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“Are you crazy? What on earth makes you—?”
“Think this is a good idea?” she finished for him.
“For starters, yes.” Zane kept his tone civil, but inside he seethed. Suddenly he wished he had another shot of brandy in his hand.
“It is a good idea, Zane. I think Cissy might have wanted it.”
“You know nothing about what Celeste wanted.” His voice was low and angry, and he didn’t care.
“A child,” she continued. “Especially a girl, should have a mother. Cissy and I grew up without a mother, and it was like...like always feeling hungry for something.”
Zane wrapped one hand around the chain supporting the swing and clenched the other into a fist. “I am Rosemarie’s father, Winifred. She is mine. My daughter. My responsibility.”
“But I could give her advantages, living in the East. Good schools. Music lessons. You cannot offer such things out here so far from civilization.”
He counted to twenty to keep his temper from making him say something he’d regret. “What gives you the right to disparage the life I can offer my child? We have a school. I can hire music teachers or art lessons or anything else my daughter needs.” His voice shook with fury and something else. Fear. He could not face losing Rosemarie, too.
“But—”
He waited until she looked directly at him. “Dammit, Winifred, you waltz out here and expect me to give up my daughter to a citified stranger with expensive clothes and high-faluting conservatory training? What do you take me for?”
That hit home. He could see the hurt in her eyes, but he was too angry to soften his words.
“The answer is no,” he shot. “It will always be no. Rosemarie is all I have of Celeste, and I will never—”
“Zane, please listen to me.”
“Winifred, for God’s sake, I love my daughter more than anything on this earth. Nothing, nothing you or anyone else could offer her can make any difference.”
Tears now sheened her cheeks, and while he felt a small hiccup of regret inside his chest, he couldn’t respond. Very slowly she placed Rosemarie in his lap and, keeping her face averted, slipped out of the swing and stepped quickly into the house.
Zane finished two more brandies before Sam called him to supper. Winifred did not appear, and he sent the houseboy upstairs to check on her.
“Lady say she not hungry, Boss.”
“Take her a chicken sandwich and some tea,” he ordered.
Sam folded his hands at his waist. “She not eat it.”
“Take it up anyway, dammit!”
He found he wasn’t hungry, either. His head began to pound with the familiar ache he’d felt ever since Celeste died, and after sitting and staring for an hour at the plate of food before him he stalked into the kitchen, grabbed the warmed baby bottle out of Sam’s hand and plodded up the stairs to feed his daughter.
* * *
The next morning when Winifred entered the dining room, Sam poured her coffee and shook his head. “Eyes look red, missy.”
Winifred brushed her fingers over her swollen eyelids. She had wept most of the night and slept little. “It’s—it’s my hay fever, I expect.” She lifted the cup to her lips.
Sam bent at the waist and tipped his head to peer into her face. “Maybe so,” he pronounced. “Boss eyes look funny, too.”
The houseboy’s keen black eyes glinted.
Winifred took a swallow of coffee. “You don’t miss much, do you, Sam?”
“Miss not much,” he agreed with a grin. “Boss never fool me.”
Nor, Winifred reflected, had she. She huffed out a sigh. Knowing that Zane was distressed did not ease her own anguish. She’d done more than make a mess of her offer to raise Rosemarie; she’d alienated the doctor, perhaps even made him resent her. Lord’s sake, would he prevent her from visiting her niece in the future? She couldn’t bear that.
She clamped her mouth shut and pushed away the plate of eggs and toast Sam laid before her. She couldn’t eat. If she opened her mouth she knew a sob would erupt.
“Must eat, missy. Good fight need full belly.”
She blinked at Sam in surprise. A good fight?
He planted his slippered feet at her side and propped his hands on his hips. “You eat,” he ordered. “Then I teach how to make biscuit.”
“Biscuits!”
Sam nodded. “Next lesson after tumbled eggs.”
Oh, for heaven’s sake. All right, she’d eat something.
