Texas rich by Fern Michaels Page B

could speak so glibly and forwardly about sex and pregnancy instead of alluding to it through euphemisms. Something was
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    wrong heie. Agnes was looking like the cat who swallowed ^e canary and he had a feeling those were his tail feathers tickling her chin.
    Moss was about to give Agnes his answer but decided to make her sweat for it. Agnes deserved to sweat. Earher that morning while tinkering with the admiral's compass, Moss had ab-eady made his decision. Certainly he would marry Billie. Aside from the fact that she really was a lovely girl and a surprisingly inventive bed partner, BiUie Ames would be the perfect solution to his problems with Seth. Pap was hot spit on carrying on the Coleman line. Billie and a baby would free him of responsibility and obligation and he could ask for reassignment to the Pacific. Billie and a baby would free him from spending the duration in the Philadelphia Navy Yard pushing papers and arranging golf dates.

"I'll ask Billie to marry me tonight," Moss drawled, unable to contain the wide grin tiiat spread over his features.
    For an instant, Agnes was taken aback. She hadn't contemplated it would be this easy; she'd expected more of a fight from this tall Texan. She had the uncomfortable feeling that instead of her using him. Moss was using her for his own purposes. However, Agnes was not about to look a gift horse in the mouth. Without another word, she pulled the choke and started the car. As she pulled out of the A&P parking lot, Moss reached forward and turned on the radio, tuning in the ongoing drama of Helen Trent and her trials and tribulations. He lounged back in the seat and stretched his long legs, cap pulled forward so the shiny visor shadowed his eyes. His attitude annoyed her, but then she supposed that's the way they did things in Texas. Texas.
    The sky was already darkening when Agnes dropped Moss off at the gates to the navy base. She had driven less than a mile when the cloudburst struck. Cautiously, she steered her car to the side of the road. This was no time to chance an accident, not now, when the golden gates of Texas were ready to open for her in welcome. It took cleverness to lift the Agnes Ameses of this world out of self-sacrifice and privation into the lap of luxury. Coleman luxury. At last she was achieving everything that was meant to be hers since the day she'd entered the world akeady screaming her head off at the injustice of it all. And it had been unjust, she reflected, all of it, fi-om being bom to Maude and Matthew Neibauer, those God-fearing, self-
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    righteous parents, to her sorry marriage to Thomas Ames, made in spite and endured in sour resignation
    Even as a child Agnes wondered if perhaps things would have been different if the Neibauers had not lived on Elm Street in the house Maude had inherited from her mother. Maude had married Matthew, a simple laborer, against her mother's wishes and the whole town knew it. They sniffed through their proper, middle-class noses in disapproval that one of their own should marry beneath her station.
    Maude, always high-strung and nervous, anguished daily over what she imagined were intentional slights. Tearfully, she hung her wash at the crack of dawn before the neighbors could see her and be reminded that she did not have a colored woman to do it. Underwear was hung between sheets so it wouldn't be seen and NoWorry bleach was added by the gallon to the wash water. A white wash was synonymous with virtue, according to Maude. Matthew's dirty plumber's overalls were hung in the basement. No need to remind the neighbors he didn't wear a suit and tie. Life, to Maude, was a series of obstacles never to be conquered.
    It had been Agnes's job from the time she was very young to clean the house each Saturday morning, before ten o'clock, in case company should come. They never did. In the front parlor she dusted her grandmother's brown horsehair furniture, replaced the crocheted doilies on the arms with freshly