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Perhaps her mistake had been to stay with her father, but Edward Chappel was the only family she had known. Her mother, Marie, had abandoned them both when Tiffany was only five. She could remember little of Marie except that she had thick, golden hair and a beautiful but weary face that very rarely smiled.
Fragments of life with her mother had come to mind over the years. Tiffany remembered that Marie insisted that her daughter’s hair always be combed and that her faded clothes always be neatly starched. And there was a tune . . . a sad refrain that Marie would sing when she helped Tiffany get dressed in the morning. Twenty years later, Tiffany would still find herself humming that tune.
The day that her mother had walked out of her life was still etched vividly in her mind. “You must remember that Mommy loves you very much and I’ll come back for you,” Marie had whispered to Tiffany, with tears gathering in her round, indigo eyes. “I promise, pumpkin.” Then Marie had gathered her daughter close to her breast, as if she couldn’t bear to walk out the door.
Tiffany had felt the warm trickle of her mother’s tears as they silently dropped onto the crown of her head.
“Mommy, don’t leave me.Please.... Mommy, Mommy, don’t go. I’ll be good . . . Mommy, I love you, please . . .” Tiffany had wailed, throwing her arms around her mother’s neck and then sobbing with all of her heart for hours after Marie’s car had disappeared in a plume of dust.
Her father’s face was stem, his shoulders bowed. “Don’t blame her, Tiffy,” he had whispered hoarsely, “it’s all my fault, you know. I haven’t been much of a husband.”
Tiffany had never seen Marie Caldwell Chappel again.
At first she couldn’t believe that her mother had left her, and each night she would stare out the window and pray that the tall man with the big car would bring her mother home. Later, in her early teens, Tiffany was angry that she didn’t have a mother to help her understand the changes in her body and the new emotions taking hold of her. Now, as an adult, Tiffany understood that a woman who had been brought up with a taste for the finer things in life could never have been happy with Edward Chappel.
Edward had always been irresponsible, going from job to job, breeding farm to breeding farm, working with the animals he loved. But each time, just when Tiffany thought they had settled down for good and she had made one or two friends in the local school, he would lose his job and they would move on to a new town, a new school, a new set of classmates who would rather ignore than accept her. To this day, she had never made any close friends. She had learned long ago that relationships were fragile and never lasted for any length of time.
After Marie had left him, Edward had sworn off the bottle for nearly three years. Tiffany now realized that his abstinence was because of the hope that Marie would return to him rather than because of his new responsibility as a single parent.
When she was just eighteen and trying to save enough money to go to college, they’d moved to the Rhodes Farm. Edward was off the bottle again and he had promised his daughter that this time he would make good.
It was in this very barn that her life had changed. While she’d been softly talking to one of the yearlings, Ellery Rhodes had walked in on her.
“Who are you?” he’d asked imperiously, and Tiffany had frozen. When she’d turned to face him, the look on his even features was near shock.
“I’m Tiffany Chappel,” she had replied, with a faltering smile.
“Ed’s daughter?”
“Yes.”
Ellery had been flustered. “I thought that you were just a little girl.” His eyes moved from her face, down the length of her body and back again. An embarrassed flush crept up his neck. “Obviously, I was mistaken.”
“Dad seems to think that I’m still about eleven,” she explained with a shrug and turned back to the horses.
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
“Why aren’t you out on your own?” It was a nosy question, but Ellery asked it with genuine concern in his gold eyes. His brows had pulled together and a thoughtful frown pulled at the corners of his mouth. For a moment Tiffany thought that he might fire her father because of her. Maybe Ellery Rhodes didn’t like the idea of a girl—young woman—on his farm. Maybe one of the grooms had complained about a woman on the farm. She had already had more than her share of male advances from the stable boys.
Tiffany couldn’t explain to her father’s employer that she had to look after him, or that a good share of his work was done by her strong hands. Edward Chappel would be fired again. Instead she lied. “I’m only helping him out for a little while. Until I go back to college—”
Ellery’s practiced eyes took in her torn sweatshirt, faded jeans and oversized boots. Tiffany knew that he saw through her lie, but he was too much of a gentleman to call her on it.
Two days later, she was called into his office. Her heart pounded with dread as she entered the old farmhouse and sat stiffly in one of the chairs near his desk.
Ellery looked up from a stack of bills he had been paying. “I’ve got a proposition for you, young lady,” he stated, looking up at her and his gold eyes shining. “Your father has already approved.”
“What do you mean?”
Ellery smiled kindly. It wasn’t a warm smile, but it was caring. He explained that he had worked out a deal with her father. He liked the way she handled the horses, he claimed, and he offered to send her to school, if she promised to return to the farm and work off the amount of money her education would cost once she had graduated.
Tiffany had been ecstatic with her good fortune, and Edward, feeling that he had finally found a way to rightfully provide for his daughter, was as pleased as anyone.
She had never forgotten Ellery’s kindness to her, and she had held up her part of the bargain. When she returned to the farm two years later, she found that her father was drinking again.
“You’ve got to leave,” he said, coughing violently. The stench of cheap whiskey filled the air in the small room he had been living in on the farm.
