Home at Rose Cottage (20 page)

Rick chuckled. “Sweetheart, I may be a totally clueless, dense male, but even I can see the contradiction in that.”

So could Maggie, but she refused to back down. She just dug the hole a little deeper. “I was hoping to spare your feelings. I was hoping to avoid an awkward, uncomfortable scene exactly like this. I figured by the time I got back, you would have moved on.”

“To what?”

“Some other conquest.”

He stared at her for what seemed like an eternity, clearly mulling that over with more attention than he’d given her earlier claim. “
That’s
what you’re scared about, isn’t it?” he said slowly, as if understanding were finally dawning. “You think I’ll find someone else, so you’re ending things before I can. And you’re here because you didn’t trust yourself to stick to your guns if you saw me long enough to tell me face-to-face.”

“Don’t be absurd,” she said, but without much gumption. It was hard to argue with the truth. She gave him what she hoped was a quelling look. “I’m not going to
stand here and argue with you all night long. I gave you my answer. Now go.”

He leveled her a long, steady, disbelieving look at her, then finally nodded. “Okay, I’ll go,” he said at last.

Just when Maggie was about to breathe a sigh of relief, though, he winked at her.

“See you first thing in the morning,” he said.

“What?”

“You’ve had your say,” he explained patiently. “In the morning, I’ll have mine.”

Even as Maggie was plotting how far away she could be by dawn, he added, “And don’t even think about taking off again. I think it’s evident that if I could find you here, I can find you anywhere, unless you cut all ties with your family.”

So Ashley had blabbed, after all. Maggie had guessed as much the instant Rick appeared. “Maybe I won’t tell Ashley where I’ve gone next time,” she muttered with new resolve. “She seems to be unreliable.”

“Don’t be too hard on her. She has your best interests at heart,” Rick said.

“Yours maybe. Not mine,” she said sourly.

He grinned. “I’m beginning to think they could be the same thing.”

He was gone before she could come up with any sort of quick rebuttal to that. Maggie stared after him as he drove away. Well, hell.

As soon as he was out of sight, she marched inside and called her big sister.

“You traitor!” she blurted as soon as Ashley picked up.

“What did I do?”

“As if you didn’t know.”

“I don’t know,” Ashley said, sounding amazingly sincere.

“Rick just left here,” Maggie told her. “Do you get it now?”

Ashley gasped. “How on earth did he find you?”

“Only one way I can think of,” Maggie said.

“I swear I didn’t tell him where you were,” Ashley insisted.

Maggie’s irritation began to fade. Ashley would never lie so blatantly. “You didn’t just happen to leave a little note on your desk where he could see it?”

“No,” her sister said flatly. “It’s interesting, though.”

“What is?”

“That he was determined enough to find you that he didn’t stop looking after he ran into a dead end with me.”

“That’s not interesting. It’s annoying,” Maggie retorted. He had all but said Ashley had blabbed, hadn’t he? Was that another lie? She went over his words carefully and realized that he’d talked about cutting ties with her family, not just her sister.

“How do you suppose he found you?” Ashley asked, her tone thoughtful. “I suppose if he tracked me down, he could have found Jo.”

She’d obviously seized on the same possibility that had just occurred to Maggie.

“Jo doesn’t even know I’m down here,” Maggie said, then sighed. “Or does she?”

“Of course she does. She’s your sister.”

“And Mom and Pop?”

“I had to tell them something,” Ashley said defensively. “They would have worried.”

“I don’t suppose you published a notice in the Boston papers, did you?”

“That’s insulting. I’m hanging up now,” Ashley replied.

“Sure. Hang up when the heat’s getting a little too hot for you,” Maggie said bitterly.

“Do you really want to belabor the whole issue of who told what to whom?” Ashley asked. “Shouldn’t you be concentrating on figuring out what to do now that Rick has found you?”

“Aside from taking off for parts unknown, I don’t have a clue,” Maggie admitted. “Any ideas?”

“Stay put and let this play itself out,” her sister suggested. “The man did go to an awful lot of trouble to find you. That must mean something.”

“He likes a challenge,” Maggie guessed.

“What if it’s more than that?”

“It isn’t.”

“How can you know that?” Ashley asked reasonably. “Take a chance. That’s my advice.”

