Regan's Pride Read Online Free PDF Page B

frightened, and when Ted came by the house to pay his respects, Barry wouldn’t let him near her. Ted left in a furious mood and Barry convinced Coreen that his cousin hadn’t wanted to speak to her, anyway.
    Barry was beside her every minute at the funeral, keeping her away from Ted’s suspicious, concerned gaze and making sure he had not a minute alone with her. The same day, he presented her with a marriage license and coaxed her into taking a blood test.
    Ted left on a European business trip just after he refused Barry’s invitation to be best man at the wedding. Ted’s face when Barry made the announcement was indescribable. He looked at Coreen with eyes so terrible that she trembled and dropped her own. He strode out without a word to her and got on a plane the same day. It was confirmation, if Coreen needed it, that Ted didn’t care what she did with her life as long as it didn’t involve him. She might as well marry Barry as anyone, she decided, since she couldn’t have the one man she loved.
    But she was naive about the demands of marriage, and especially about the man Barry really was behindhis social mask. Coreen lived in agony after her marriage. Barry knew nothing of tenderness and he was incapable of any normal method of satisfaction in bed. He had abnormal ways of fulfillment that hurt her and his cruelty wore away her confidence and her self-esteem until she became clumsy and withdrawn. Ted didn’t come near them and Sandy’s invitations were ignored by Barry. He all but broke up her friendship with Sandy. Not that it wouldn’t have been broken up, anyway. Ted moved to Victoria and took Sandy with him, keeping the old Regan homestead for a holiday house and turning over the management of his cattle ranch to a man named Emmett Deverell.
    Barry had known how Coreen felt about Ted. Eventually Ted became the best weapon in his arsenal, his favorite way of asserting his power over Coreen by taunting her about the man who didn’t want her. They’d been married just a year when Ted finally accepted Barry’s invitation to visit them in Jacobsville. Coreen hadn’t expected Ted to come, but he had.
    By that time, Coreen was more afraid of Barry than she’d ever dreamed she could be. He was impotent and he made intimacy degrading, a disgusting ordeal that made her physically sick. When he drank, which became a regular thing after their marriage, he became even more brutal. He blamed her for his impotence, he blamed her infatuation for Ted and harped on it all the time until finally she stiffened whenever she heard Ted’s name. She tried to leave him several times, but a man of such wealth had his own ways of finding her and dealing with her, and with anyone who tried to help her. In the end she gave up trying, for fear of causing a tragedy. When he turned to other women, it was almosta relief. For a long time, he left her alone and she had peace, although she wondered if he was impotent with his lovers. But he began to taunt her again, after he’d run into Ted at a business conference. And he’d invited Ted to visit them in Jacobsville.
    Ted had watched her covertly during that brief visit, as if something puzzled him. She was jumpy and nervous, and when Barry asked her for anything, she almost ran to get it.
    â€œSee?” Barry had laughed. “Isn’t she the perfect little homemaker? That’s my girl.”
    Ted hadn’t laughed. He’d noticed the harried, hunted expression on Coreen’s face and the pitiful thinness of her body. He’d also noticed the full liquor cabinet and remarked on it, because everyone knew that it was Tina’s house that Barry and Coreen were staying in, and that Tina detested liquor.
    â€œOh, a swallow of alcohol doesn’t hurt, and Coreen likes her gin, don’t you, honey?” he teased.
    Coreen kept her eyes hidden. “Of course,” she lied. He’d already warned her