Free Shades of Twilight by Linda Howard Page A

she’d always been too young. With Davencourt in the balance, he would have chosen her, she knew he would. She wouldn’t have cared that he’d wanted Davencourt more than he wanted her. She would have married Webb on any terms at all, grateful just to get any part of his attention. Why couldn’t it have been her? Why Jessie?
    Because Jessie was beautiful, and had always been Grandmother’s favorite. Roanna had tried hard at first, but she had never been as graceful or as socially adept, or had Jessie’s good taste in clothing and decorating. She would certainly never be as pretty. Roanna’s mirror wasn’t rose tinted; she could plainly see her straight, heavy, untidy hair, more brown than red, and her bony, angular face with her weird, slanted brown eyes, the bump on the bridge of her long nose, and her too-big mouth. She was rail thin and clumsy, and her breasts were just barely there. Despairing, she knew that no one, especially no man, would ever willingly choose her over Jessie. At seventeen, Jessie had been the most popular girl in school, while Roanna, at the same age, had never had a real date. Grandmother had arranged for her to have “escorts” to various functionsshe’d been forced to attend, but the boys had obviously been shanghaied by their mothers for the duty, and Roanna had always been embarrassed and tongue-tied. None of the draftees had ever volunteered for another opportunity for her company.
    But since Webb’s marriage, Roanna had tried less and less to fit herself into the mold Grandmother had chosen for her, the appropriate social mold of a Davenport. What was the point? Webb was lost to her. She had begun withdrawing, spending as much time as she could with the horses. She was relaxed with them in a way she never was with people, because the horses didn’t care how she looked or if she’d knocked over yet another glass at dinner. The horses responded to her light, gentle touch, to the special crooning note in her voice when she talked to them, to the love and care she lavished on them. She was never clumsy on a horse. Somehow her thin body would move into the rhythm of the powerful animal beneath her, and she would become one with it, part of the strength and grace. Loyal said he’d never seen anyone ride as good as she did, not even Mr. Webb, and he rode as if he’d been born in a saddle. Her riding ability was the only thing about her that Grandmother ever praised.
    But she would give up her horses if she could only have Webb. Here was her chance to break up his marriage, and she couldn’t take it, didn’t dare take it. She couldn’t hurt him that way, couldn’t take the chance that he would lose his temper and do something irrevocable.
    Buckley sensed her agitation, the way horses do, and began to prance nervously. Roanna jerked her attention back to what she was doing and tried to soothe him, patting his neck and talking to him, but she couldn’t give him her full attention. Despite the heat, cold chills roughened her skin, and again she felt as if she might vomit.
    Loyal was far more attuned to horses than he was to people, but he frowned when he saw her face and came over to take Buckley’s reins as she swung down from the saddle. “What’s wrong?” he asked bluntly.
    â€œNothing,” she said, then rubbed a shaky hand over her face. “I think maybe I got too hot, that’s all. I forgot my cap.”
    â€œYou know better’n that,” he scolded. “Go on up to the house and drink some cold lemonade, then rest up for a while. I’ll take care of Buck.”
    â€œYou told me to always take care of my own horse,” she said, protesting, but he cut her off with a wave of his hand.
    â€œAnd now I’m tellin’ you to go on. Scat. If you don’t have enough sense to take care of yourself, I don’t know that you can take care of Buck.”
    â€œAll right.