“As if I’d take relationship advice from a workaholic who hasn’t had a date in two years.”

“I date,” Ashley replied indignantly.

“No, you have meetings with other lawyers who happen to be men. It’s not the same thing.”

“I’m saying goodbye now.”

Maggie chuckled. “Goodbye. Love you.”

“You, too, brat.”

After she’d hung up, Maggie stared at the phone and debated calling her folks or her youngest sister to see who was responsible for Rick turning up here. Why bother, though? That particular horse was out of the barn. Rick was here, and now she needed to spend all of her energy devising some scheme to keep him out of her bed.

And judging from the way her pulse had been scrambling and her willpower had been weakening, it had better be one heck of a scheme.

O
n some level Rick knew he probably should have turned around and driven straight back to Boston. In fact, his well-honed instincts for self-preservation were all but screaming for him to do precisely that. In Boston there were plenty of women who would be eager for his company, rather than one prickly woman who claimed to want nothing to do with him.

But he didn’t want those other women. It seemed he wanted Maggie D’Angelo, in all probability simply because he couldn’t have her. That had to be it, he concluded. Every guy wanted what he couldn’t have. He was no different from any other man on that score. He loved a challenge, and too few women over the years had offered him one.

Lying in an antique brass bed on a feather mattress in a waterfront Victorian-style bed-and-breakfast later that night, he indulged in a rare bit of introspection, contemplating the perversity of his decision to stay here and convince Maggie that she wanted him.

What happened when he pulled it off? And he
would
pull it off. It wasn’t as if he wanted anything permanent. He never had before, and he couldn’t think of anything
that had changed. He still liked answering to no one. He liked his space. And he really, really liked the fact that no woman ever got close enough to break his heart.

Did that mean this was nothing more than a game with him? The proverbial thrill of the chase? A tiny little flicker of conscience warned Rick that he shouldn’t be playing this game, not with Maggie, not unless he intended to follow through.

But follow through to what? A rollicking affair? It was pretty clear she didn’t want that. Otherwise she would have welcomed him with open arms and one of her mind-blowing kisses back there at her front door. A rollicking affair was precisely what she’d run away from.

That brought him to marriage. Not that Maggie had ever made any noises around him about wanting marriage, but she was the kind of woman who would eventually want happily-ever-after. He’d gotten that early on. She came from a large and loving family. He’d only met Ashley and spoken to their mother on the phone, but Maggie talked about all of them, probably even more than she realized. She seemed to take particular delight in her parents’ long and loving marriage and her sister Melanie’s recent whirlwind courtship and wedding. It would be perfectly natural for her to want the same thing for herself one day. Maybe that was why she’d kicked him out. Maybe she’d recognized that he was a bad bet for that kind of permanent relationship.

He tried to imagine himself in the role of devoted husband, tried to envision being tied down to one woman, to having kids underfoot. He’d been footloose for a long time. His folks had been divorced when he was only ten, and after that, his dad was gone and his mom had lost interest in parenting, turning to booze to drown her sorrows. Rick had pretty much raised himself. He knew a
whole lot about growing up independent, but he didn’t know beans about what it took to keep a family happy, except maybe sticking around. He wasn’t sure that was a gene he possessed.

The Flannery men apparently had a long history of being rogues and scoundrels, going all the way back to Ireland. Rick’s mother had drunkenly recited all the tales to him on numerous occasions to explain why his father was no longer around. She’d said it was history repeating itself.

Given all that, his decision to stay put and pursue Maggie made no sense. But after listening all night to his conscience asking the hard questions—and even when he couldn’t come up with any credible answers—Rick found himself picking up a couple of lattes first thing in the morning. Filled with a familiar anticipation, he headed for that quaint little cottage on the bay for another encounter with the stubborn, sexy woman who seemed dead set on tying him into knots.

He told himself he didn’t need to have a long-range plan. Living in the moment had served him well enough for years. One step at a time, that was the key.

Today his goal was merely to get inside the door. Maybe by tomorrow he’d start worrying about pinning down why Maggie was really running so scared around him and what she really expected from him. Then, if he didn’t like
those
answers, he could head for the hills.

