she suggested, as she worried a strand of her hair between two fingers.
“Okay.” He shrugged off his coat and tossed it on the sofa, then sat in a chair, dwarfing the table with his size. She sat in the chair across from him and finally forced herself to meet his gaze.
“Thanks for coming.” Her voice cracked and she cleared her throat. She folded her hands on top of the table, hoping to keep their trembling under control.
“Mary, what’s going on?” His gentle voice pulled a mist of tears to her eyes. “What kind of information do you think you have that might help me solve these murders?”
For a long moment she wasn’t sure where to begin to tell the story that had ultimately brought her to this place and time. She finally decided the beginning was always the best place to start.
She leaned back in her chair, pulled her hands from the top of the table and kept them tightly clasped in her lap. Hopefully he wouldn’t notice how violently they trembled. “When I was twenty-one I was working as a waitress in an upscale restaurant in San Francisco. My parents were dead and I was trying to make it on my own with a paltry salary and whatever tips I got. It was a tough life, but I was getting by okay.”
He looked at her curiously and she knew he was wondering where she was going with this. But he sat back as if patient enough to allow her to get there in her own way.
“I’d only been working there about two months when I met Jason McKnight. He was very handsome and quite charming and seemed to be taken with me. Over the next couple of months he came into the restaurant regularly and always sat in my section.
He flirted with me and kept asking me out and finally I agreed to go out with him. For the next six months he wined and dined me and I discovered he was a very wealthy, influential man, but what was important to me was that he treated me with a respect and tenderness I’d never known before. I felt like Cinderella who had finally met her prince.”
For a moment she was cast back into time, back to when she had believed dreams could come true and there really was a Prince Charming for everyone and she’d found hers.
She released a shuddering sigh. “When he asked me to marry him, I readily accepted. I thought I was so in love. The wedding was a whirlwind and I scarcely caught my breath before I suddenly I found myself Mrs. Jason McKnight, attending lavish dinner parties and charity balls. We rubbed shoulders with judges and politicians, with movie stars and the upper crust. Jason expected me to be the perfect wife, the perfect hostess and I tried so very hard to please him.” Her hands began to tremble again in her lap and she squeezed them more tightly together.
“But you didn’t always please him,” Cameron said, his tone as flat as the slightly dangerous darkness that had swept into his eyes.
“We’d been married about six months the first time he kicked me in the thigh so hard I thought he had crippled me. He told me I’d been flirting with somebody at the party we’d attended, which of course wasn’t true.”
“So, what happened?”
She shrugged. “He kicked me and screamed at me and then went downstairs to his study for yet another drink. I crawled into bed and finally fell asleep. The next morning I woke up in a bed full of roses and Jason effusively apologizing and chalking the whole thing up to the fact that he’d been drunk, too drunk to really know what he was doing. I made the same mistake so many women make.... I believed him and so I forgave him.”
“And then something happened again,” Cameron said softly.
“Of course,” she replied and released a weary sigh. “Cameron, I was a textbook case of an abused woman. Each time he hurt me he made excuses for himself and it didn’t take long before I began to blame myself for his behavior. Maybe the flower arrangement in the center of the table hadn’t been as fresh as it should have been, perhaps I should have paid more attention to the items on the menu for an important dinner party. There was so little I knew about the kind of lifestyle we were living.