Free A Little Time in Texas by Joan Johnston Page B

sins and find true remorse.”
    Angel didn’t know how long she was left in the cellar, but the horrors of the place magnified over time. The cobwebs held poisonous spiders. The bugs crawling over her grew to immense proportions. The mice became rats and threatened to chew off her fingers and toes. And the dark, the oppressive, relentless dark, seeped into her soul.
    “Angel? It’s me, Belinda. Can you hear me?”
    Angel had been wishing so desperately for the sound of another human voice, she thought she was dreaming. She answered, anyway. “Belinda? Is that you?” She leaned her ear against the crack between the cellar doors, so she could hear.
    “I’m sorry to be so long in coming,” Belinda said. “This is the soonest I could sneak away to visit you. I’m so sorry, Angel. I knew I shouldn’t have taken the biscuits. But I was so hungry. It seems like I’m always so hungry!”
    “Oh, Belinda. How could you? Mama would—”
    “Mama’s not here,” Belinda said in a sharp voice. “We’re on our own, Angel. If we don’t take care of ourselves, no one else will. You saw how willing Miss Higgens was to think the worst of you. Our mama was a thief. Nobody, especially not Miss Higgens, is ever going to let us forget it. I’m sorry you got blamed, but I’m not sorry I took the biscuits!”
    Belinda left without giving Angel a chance to argue with her. Belinda’s words stayed with Angel in the dark and created an epiphany. What good was it to be honest and starve? Whyshouldn’t she take what she needed? The trick was not to get caught. And she wouldn’t, not ever again. Because she would be the one doing the stealing, and she would hide her tracks better than Belinda had.
    Miss Higgens had left her in the cellar for twenty-four hours without food or water or—except for Belinda’s visit—any other human contact. Angel had come out of the cellar a changed person—harder, more self-reli-ant…and terrified of the dark.
    Over the years Angel had lived along a fine line that sometimes crept over into lawlessness. She had taken, when not taking meant going hungry; she had done an honest day’s work when it could be had. Despite her epiphany, Angel had never been able to leave behind the notion, ingrained from birth by her mother, that breaking the law was wrong.
    Belinda hadn’t been so fortunate. The deprivation in their youth had made Belinda crave things, and her scruples had been discarded as she satisfied those cravings. Eventually Belinda had taken to selling herself to live better during the war. Angel had cried the last time she’d seen her sister alive.
    Suddenly the cave’s darkness was broken by a ray of white light. Dallas had found her. Angelcouldn’t help the feeling of relief that swept over her. The blackness was gone and with it the memories of a painful past. Here was a man who made her wish she had lived a better life. A man to whom truth and honesty meant something. A good man…whose horse she had stolen, whose trust she had betrayed.
    Why did she feel so guilty? She had survived in the past by “feeling true remorse,” and then putting the guilt aside. Since childhood, duplicity had held a limited, but necessary, role in her life. Why was she feeling regrets now?
    Because she liked and respected Dallas Masterson, and she wanted—needed—his respect. Still, she couldn’t set aside the practical side of her nature. The damage was done. She had stolen his horse and left. It made more sense to go forward from here than to turn back.
    Angel uncurled slowly and raised a hand to shade her eyes, but she couldn’t see the man who stood in the darkness beyond the light. “You might as well come with me,” she said, lifting her chin pugnaciously. “I’m not leaving until I explore that exit on the other side of the cave.”
    “Why, I just might do that, pretty lady,” a guttural male voice said. “But I think maybe some of my friends might wanta come along. Hank, Ty-rel, Clete,”