“Hello,” Travis said quietly to the little girl. “What’s your name?”
“Jennifer Stanford. Who are you?”
Even before she spoke, Travis had an idea of who she was. There was a look about her of his younger brother, and the arch of her eyebrows was very like their mother’s. “Is your mother’s name Regan?”
Seriously, the child nodded.
Sitting up on the bed, pulling the quilt across his lower half, Travis was also serious. “What would you say if I were your father?”
Jennifer traced a pattern on the bedspread. “I might like it. Are you my father?”
“I think it would be safe to say I am.”
“Are you going to live with us?”
“I was planning for you to live with me. If you were to come sit by me I could tell you all about where I live. Last year I bought four ponies just the right size for my daughter.”
“You’d let me ride a pony?”
“It would be yours to care for, to ride, and to do whatever you wanted with it.”
After just a moment’s hesitation, Jennifer climbed onto the bed beside her father, far away at first, but as Travis’s storytelling increased, soon she was sitting in his lap.
And that is how Regan found them, cuddled together, fascinated by each other. It was a charming picture.
As soon as Jennifer saw her mother, she started bouncing on the bed with glee. “This is my daddy, and we’re going to go live with him, and he has a pony for me and pigs and chickens and a treehouse and a swimming pond, and we can go fishing and everything!”
After one quick look at Travis, Regan held out her arms for her daughter. “Brandy has supper ready for you in the kitchen.”
“Can Daddy come too?”
“We need to talk,” Regan said sternly. “He’ll see you later—that is, if you eat what Brandy gives you.”
“I will,” Jennifer promised, waving to her father before scampering out the door.
“She’s a beauty,” Travis said. “I couldn’t be prouder….” He stopped when Regan turned to look at him in fury. “Did I do something?”
“Did you do something?” she mocked, trying to control her temper. “How dare you tell my daughter we’re going to live with you!”
“But of course you’ll return now that I’ve found you. It just took me a while, that’s all.”
“Did it ever occur to you that I’ve always known where you were?” she fumed. “At any time that I wanted, I could have returned to you and that monstrosity of a plantation of yours.”
“Regan,” Travis said, his voice low. “I don’t understand why you left, but I can tell you that you and my daughter are returning home with me.”
“Right there is why I left,” she said. “From the moment I met you you’ve told me what to do and how to do it. I wanted to stay in England, but you wanted me to come to America, so I came to America. You initiated a wedding ceremony without even asking me if I wanted to marry you. And then at that plantation of yours! I was left in charge of a hundred people who did everything they could to defy my authority. And all the while you were…out chasing horses with your dear Margo.”
At the last, Travis smiled. “Jealousy, was that why you left me?”
Regan threw up her hands in despair. “Haven’t you heard anything I’ve said? I don’t want you to run my life, or Jennifer’s. I don’t want her growing up and being told when to do something and how to do it. I want her to learn to make her own decisions.”
“When have I ever stopped you from making decisions? I gave you half a plantation of decisions to make, and I never interfered.”
“But I didn’t know how to make them. Can’t you understand? I was so afraid, in a new country around strangers who constantly told me I didn’t know how to do anything. I was afraid!”
Travis’s eyes were twinkling. “From what I’ve heard, you’ve done very well here. You didn’t seem to be afraid of Americans here, so why were you there? I admit I have a fairly harsh group of judges working for me, but if you did it here, why couldn’t you have done it then?”
“I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “Here I had to do something or starve. At your place I could have stayed in my room and never come out.”