Hard-Headed Texan - Candace Camp

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she went to the kitchen door and checked its bolt, then continued around the house, checking each window and doorknob. She had forgotten to set the security system—one of her first acquisitions whenever she moved into a new place—and she punched in the keycode now, watching as the reassuring red light began to blink.

      She went to the window of the living room, which looked out on the front yard. The blinds were closed, as they always were at night, but Antonia lifted the edge and looked out. The moon was full and cast a bright light across the scene, outlining trees and cars. Nothing moved.

      For a long time she stood there, gazing into the darkness, thinking about the past, about how she had gotten here. About Alan.

      Chapter 3

      Marrying Alan Brent had been the first thing Antonia had done in her life that her mother had approved of wholeheartedly. Antonia had never fit into her parents’ country club world, no matter how much her mother had tried to mold her daughter in her own image. The only thing that Antonia enjoyed about her privileged upbringing was the riding. Horses and riding had long been a part of the “aristocratic” Virginia image. She started taking riding lessons when she was seven; riding was even part of the curriculum at the exclusive girls’ school she attended. From the moment Antonia was introduced to the huge creatures, she loved them and had no fear of them.

      However, even her interest in this one aspect of her life was not enough to reassure her mother, for Antonia did not approach riding as a social activity at which one needed to be competent, but as a passion. Moreover, she was interested in everything about the animals, not just in learning the proper way to mount and ride. And the one thing concerning horses in which she had no interest was the local hunt club.

      Before Antonia finished high school, she knew that she wanted to be a veterinarian and specialize in horses. For that reason she campaigned to go to a respected state university instead of the proper ladies’ college that her mother had attended. She had traded making her debut for attending the college she wanted, wading through the tedious balls, parties and teas for the requisite year. After that she had dived headlong into her schoolwork, concentrating on the science courses and academic standing that would get her into veterinary college. It had been her ambition to go to North Carolina State University for her professional training. Then she had met Alan Brent.

      It had been during her junior year of college. He had been a senior, blond and blue-eyed, handsome, yet able to blend in with everyone else. She had met him at a fraternity party to which she had reluctantly gone with the son of one of her mother’s friends. Her date had gotten so thoroughly drunk that he had passed out under the table in the dining room of the fraternity house, and Alan had politely offered to drive her home. She had been amazed and delighted when he called her the next day and asked her out.

      Though she had been told by more than one person that she had blossomed into a beauty, Antonia had never quite gotten rid of the inner feeling that she was the tall gawky wallflower she had been in middle school, when she had spent every tortuous cotillion seated against the wall, waiting for the night to end. Moreover, she was still accustomed to towering over many of the young men she met. Alan, however, was as tall as she, as long as she wore flats, and he was popular, poised and handsome. She was tongue-tied and terribly flattered by his attention, and by their fourth date, Antonia was hopelessly in love with him.

      To her amazement, he seemed to be equally in love with her, and by the end of the year, they were engaged. Antonia’s mother was almost as delighted as Antonia. Alan Brent’s background was as blue-blooded as he appeared to be. The only fly in the ointment, as far as Antonia was concerned, was that Alan was planning to attend Washington and Lee law school. Faced with the prospect of spending the next three years apart from him, she agreed with Alan that the intelligent thing to do was for her to put off her postgraduate plans until he had finished law school. She would get a job while he attended law school, and once he had his degree, they would move to Raleigh so that she could attend vet school.

      She sped up her college plans by going to summer school and taking a heavy load the next semester, enabling her to graduate in December. There had been a December wedding, and she had started to work.

      Within two months, they had gotten into a fight, which had ended with Alan hitting her and walking out. Antonia, astounded and sick with unhappiness, had cried herself to sleep. The next day Alan had returned, full of remorse and promises. It was the stress of law school, he told her, and it would never happen again. Antonia, eager to believe him, agreed to stay.

      That had begun the pattern of their married life. Confused, in love, and steeped in a lifelong habit of guilt for not being the child her parents thought she should be, Antonia had fallen into the classic syndrome of the abused wife. She blamed herself and made excuses for Alan; she hid her bruises and believed each promise that he would change. Living in a new town, she was cut off from her family and friends, and too embarrassed to reveal her problems to any of the people she met at work. They socialized primarily with Alan’s classmates, and even if she had felt close enough to any of his friends’ wives or girlfriends, she was far too loyal to Alan to reveal him in a bad light to those close to him.

      She struggled on, growing more and more isolated, more and more unhappy. Concurrently, Alan’s violence escalated. Gradually, she grew to fear and hate him, but she felt trapped, even after they moved back to Richmond. Not surprisingly, when he graduated, Alan had decreed that it was counterproductive to move to Raleigh for Antonia to go to school. He had gotten a splendid offer from a Richmond firm, and, after all, Antonia did not need to get an advanced degree. He would be earning more than enough money for both of them; she wouldn’t even have to work anymore if she didn’t want to.

      Finally, almost two years after they moved to Richmond, Alan had gotten drunk and beaten Antonia up and shoved her down the stairs, giving her a concussion, several cracked ribs and a broken arm. A sympathetic policewoman, unable to get a statement against Alan from Antonia, had given her the name of a psychologist specializing in domestic violence. Four months later, with the help of the psychologist, Antonia had left Alan and filed for divorce.

      When she left him, Alan had started a program of harassment that included phone calls at all hours of the day and night, some silent, some filled with verbal abuse, and even more disturbing surprise visits in which he screamed and threatened and pounded on her door. It had culminated, finally, in his breaking into her apartment one night and beating her so badly that neighbors had called the police and Antonia had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance.

      As she had lain in the hospital, she had made a vow never to let herself be in a position where such a thing could happen again. When she was released from the hospital, she had gone to her grandmother’s house in the Shenandoah Valley. Her grandmother, a faintly eccentric woman who always seemed a trifle surprised that she had produced a son as conservative as Antonia’s father, took Antonia in, informing her somewhat gleefully that she had exchanged free rent for her tenant in the cabin up the road from hers in exchange for his protecting her granddaughter. The tenant, a Vietnam vet, had agreed to patrol the road and house after dark; it was, her grandmother pointed out, a great deal for him, as he had trouble sleeping, anyway. The thought of a stranger with a gun roaming around outside in the dark unsettled Antonia at first, but once she had met the quiet, solid man, she had liked him as much as her grandmother did and had been able to get a good night’s sleep for the first time since she had gone to the hospital.

      While she was recuperating in the mountains, she had applied to Texas A&M veterinary school. She was determined now to have the life she had always wanted, the life interrupted by Alan. North Carolina State, she decided, was too close, and it was somewhere Alan might guess she would go. Texas was far away and not a place where Alan would think of her going. He, like her parents, would assume that she would want to stay on the Eastern Seaboard.

      Her grandmother had generously offered to pay for her schooling, and in the fall Antonia had moved to Texas. She had not even told her parents where she was moving, and it was some months before she contacted them in any way except through her grandmother. Finally the nightmares and fears had receded enough that she had told her parents of her whereabouts, but only after their promise to tell no one.

      She

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