She was going to go to bed with him. Maggie knew it the instant Rick showed up looking all rumpled and sexy with two lattes in hand. She’d spent the whole night telling herself she was right to send him away, that they couldn’t possibly have any sort of future because she wasn’t cut out to compete with women who made her feel like a whale,
even if she was a perfectly respectable size ten instead of a two. She was not that masochistic. She reminded herself that she wanted a whole lot more from a relationship than explosive passion.

But even as she’d been congratulating herself on her good sense, a part of her had been yearning for the man’s touch. Another part—her libido, no doubt—had been bargaining with her brain, telling it that if Rick actually came back again, all bets were off. Explosive passion didn’t come along all that often. A woman would have to be an idiot to turn her back on it, at least while she was off on vacation. Back in Boston, she’d have to face facts, not now.

After all, she justified, Rick would only be here a few days at most. How much more complicated could things get in a few days?

She tried to keep all of that off her face when she accepted the cup of coffee with a perfectly uncomplicated, “Thanks.”

“Expecting me?” Rick asked.

“Not really. I thought you’d wake up and think twice about what you’re doing here.”

“I did.”

“And?”

“I came down here to see you.”

“No, you came to annoy me,” she insisted. “If I’d asked you to go away with me, you would have turned me down flat, trumping up some excuse or another. Face it, Flannery, you came because I told you not to.”

“No, I came in spite of that,” he corrected. “You should know by now that I’m not that easy to shake.”

“Neither is a stalker. It’s not a recommendation.”

He looked momentarily nonplussed. “Please tell me you don’t think that’s what I’m doing,” he said.

She sighed. “No, of course not.” After all, who would be obsessed with her? Men were infatuated with her. Then they weren’t. That was the cycle she expected. She met Rick’s gaze. “But I honestly don’t get why you came all this way when I’d made it clear on the phone that I didn’t want you to. Is it some sort of macho pride thing?”

“Do we have to discuss this right here on the front porch?” Rick asked.

“It’s not as if there are a lot of passersby to overhear,” she told him.

He held up the bag. “But I brought lattes and freshly baked bear claws. I thought we could sit down and have a civilized chat.”

“You really just want to talk?” she asked skeptically. That would be a first. They’d done precious little talking, at least not about anything meaningful, during their whirlwind romance.

“For now,” he admitted with one of the lopsided grins that never failed to charm her.

Maggie debated with herself, then stepped past him. “We’ll go out back. It’s pleasant down by the water this time of day. That’s where I always have my morning coffee.”

His grin spread, and there was no mistaking the smug ego behind it.

“What?” she demanded, determinedly leading the way to the backyard swing…and at least the illusion of safety.

“Still scared that if you let me inside, you won’t want me to leave?” Rick asked.

She returned his gaze. “Yes,” she admitted candidly.

He nodded. “The truth at last.”

“You only recognize it as truth because it flatters you.”

“None of this is about ego, Maggie.”

“Then what is it about?” she asked, as she sat on the double swing and curled one leg under her, leaving plenty of room for Rick beside her. The sun glistened on the Chesapeake Bay, which was already alive with watermen pulling in crab pots and reeling in rockfish. There was a tangy scent of salt in the air, mingling with the sweet fragrance of her grandmother’s roses, now back in bloom after years of neglect.

“It’s about meeting someone who fascinates me and wanting to spend more time with her,” he said simply. “I thought we’d gotten my motives out of the way a couple of weeks ago. I was candid with you from that first night.”

All Maggie remembered from that night was the unexpected shock of Rick’s mouth on hers, the unexpected surge of need that had swept over her when he’d touched her. If they’d talked at all, it had gotten lost in a haze of heat and passion.

“So you explained the rules and gave yourself an out, in case I got any ideas,” she surmised. “Bully for you.”

“It wasn’t an out,” he corrected. “I was being honest.”

“And then you disappeared,” she reminded him, thinking about how much it had hurt when the phone hadn’t rung and how furious she’d been with herself that she’d cared. He’d told her exactly who he was. She hadn’t wanted to believe it.

He stared at her, obviously stunned. “Disappeared? I didn’t go anywhere.”

“I didn’t mean it literally. You stopped calling.”

“Is
that
what has you all worked up?” he asked incredulously. “I didn’t call for a few days, so you think I went off with some other woman?”

Maggie ignored the indignation in his voice. She leveled a look straight into his eyes. The truth would be there, if not in his words. “Did you?”

