Regan's Pride

“Because you won’t let it be,” she said quietly.

“Leave it alone, Coreen,” he returned coldly.

She felt the chill, as she hadn’t before. He was as unapproachable now as stone. The song that was playing inside suddenly caught her attention and she laughed a little nervously. “Thanks for the Memory.” She identified it, and thought how appropriate it was.

“Don’t kid yourself that this was any romantic interlude,” he said with brutal honesty as he fought for breath. “You’re just a kid…little more than a stick figure with two marbles for breasts. Now go away. Get out of my life and stay out!”

He’d walked off and left her out there. It was a summer night and warm. Coreen, wounded to the heart by that parting shot, had gone to her father’s car and sat down in it. She hadn’t gone back inside even when her father came out and asked what was wrong. A headache, she’d told him. He’d seen her leave with Ted, and he knew by the look on her face that she was hurt. He made their excuses and took her home.

Coreen had never gone to another gun club meeting or accepted another invitation from Sandy to come out to the ranch and ride horses. And on the rare occasions when Ted came into the store, she’d made herself scarce. She couldn’t even meet his eyes, ashamed of her own lack of control and his biting comment about her body. For a man who thought she was too small-breasted, he certainly hadn’t been reticent about touching her there, she thought. She knew so little about men, though, perhaps he meant the whole thing as a punishment. But if that had been so, why had his hands trembled?

Eventually she’d come to grips with it. She’d put Ted into a compartment of her past and locked him up, and she’d pretended that the night of the dance had never happened. Then her father had a heart attack and became an invalid. It was up to Coreen to run the business and she wasn’t doing very well. That was when Barry had come into her life. Coreen and her father had been forced to put the feed store on the market and Barry had liked the prospect of owning it. He’d also liked the looks of Coreen, and suddenly made himself indispensable to her and her father. Anything they needed, he’d get them, despite her pride and protests.

He was always around, offering comfort and soft kisses to Coreen, who was upset about the doctor’s prognosis, and hungry for a little kindness. Ted’s behavior had killed something vulnerable in her. Barry’s attention was a soothing balm to her wounds.

Ted had heard that his favorite cousin, Barry, was seeing a lot of Coreen. Ted stopped by often to see her father, and he watched her now, in an intense, disturbing way. He was gentle, almost hesitant, when he spoke to her. But Coreen had learned her lesson. She was distant and barely polite, so remote that they might have been strangers. When he came close, she moved away. That had stopped him in his tracks the first time it happened.

After that, he became cruel with her, at a time when she needed tenderness desperately. He began to taunt her about Barry, out of her father’s hearing, mocking her for trying to entice his rich cousin to take care of her. Everyone knew that the feed store was about to go bankrupt because of the neglect by her sick father and his mounting medical bills.

The taunts frightened her. She knew how desperate their situation was becoming, and she daren’t ask Ted for help in his present mood. Ironically his attitude pushed her further into Barry’s waiting arms. Her vulnerability appealed to Barry. He took over, assuming the debts and taking the load from Coreen’s shoulders.

The night her father died, Barry took charge of everything, paid all the expenses and proposed marriage to Coreen. She was confused and frightened, and when Ted came by the house to pay his respects, Barry wouldn’t let him near her. Ted left in a furious mood and Barry convinced Coreen that his cousin hadn’t wanted to speak to her, anyway.

Barry was beside her every minute at the funeral, keeping her away from Ted’s suspicious, concerned gaze and making sure he had not a minute alone with her. The same day, he presented her with a marriage license and coaxed her into taking a blood test.

Ted left on a European business trip just after he refused Barry’s invitation to be best man at the wedding. Ted’s face when Barry made the announcement was indescribable. He looked at Coreen with eyes so terrible that she trembled and dropped her own. He strode out without a word to her and got on a plane the same day. It was confirmation, if Coreen needed it, that Ted didn’t care what she did with her life as long as it didn’t involve him. She might as well marry Barry as anyone, she decided, since she couldn’t have the one man she loved.

But she was naive about the demands of marriage, and especially about the man Barry really was behind his social mask. Coreen lived in agony after her marriage. Barry knew nothing of tenderness and he was incapable of any normal method of satisfaction in bed. He had abnormal ways of fulfillment that hurt her and his cruelty wore away her confidence and her self-esteem until she became clumsy and withdrawn. Ted didn’t come near them and Sandy’s invitations were ignored by Barry. He all but broke up her friendship with Sandy. Not that it wouldn’t have been broken up, anyway. Ted moved to Victoria and took Sandy with him, keeping the old Regan homestead for a holiday house and turning over the management of his cattle ranch to a man named Emmett Deverell.

