Promises to Keep by Char Chaffin Page B

dishtowel. “Mind those slick roads, Travis. And don’t forget dinner tomorrow night, all right? Mark got home yesterday, and he says he wants to talk to you.” She laughed when Travis’s face went white.
    “Uh-oh. My big, bad Air Force brother wants to ‘talk’ with my boyfriend,” Annie chuckled. “Maybe we should shop for a weapon while we’re in Charlottesville.”
    “Annie, don’t tease him.” Her mama ruffled Travis’s hair and tugged on the lock that always seemed to curl over one eye. “I doubt Travis will need to arm himself.” Her hand cupped his face before she stepped back toward the kitchen. “Not too late, you two. No speeding and fancy driving, you hear?”
    Travis was still pale from the mention of Mark. Her oldest brother loved to intimidate the younger kids, and Travis had gotten his share over the years. She heard him swallow with an audible gulp as he answered her mama. “Yes, ma’am. I mean, no, ma’am.” He grabbed Annie’s hand and pulled her out the door. She didn’t stop giggling until he shoved her into the front seat of his car.
     
    Standing in the middle of the study, her arms wrapped protectively across her chest, Ruth’s bitterness showed on her pinched, angry face.
    “You have no right to dictate to me when it comes to raising our son. No right to tell me what I can’t take away from him if he fails to do as he’s told and refuses to obey. He’s a child, Ronald. You have let him control his own life for far too long. You rewarded him when he should have been punished. You gave him the lofty idea he can choose his own path, even though that path will be destructive to this family. So don’t,” Ruth’s breath hitched in her throat, “don’t stand there and tell me I have no right to take away what our son sees fit to destroy.”
    Ronald fought the urge to yank his hair out in frustration. “Ruth, listen to yourself. Our son is not some spawn of Satan, trying to rip apart the Quincy name and annihilate the entire town while he’s at it. And he’s not a child. Open up your eyes and see. See what kind of man our boy will become. I’m proud of everything he’s accomplished so early in his life, proud of where he’s going.”
    Lord, he was tired. It was almost an effort to sit upright, but he forced his spine to stiffen, and gripped the arms of his wheelchair. He had to make her see reason. Before she tried to do something she’d forever regret.
    Finally, he said, “Ruth, there isn’t a thing you can do to oust our son from the family will. It’s set up much the same as it was when I was a boy, except Travis’s name replaced mine in the wording as my sole heir. You know this. I explained it, years ago.”
    “What if I told the Board of Trustees you weren’t in full possession of your faculties, Ronald?” Her voice lowered, turned sly. She looked at him with glittering eyes. “You said yourself Travis is old enough to choose his own future and mate. What if the board got wind of the scandal surrounding the girl our son has chosen? You think they’d wax sentimental over the course of true love, versus the kind of damage a merger with the Turner family would instigate?”
    He could only regard her with crushing disappointment. “You’d reveal your past after years of secrecy, all you went through, just to spite the Turner family and make the board doubt my ability to run the legacy?”
    It had come to this. To bend their son to her will, she’d rip her privacy wide open to the opinions and gossip of a typical small town and its small town mentality, ruin the name of a good family, break her son’s heart. All in an attempt to control not only Travis’s life, but Annie’s, too. And, in an indirect way, Catherine Cabot’s as well, for she’d never stopped trying to force a match between Trav and Catherine.
    It was too much. It had to stop.
    His chest ached, heart sore from the confrontation and the fury of what had been spoken in this room, this