Without blinking, he steadied Kitty. Then he murmured some sort of excuse in a strained voice and strode back into the hall. The poor man, Kitty thought. He'd lived his whole life within moral and legal boundaries, and for the second day in a row, her mother had scandalized him. Kitty was scandalized too, for that matter. In the past six months there hadn't been one legitimate rumor about a lover for Samantha, but presumably someone in or around Hot Water had fathered her baby.
A choked sound from the TV room made Kitty whirl around. Samantha's eyes were on her and she looked even sicker. "Kitty," she said, her voice as strained as the judge's. "I didn't want you to find out like this. And I don't want - "
"This baby either?" Shock was drowned by a wave of shame and anger that rose, then crashed, flooding Kitty's entire being. Suddenly she was five feet eight inches of trembling, humiliated outrage. "Well, sorry, but you better face facts," she spit out. "Aunt Cat is too old to do your mothering this time. And we both know you can't - or won't - do it."
"Kitty!" Both Samantha and Sylvia called her name as she spun toward the hall and ran.
The first door she found led her outside, to Tony and Sylvia's backyard. It was full dark now, but there were people standing in small groups beneath Japanese lanterns strung throughout the trees and along a walkway beside the creek meandering by. Kitty ran past them all, along the creek, then over two small bridges until she was alone and the Japanese lights were just twinkles among the oaks. From here, the only voices she heard were the ones that kept replaying in her head. Her mother was pregnant.
Disregarding her new dress, she dropped to the leaf-covered dirt and leaned back against a tree trunk. She drew her legs up and hugged them with her arms, resting her cheek against her knees.
Her mother was about to set tongues wagging again, more Wilder fodder for a raging fire of small-town gossip. Would nothing ever change?
"Kitty." Through the darkness came a familiar voice. A worried-sounding voice.
She squeezed shut her eyes. "Go away, Dylan." She wanted his comfort, yes. Desperately. But she couldn't let herself get used to it.
"I've been looking everywhere for you." A tall, inky shadow emerged from behind a nearby tree.
"Go away." A hot tear rolled from the corner of her eye and channeled along her nose to catch in the corner of her mouth.
"You know I can't do that." Before she could move or protest, he was somehow sitting in her spot against the tree, Kitty cradled in his arms. "You're my wife, after all."
The words struck like a blow. Kitty couldn't move, she could barely breathe, and it left Dylan free to push her head against his chest. He started stroking her hair. "This stuff fascinates me, you know," he said softly. "All the amazing things you do with it. Those knots, for example, baffle me. My shoelaces untie at the drop of a hat, but not your hair. And then there's those mystifying, one-pin-and-it's-over topknots you wear at The Burning Rose. It's become my obsession to figure out how you defy gravity and keep those up."
Her heart contracted, leaking even more pain. She knew he was talking to calm her, to soothe her, but she couldn't find the voice to tell him it wasn't working. That it wasn't ever going to work.
She felt him press a kiss on the top of her head. "I have to say, my favorite way you wear your hair is just like this, though, a sleek curtain down your back," he said. "I think I could get lost on the other side of it and never find my way out of you."
Oh, God. Her heart contracted again and another tear trickled down her cheek. The moment she'd realized he'd come to find her, to comfort her - "my wife," he'd said - the person who had been lost was her. Lost in love with him.
She couldn't lie to herself anymore. How foolish she'd been, trying to imagine that there wasn't enough time for this to happen. Hah! The truth was, on a night eight years before, when she'd sought him out, her childish hero worship of him had turned to full-blown, full-out, I'm-saving-myself-for-you love.
She'd called her actions rebellion the next day. She'd pointed her finger at the leering, foul-mouthed Ned DeBeck.