Barry had known how Coreen felt about Ted. Eventually Ted became the best weapon in his arsenal, his favorite way of asserting his power over Coreen by taunting her about the man who didn’t want her. They’d been married just a year when Ted finally accepted Barry’s invitation to visit them in Jacobsville. Coreen hadn’t expected Ted to come, but he had.

By that time, Coreen was more afraid of Barry than she’d ever dreamed she could be. He was impotent and he made intimacy degrading, a disgusting ordeal that made her physically sick. When he drank, which became a regular thing after their marriage, he became even more brutal. He blamed her for his impotence, he blamed her infatuation for Ted and harped on it all the time until finally she stiffened whenever she heard Ted’s name. She tried to leave him several times, but a man of such wealth had his own ways of finding her and dealing with her, and with anyone who tried to help her. In the end she gave up trying, for fear of causing a tragedy. When he turned to other women, it was almost a relief. For a long time, he left her alone and she had peace, although she wondered if he was impotent with his lovers. But he began to taunt her again, after he’d run into Ted at a business conference. And he’d invited Ted to visit them in Jacobsville.

Ted had watched her covertly during that brief visit, as if something puzzled him. She was jumpy and nervous, and when Barry asked her for anything, she almost ran to get it.

“See?” Barry had laughed. “Isn’t she the perfect little homemaker? That’s my girl.”

Ted hadn’t laughed. He’d noticed the harried, hunted expression on Coreen’s face and the pitiful thinness of her body. He’d also noticed the full liquor cabinet and remarked on it, because everyone knew that it was Tina’s house that Barry and Coreen were staying in, and that Tina detested liquor.

“Oh, a swallow of alcohol doesn’t hurt, and Coreen likes her gin, don’t you, honey?” he teased.

Coreen kept her eyes hidden. “Of course,” she lied. He’d already warned her about what would happen if she didn’t go along with anything he said. He’d been even more explicit about the consequences if she so much as looked longingly at Ted. He’d invited his cousin to torment Coreen, and it was working. He was in a better humor than he’d enjoyed in months.

“Get us a drink. What will you have, Ted?”

The older man declined and he didn’t stay long. Ted had never come back to visit after that. Barry met his cousin occasionally and he enjoyed telling Coreen how sorry Ted felt for him. She knew that Barry was telling him lies about her, but she was too afraid to ask what they were.

Her life had become almost meaningless. It didn’t help that her earlier clumsiness had been magnified tenfold. She was forever falling into flowerpots or tripping over throw rugs. Barry made it worse by constantly calling attention to it, chiding her and calling her names. Eventually she didn’t react anymore. Her self-esteem was so low that it no longer seemed important to defend herself. She tried to run away. But he always found her…

He mentioned once how his mother, Tina, had controlled him all his life. Perhaps his weakness stemmed from her dominance and the lack of a father. His drinking grew worse. There were other women, scores of them, and in between he was cruel to Coreen, in bed and out of it. He was no longer discreet with his affairs. But he was less interested in tormenting Coreen as well. Until that card came from Sandy on Coreen’s birthday, the day before the tragic accident that had killed Barry. It had Ted’s signature on it, too, a shocking addition, and Barry had gone crazy at the sight of it. He’d gotten drunk and that night he’d held Coreen down on the sofa with a knife at her throat and threatened to cut her up….

A sudden buzz of conversation brought Coreen back to the present. Shivering from the memory, she focused her eyes on the big oak desk where the lawyer was sitting and realized that he was almost through reading the will.

“That does it, I’m afraid,” he concluded, peering over his small glasses at them. “Everything goes to his mother. The one exception is the stallion he willed to his cousin, Ted Regan. And a legacy of one hundred thousand dollars is to be left to Mrs. Barry Tarleton, under the administration of Ted Regan, to be held in trust for her until she reaches the age of twenty-five. Are there any questions?”

Ted was scowling as he looked at Coreen, but there was no shock or surprise on her face. There was only stiff resignation and a frightening calmness.

