Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [175]
Annie looked compassionately at her. “Let’s just wait and see, love, shall we?” she said.
They spent the next few days looking at hotels for Annie and she decided the French had their own style and she declined to compete, and then they took the train to Bordeaux. They visited half a dozen châteaux and tasted a hundred wines and bought new vines for Francie’s ranch, but still she couldn’t forget him, and she hurried Annie back to Cherbourg and onto a liner to New York a week earlier than they had planned.
In San Francisco she hung all her beautiful Paris dresses in the closet and waited for him to call. A week passed, then two. She told herself she wouldn’t call him, she must not. After three weeks she steeled herself to the fact that it was over and left, heartbroken, for the ranch.
The weather was cold and windy but the sky was a clear hard blue. She put on her riding britches and flannel checkered shirt and flung an old navy wool sweater over her shoulders. She saddled up her favorite Appaloosa and rode over the hills with the cold wind tugging at her hair and stinging her cheeks, but she welcomed it—anything to take away the ache of new loneliness.
Hours later she rode the tired mare slowly back again, wishing she had never met Buck Wingate. And then she turned into the courtyard and there he was.
She was off the horse and in his arms in an instant. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said, her voice muffled against his shoulder.
“You’re wrong,” he said. “This is where I belong.” He held her at arm’s length, looking at her. “You won’t send me away again?”
She shook her head. “I can’t. But I’ll never take you away from your wife, Buck. Or your career. I’ll just be happy to see you, whenever we can.”
And she thought as he held her close, that for all the Mandarin’s teaching, she was still only a weak and helpless woman when it came to love.
CHAPTER 37
1930
Maryanne Wingate was a busy woman, she was rich and spoiled and used to having things her own way, but she wasn’t a fool. She suspected Buck was having an affair and at first she said nothing, supposing it would pass, as these things did. Not that she was worried: she told herself men needed the sort of women they had affairs with, women they paid for in small trinkets or cold hard cash, not her sort of woman. And she knew the Bucks of the world never married women like that. Her position as his wife was inviolate, but as months passed and the weekends away began to grow more frequent and the door between their bedrooms remained firmly shut, she began to get frightened. A casual affair was one thing, but a major indiscretion would be a disaster.
She thought angrily of all the time and effort she had put into furthering his career and decided she was going to get to the bottom of things. She called a very discreet detective agency and had her husband followed. She was shocked at the speed with which she received her answer—it seemed Buck hardly bothered to cover his tracks. And she was even more shocked when she found out the name of her rival.
She fumed silently for days, pacing like a maddened panther around her room. Buck was away again—at the ranch with her. He’d been going there for over a year now and she thanked God that at least the ranch was at the back of beyond and they weren’t flaunting their relationship in front of all San Francisco. She remembered seeing Francie Harrison at that party and she thought angrily that she was beautiful, and with a reputation like hers she wasn’t surprised Buck had fallen for her. But now if she wasn’t to lose everything she had worked for, she had to do something about it.
Francie lived for their weekends at the ranch, it was their home—hers and Buck’s: her room was now their room, his clothes hung in her closet and his riding boots stood in the hallway next to hers. His nervous black Thoroughbred shared the stables with her Appaloosa mare, his books filled her