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“Ten pounds, two ounces.” His mouth was grim.
“I’ll want to keep a very close eye on your wife if this baby approaches a birth weight of anything over eight pounds. She has a narrow pelvis, not drastically so, but a ten-pound baby would probably require a C-section.”
That said, he began talking to Madelyn about her diet, vitamins and rest, and he gave her several booklets about prenatal care. When they left half an hour later, Madelyn was weighted down with prescriptions and reading material. Reese drove to a pharmacy, where he had the prescriptions filled, then headed home again. Madelyn sat straight and silent beside him. When they got home, he realized that she hadn’t looked at him once all day.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE NEXT MORNING as he started to leave she asked coolly, “Can you hear the car horn blow from anywhere on the ranch?”
He looked startled. “Of course not.” He eyed her questioningly, but she still wasn’t looking at him.
“Then how am I supposed to find you or contact you?”
“Why would you want to?” he asked sarcastically.
“I’m pregnant. I could fall, or start to miscarry. Any number of things.”
It was an argument he couldn’t refute. He set his jaw, faced with the choice between giving her the means to leave or endangering both her life and that of his baby. When it came down to it, he didn’t have a choice. He took the keys from his pocket and slammed them down on the cabinet, but he kept his hand on them.
“Do I have your word you won’t run?”
She looked at him finally, but her eyes were cool and blank. “No. Why should I waste my breath making promises when you wouldn’t believe me anyway?”
“Just what is it you want me to believe? That you haven’t worked it so you have just as much claim to the ranch as I have? A woman made a fool of me once and walked away with half of everything I owned, but it won’t happen again, even if I have to burn this house to the ground and sell the land for a loss, is that clear?” He was shouting by the time he finished, and he looked at her as if he hated the sight of her.
Madelyn didn’t show any expression or move. “If that was all I’d wanted, I could have paid off the mortgage at any time.”
Her point scored; she saw it in his eyes. She could have followed it up, but she held her peace. She had given him something to think about. She would give him a lot more to think about before this was over.
He banged out of the house, leaving the car keys on the cabinet. She picked them up, tossing them in her hand as she went upstairs to the bedroom, where she already had some clothes packed. In the two nights she had spent alone in this room, she had thought through what she was going to do and where she was going to go. Reese would expect her to go running back to New York now that she had a claim on the ranch, but she had never even considered that. To teach him the lesson he needed, she had to be close by.
It would be just like him to deliberately work close by in case she tried to leave, so she didn’t, and felt fierce satisfaction when he came home for lunch after telling her that he would be out all day. Since she hadn’t cooked anything, she made a plate of sandwiches and put it in front of him, then continued with what she had been doing before, which was cleaning the oven.
He asked, “Aren’t you going to eat?”
“I’ve already eaten.”
A few minutes later he asked, “Should you be doing work like that?”
“It isn’t hard.”
Her cool tone discouraged any more conversational overtures. She wasn’t letting him off that easy. She had told him twice that she wasn’t going to pay for April’s sins, but it evidently hadn’t sunk in; now she was going to show him.
When he left again she waited half an hour, then carried her suitcase out to the car. She didn’t have far to go, and it wouldn’t take him long to find her, a few days at the most. Then he could take the car back if he wanted, so she didn’t feel guilty about it. Besides, she didn’t need it. She fully expected to be back at the ranch before her next doctor’s appointment, but if she wasn’t, then she would inform Reese that he had to take her. Her plan had nothing to do with staying away from him.
There was a room above Floris’s café that was always for rent, because there was never anyone in Crook who needed to rent it. It would do for her for as long as she needed it. She drove to Crook and parked the car in front of the café. The idea wasn’t to hide from Reese; she wanted him to know exactly where she was.
She went into the café, but there wasn’t anyone behind the counter. “Floris? Is anyone here?”
“Hold your water,” came Floris’s unmistakable sour voice from the kitchen. A few minutes later she came through the door. “You want coffee, or something to eat?”
“I want to rent the room upstairs.”
Floris stopped and narrowed her eyes at Madelyn. “What do you want to do that for?”
“Because I need a place to stay.”
“You’ve got a big house back on that ranch, and a big man to keep you warm at night, if that’s all you need.”