“No, dammit! I spent six solid days and nights in my studio, finishing up photo shoots and working in the darkroom, so I could get ahead and have some free time to spend with you. You told me you’d have a break once the August issue was wrapped up, so I wanted to be free when you were.”

Maggie was beginning to feel foolish. “You couldn’t call and explain that?” she muttered defensively. Would it really have mattered if he had? Wasn’t her decision the right one, no matter what?

Rick tensed. “I’m not used to having to call and explain myself to anyone,” he said. “Besides, I thought you wanted to keep things casual. That is what you told me, isn’t it? You said you have a habit of getting in over your head too quickly and then realizing you’d made a mistake. You said you didn’t want anything too heavy, right?”

“Yes.” It was her first line of defense against the inevitable. She’d wanted to be the one to set the tone for their fling. If she implied from the outset it was meaningless, then he couldn’t possibly leave her heart or her pride in tatters. Or at least he’d never know it. She’d pretty much ruined that illusion in the past few minutes.

“What changed?” he asked, giving her a searching look.

What had changed? She’d meant those words when she’d said them, but it wasn’t all that difficult to figure out. They’d slept together, and she’d liked it entirely too much. Ashley had picked up on that right off, so it was hardly mysterious. Her sister had guessed that Maggie had suddenly wanted more. In fact, she’d wanted things she’d sworn never to want again, all in the blink of an eye, because the man excelled in bed. To be perfectly honest with herself, she had no idea how compatible they were out of it, which meant that all this angst, all this irrational
fleeing, was totally absurd. Flings had their parameters, and a fling—albeit a grand and glorious one—was definitely all they’d had.

She met his gaze. “I lost my mind,” she suggested lightly. “Sorry.”

His gaze held steady with hers. “Maybe we both did,” he said quietly. “I wanted more, too, Maggie, and damned if I have any explanation for it, either.”

She heard the sincerity and bewilderment in his voice, and it reassured her. Maybe she didn’t have to plunge off the deep end. Maybe they could start over and take things slowly, get to know each other a bit before the fireworks got out of hand. That would be something new for her. Perhaps for Rick, too.

He tucked a finger under her chin and gazed into her eyes. Her entire body trembled. Okay, maybe they couldn’t take things too slowly.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“With my brain?” she responded wryly.

He laughed. “For starters.”

“That we could start over, take things a little slower this time. Get to know each other.” She regarded him with a sideways glance, trying to gauge his reaction. She couldn’t.

“And with whatever other part is chiming in?” he asked, amusement dancing in his eyes. “What’s it telling you?”

“That we should go inside and make love right this second and to hell with everything else.”

Heat glittered in the depths of his eyes. “How about we listen to that part first, then give your brain its say a little later?”

She wanted to say no. She really did. But her hand was in his and they were heading inside before one single
coherent sentence could cross her lips. When it did, it wasn’t “Forget about it” or even a simple “No.” Instead, she said, “The bedroom’s this way.”

Rick wasn’t entirely sure what had gotten Maggie to change her mind. He doubted it was anything he’d said. Reason and sanity didn’t seem to be what they were about. No, if anything, they were all about passion and hunger.

They’d barely crossed the threshold to Maggie’s bedroom when their clothes went flying. From the first they’d had no inhibitions, no false modesty. Maggie had been as eager as he’d been. Today was no different. Now that the decision had been made, she was coming to him with no apparent hesitation or regret.

He crushed her lush mouth under his, tasted her even as she fit her body to his, hip to hip, thigh to thigh. His hands were busy with buttons and snaps and zippers, seeking hot skin and her moist core. Hers were just as frantic, tugging aside his shirt, diving below the waistband of his jeans. When she found him, he was already hard and aching.

Rick couldn’t wait, not this time. There was barely time to slip on a condom before he took her hard and fast, clothes tangled around their feet. Maggie was backed up against a wall, her legs around his waist. Her nails dug into his shoulders as she took him in, sheathing him in slick heat.

Rick paused, tried to catch his breath, tried to make it last, but the sensations were too sweet, too intense, too commanding.

In mere seconds, Maggie convulsed around him until he exploded inside her with the kind of heart-pounding,
mind-blowing orgasm he’d experienced few times in his life, all of them with this woman.