She stared at me for a moment, then began to laugh.
"Well, I'll be damned," she said. "All my life I wanted him to pay some kind of attention to me and now, when I don't need him any more, he suddenly wants to play daddy."
"Don't need him any more?" She nodded.
"Not any more. Ever," she said slowly. She came off the bed and laid her head against my chest. Her voice was a childlike whisper of confidence. "Not now that I have you. You're everything to me – father, brother, lover."
I stroked her soft brown hair slowly.
Suddenly, a surge of sympathy came up inside me. I knew how alone you could be when you were nineteen. Her eyes were closed and there were faintly blue weary hollows in the soft white flesh beneath them.
I pressed my lips lightly to her forehead.
"Come to bed, child," I said gently. "It's almost morning."
She was asleep in a moment, her head resting on my shoulder, her neck in the crook of my arm.
For a long time, I couldn't fall asleep. I lay there looking down at her quiet face as the sun came up and light spilled into the room.
Damn Amos Winthrop! Damn Jonas Cord!
I cursed all men who were too busy and self-centered to be fathers to their children.
I began to feel weariness seep through me. Half asleep, I felt her move beside me and the warmth of her long, graceful body flowed down along my side.
Then sleep came. The dark, starless night of wonderful sleep.
We were married the next evening at the Little Chapel in Reno.
4.
I SAW THE GLEAMING PHOSPHORESCENCE MOVING in the water and flicked the fly gaily across the stream just over the trout.
The instinct came up in me. I knew I had him.
Everything was right. The water, the flickering shadows from the trees lining the bank, the bottle-blue, green and red tail of the fly at the end of my line.
Another moment and the bastard would strike.
I set myself when I heard Monica's voice from the bank behind me.
"Jonas!"
Her voice shattered the stillness and the trout dived for the bottom of the stream. The fly began to drag and before I turned around, I knew the honeymoon was over.
"What is it?" I growled.
She stood there in a pair of shorts, her knees red and her nose peeling.
"There's a telephone call for you. From Los Angeles."
"Who?"
"I don't know," she answered. "It's a woman. She didn't give her name."
I looked back at the stream.
There were no lights in the water. The fish were gone. That was the end of it. The fishing was over for the day. I started toward the bank.
"Tell her to hold on," I said. "I’ll be up there in a minute."
She nodded and started back to the cabin. I began to reel in the line.
I wondered who could be calling me.
Not many people knew about the cabin in the hills.
When I was a kid, I used to come up here with Nevada. My father always intended to come along but he never did make it. I came out of the stream and trudged up the path.
It was late in the afternoon and the evening sounds were just beginning. Through the trees I could hear the crickets beginning their song.
I laid the rod alongside the outside wall of the cabin and went inside.
Monica was sitting in a chair near the telephone, turning the pages of a magazine.
I picked up the phone.
"Hello."
"Mr. Cord?"
"Yes."
"Just a moment," the operator sang. "Los Angeles, your party is on the wire."
I heard a click, then a familiar voice.
"Jonas?"
"Rina?"
"Yes," she said. "I've been trying to get you for three days. Nobody would tell me where you were, then I thought of the cabin."
"Great," I said, looking over the telephone at Monica.
She was looking down at the magazine but I knew she was listening.
"By the way," Rina said in that low, husky voice. "Congratulations. I hope you'll be very happy.