“Where are you going?” she demanded. “Travis! We have to get the money!”
He paused long enough to touch her cheek. “Margo has Jennifer,” he said as he continued saddling the horse. “She knew we’d find the ink, and she knows I’ll come after her. That’s what she really wants. I don’t believe she’ll harm Jennifer.”
“Don’t believe! Your whore has taken my daughter and—.”
He put his finger to her lips. “She is my daughter too, and if I have to give every acre I own to Margo, I’ll get Jennifer back safely. Now I want you to stay here because I can handle this better alone.” He swung onto the horse.
“I’m just supposed to stay here and wait? And how do you know for sure where Margo is?”
“She always goes home,” he said grimly. “She always goes to where she can be near the memory of that damned father of hers.”
With that he reined away, applied a kick to the horse’s side, and disappeared in a cloud of dust.
Chapter 21
IT WAS NIGHT, ALMOST DAWN THREE DAYS LATER, WHEN Travis jerked his horse to a halt before Margo’s door. It had taken several horses to carry him all the way at the pace he’d demanded of them.
Jumping down, he slammed into her house, knowing exactly where she’d be—in the library, sitting under the portrait of her father.
“It took you a little longer than I expected,” she said cheerfully as she greeted Travis. Her red hair was a mass of tangles about her shoulders, and there was a dark stain on her dressing gown.
“Where is she?”
“Oh, she’s safe,” Margo laughed, holding up an empty whiskey glass. “Go and see for yourself. I rarely harm children. Then come back and join me for a drink.”
Travis took the stairs two at a time. At one point in his life he’d been a frequent visitor to the Jenkins house, and he knew his way around well. Now, searching for his daughter, he took no notice of the bare places on the walls where once a portrait had hung or an empty table where an ornament no longer stood.
He found Jennifer asleep in the bed he’d used when he was a boy. When he picked her up she opened her eyes, smiled, said “Daddy,” and went back to sleep. She and Margo must have traveled all night, as the dust on her face and clothes showed.
Carefully, he put her back down in the bed, kissed her, and went downstairs. It was time he and Margo talked.
Margo didn’t even look up as he crossed the room and poured himself a glass of port. “Why?” she whispered. “Why didn’t you marry me? After all those years we spent together. We rode together, swam naked together, made love. I always thought, and Daddy always thought—.”
Travis’s explosion cut her off. “That’s why!” he shouted. “That goddamned father of yours. There are only two people you ever loved: yourself and Ezra Jenkins.”
He paused to raise his glass in salute to the portrait over the fireplace. “You never saw it, but your father was the meanest, cheapest liar ever created. He’d steal pennies from a slave child. I never cared much what he did, but every day I could see you becoming more like him. Remember when you started charging the weavers for their broken shuttles?”
Margo looked up, a desperate expression on her face. “He wasn’t like that. He was good and kind….”
Travis’s snort stopped her. “He was good to you and no one else.”
“And I would have been good to you,” Margo said, pleading.
“No!” Travis snapped. “You would have hated me because I didn’t cheat and steal from everybody around me. You would have seen that as weakness on my part.”
Margo kept her eyes on her drink. “But why her? Why a skinny little, washed-out English gutter rat? She couldn’t even make a cup of tea.”
“You know she’s no gutter rat, not when you demand fifty thousand dollars ransom of her.” Travis’s eyes began to glaze over as he thought back to that time in England. “You should have seen her when I first saw her—dirty, scared, wearing a
torn and ragged nightgown. But talking like the highest-born English lady. Every word, every syllable was so precise. Even crying, she talks like that.”
“You married her because of her damned uppity accent?” Margo spat angrily.
Travis smiled in a distant way. “I married her because of the way she looks at me. She makes me feel ten, no, twenty feet tall. I can do anything when she’s around. And watching her grow has been a joy. She’s changed herself from a frightened little girl into a woman.” His smile broadened. “And she’s all mine.”
Margo’s empty glass flew across the room, shattering on the wall behind Travis’s head. “Do you think I’m going to sit here and listen to your ravings about another woman?”
Travis’s face turned hard. “You don’t have to listen to me at all. I’m going upstairs to get my daughter and take her home.” At the foot of the stairs he turned back toward her. “I know you well. I know it’s because of what your father taught you that you tried this treacherous way of getting what you wanted. Because Jennifer is unharmed, I’m not pressing charges this time. But if you ever again….”