Tina got to her feet. She glanced at Coreen coldly. “I’ll give you a little while to get out of the house. Just to stem any further gossip, you understand, not out of any regard. I blame you for what happened to my son. I always will.” She turned and left the room, her expression foreboding.

Coreen didn’t reply. She stared at her hands in her lap. She couldn’t look at Ted. She was homeless, and Ted controlled the only money she had. She could imagine that she’d have to go on her knees to him to get a new pair of stockings. She was going to have to get a job, quick.

“She could have waited until tomorrow,” Sandy muttered to Ted when they were back outside, watching Tina climb into the Lincoln.

“Why did he do that?” Ted asked with open puzzlement. “For God’s sake, he was worth millions! He’s involved me in it, and she’ll have literally nothing for another year, until she turns twenty-five! She’ll even have to ask me for gas money!”

Sandy glanced at him with faint surprise at the concern he’d betrayed for Coreen. “She’ll cope. She knew Barry wasn’t leaving her much. She’s prepared. She said it didn’t matter.”

“Hell, of course it matters! Someone needs to talk some sense into her! She could sue for a widow’s allowance.”

“I doubt that she will. Money was never one of her priorities, or didn’t you know?”

He didn’t reply. His eyes were narrow and introspective.

“She looks odd, did you notice?” Sandy asked worriedly. “Really odd. I hope she isn’t going to do anything foolish.”

“Let’s go,” Ted said as he got in behind the steering wheel, and he sounded bitter. “I want to talk to that lawyer before we go home.”

Sandy frowned as she looked at him. She was worried, but it wasn’t about Coreen’s money problems, or the will. Coreen was hopelessly clumsy since she’d married Barry. She said that she liked to skydive and go up in sailplanes, especially when she was upset, because she said it relaxed her. But she’d related tales of some of the craziest accidents Sandy had ever heard of. Sometimes she thought that Barry had programmed Coreen to be accident-prone. The few times early in their marriage that she’d seen her friend, before Barry had cut her out of Coreen’s life, he’d enjoyed embarrassing Coreen about her clumsiness.

Ted didn’t know about the accidents. Until the funeral, he’d walked away every time Sandy even mentioned Coreen, almost as if it hurt him to talk about her. He had the strangest attitude about her friend. He didn’t care much for women, she knew, but the way he treated Coreen was intriguing. And the most curious thing had been the way he’d looked, holding Coreen in the living room earlier. The expression on his face had been one of torment, not hatred.

She was never going to understand her brother, she thought. The violence of his reaction to Coreen was completely at odds with the tenderness he’d shown her. Perhaps he did care, in some way, and simply didn’t realize it.

Sandy insisted on staying with Coreen overnight, and she offered her best friend the sanctuary of the ranch until she found a place to live. Coreen refused bluntly, put off by even the thought of having to look at Ted over coffee every morning.

Coreen got her friend away the next morning, after a long and sleepless night blaming herself and remembering Ted’s accusation of the day before.

“We’re just getting moved in. Remember, Ted leased the place, along with the cattle farm, and we moved to Victoria about the time you married Barry. Ted’s away a lot now, over at our cattle farm on the outskirts of Jacobsville, that Emmett Deverell and his family operate for him. We’re going to have thoroughbred horses at our place and some nice saddle mounts. We can go riding like we used to. Won’t you come with me? I’ll work it out with Ted,” Sandy pleaded.

“And let Ted drive me into a nervous breakdown?” came the brittle laugh. “No, thanks. He hates me. I didn’t realize how much until yesterday. He would rather it had been me than Barry, didn’t you see? He thinks I’m a murderess…!”

Sandy hugged her shaken friend close. “My brother is an idiot!” she said angrily. “Listen, he’s not as brutal as he seems when you get to know him, really he isn’t.”

“He’s never been anything except cruel to me,” Coreen replied, subdued. She pulled away. “Tell him to do whatever he likes with the trust, I won’t need it. I can take care of myself. Be happy, Sandy. You’ve got a great career with that computer company, even a part interest. Make your mark in the world, and think of me once in a while. Try to remember all the good times, won’t you?”

Sandy felt a chill run up her spine. Coreen had that restless look about her, all over again. There had been two bad accidents over the years because of Coreen’s passion for flying and skydiving: a broken leg and two cracked ribs. Sandy had gone to see her in the hospital and Barry had been always in residence, refusing to let Coreen talk much about how the accidents had happened.

“Please be careful. You really are a little accident-prone,” she began.