Terms of Surrender by Janet Dailey

Author:Janet Dailey [Dailey, Janet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781451639858
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 2011-02-01T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

While Angie made one last check of the motel room to make certain she hadn’t left anything, Deke carried her belongings outside. A few minutes later, she followed him. In the parking lot, she hesitated when she saw him stowing her things in the trunk of his car.

“Is that everything?” At her nod, he pushed the trunk lid shut and walked around to the driver’s door. He noticed her hovering uncertainly and said, “We’re taking my car.”

“What about mine?” Angie frowned, because Deke still hadn’t told her where they were going. “I can’t leave it here.”

“I’ll have one of my men pick it up,” he replied, and he opened the door on the driver’s side to slide behind the wheel.

After another uneasy glance at her car, Angie walked to the passenger side of his car and climbed in beside him. His gray glance touched her briefly, telling her no secrets. Then he was starting the car and driving away from the motel. It was moments like these when Deke was silent and uncommunicative that made Angie uneasy with him. This was when she doubted that she knew him at all.

With sidelong looks, she studied him. The cut of his profile was strong and forceful—the clean line of his jaw and the forward thrust of his chin. His cheeks were tanned lean and hard, the skin stretching tautly over his cheekbones and grooves etched at the corners of his mouth. A hat covered the virile thickness of his dark hair and shaded those impenetrable gray eyes. Her glance strayed to his mouth, so lacking in softness yet so capable of passion. Like his hands—she thought, and studied the work-roughened hands on the wheel. They were a man’s hands, firm in their grip and always in control whether it was controlling this car at fast speeds or controlling her.

There was no conversation as Deke pointed the car south of Goliad. This was the way he’d been after Angie became pregnant seven years ago and they’d married. He had never talked to her, not about things that mattered. He had never confided his feelings to her, nor asked how she felt. When Angie had tried to express her thoughts to him, Deke had usually brushed them aside with the phrase that had become meaningless from repetition—“We’ll work it out.” That’s when Angie had come up with her own solution for the situation that had become impossible.

Had anything changed?

Sighing inwardly, Angie turned her gaze out the window. The countryside was rough and broken, thick with scrub brush and mesquite and creased with dry washbeds. The autumn grass was tall and pale brown, cured by a Texas sun. Occasionally, Angie had glimpses of cattle lazing in the shade of live oaks.

The closer they got toward the Gulf Coast, the terrain changed into a mixture of marshy pastures and cotton fields. They passed a smattering of natural gas wells and the grasshopper-headed pumps of an oil well or two. Live oak trees began to dominate the landscape.

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