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“I can’t, Dad. I’ve got a debt to pay.”
Edward shivered, though he was covered by several thick blankets. “You should never have come back.”
“Why didn’t anyone tell me you were sick—”
Edward raised a feeble hand and waved away her concerns. “It wouldn’t help anything now, would it? You were so close to finishing school, I didn’t want you to know.”
“I think you should be in a hospital.”
Edward shook his head and another fit of racking coughs took hold of him. “I want you to leave. I’ve got a little money. Get away from this farm, from Ellery Rhodes—”
“But he’s been so good to me.”
Her father’s faded blue eyes closed for a second. “He’s changed, Tiff. . . .” Another fit of coughing took hold of him, and he doubled up in pain.
“I’m getting you to a hospital, right now.”
Despite her father’s protests, Tiffany managed to get him out of the stifling room and to the main house. When she knocked on the door, Stasia, the exotic-looking woman Ellery was living with, answered the door.
“My father needs help,” Tiffany said.
Stasia’s full lips pulled into a line of disgust at the sight of Tiffany and her father. Her dark eyes traveled over Tiffany, and she tossed her hair off her shoulders. “He needs to dry out—”
“He’s sick.”
“Humph.”
Pulling herself to her full height, Tiffany looked the older woman directly in the eye. “Please. Call Ellery.”
“He’s not here.”
“Then find someone to help me.”
Edward’s coughing started again. His shoulders racked from the pain. “I don’t know why Ellery keeps him around,” Stasia muttered, as she reached for her coat and begrudgingly offered to drive them into town.
Tiffany remained at her father’s side for two days until the pneumonia that had settled in his lungs took his life.
“You stupid, lovable old fool,” Tiffany had said, tears running down her face. “Why did you kill yourself—why?” she asked, as her father’s body was moved from the hospital room to the morgue.
Refusing help from the hospital staff, Tiffany had run out of the building, blinded by tears of grief and guilt. If she hadn’t gone away to school, if she had stayed on the farm, her father would still have been alive.
She didn’t see the oncoming car as she crossed the street. She heard the blast from an angry horn, smelled the bum of rubber as tires screamed against the dry asphalt and felt a man’s body push her out of the way of the station wagon.
The man who had saved her life was Ellery. He’d gathered her shaken form into his arms and muttered something about being sorry. She didn’t understand why, and she didn’t care. Ellery Rhodes was the only person she had ever known who had been kind to her with no ulterior motives.
Within two weeks, Stasia was gone and Ellery asked Tiffany to marry him.
Tiffany didn’t hesitate. Ellery Rhodes was the first person she had met whom she could depend on. He cared for her, and though he seemed distant at times, Tiffany realized that no relationship was perfect.
She wondered now if she had married him out of gratitude or grief. The love she had hoped would bloom within her had never surfaced, but she supposed that was because passionate, emotional love only existed in fairy tales.
Inexplicably, her thoughts returned to Zane Sheridan, with his knowing gray eyes and ruggedly hewn features. He was the last person she needed to complicate her life right now, and the idea that he could shed any light on what had happened to Devil’s Gambit or Ellery was preposterous.
But what if there’s a chance that Ellery’s alive?
Without any answers to her questions, Tiffany headed back to the house to remind Louise that there would be a guest for dinner.
* * *
