Maggy's Child (12 page)

It had been a magical night. He had even kissed her good night. The chaste peck on her lips had kept her dreaming of him for months of nights.

“Remember your prom, Magdalena?” he whispered. Maggy was surprised and yet not surprised to realize that his thoughts were running parallel with hers. It had always been like that, with Nick. He had known what she was thinking almost as soon as she did.

Maggy closed her eyes and let her head rest against his shoulder.

Like that, they finished out the dance.

When the song ended, her eyes didn’t open until Nick put her away from him, his hands resting on either side of her waist. Maggy blinked at him, feeling dazed. Nick smiled broadly down into her eyes.

Around them people were glancing their way. Maggy caught some of the looks, flushed, and experienced a frisson of pure panic. Please God Lyle hadn’t witnessed that dance.…

“Keep away from me,” she said through teeth that were bared in a travesty of a social smile, and jerked free of his hands. Turning her back on him, she marched to the edge of the dance floor and up the shallow steps. Nick was right behind her. She could feel his eyes boring a hole through her back. The pianist was already playing another song. Everyone was dancing again, and no one was paying the least attention to her and Nick. If she could just get away from him, Lyle need never know. Two steps beyond the dance floor, she turned on him.

Furious brown eyes met teasing hazel-green ones and shot him a look that should have stopped him in his tracks. But Nick, remembering her temper of old, merely crossed his arms over his chest and looked ready to enjoy the attack.

“Maggy.” Lyle’s arctic voice behind her made her jump sky-high, and she glanced back over her shoulder like a startled fawn. He’d seen her dancing with Nick. She knew it as soon as she caught a glimpse of his face. The rage went out of her like air from a deflating balloon, and burgeoning fear took its place. Lyle’s hand clamped over her elbow, bringing her back to reality with a shock. His touch made her skin crawl.

“Lyle.” She started to sweat. Nerves set her pulses to pounding as, still keeping her arm imprisoned, he moved to stand beside her. Glancing up at her husband again, Maggy was surprised to find James Brean just beyond his shoulder, beaming jovially at her. With them was Brean’s wife Ellen, and Buffy. All were smiling. Even Lyle’s lips were curved upward. Only his eyes were cold.

Maggy thanked God for the presence of outsiders.

“Shame on you, Maggy, for trying to steal my date,” Buffy said with playful reproof, and slid over to Nick’s
side, where she tucked a hand in the crook of his elbow and smiled up at him with kittenish charm. Then her gaze shifted to Lyle. “You know Nick King, don’t you, Lyle? I assume you must, if he’s an old friend of Maggy’s.”

Maggy wondered if she was only imagining the malice in Buffy’s voice.

“We’ve met,” Nick said after an instant’s silence in which the two men’s gazes locked. “But it was just briefly, and many years ago.” He paused and smiled a killer-crocodile smile while looking directly into Lyle’s eyes. “It’s a pleasure to have the chance to renew the acquaintance.”

“The pleasure is all mine.” Was Maggy the only one who heard the danger that underlay Lyle’s reply? Even Nick seemed impervious to the threat, maybe because it was veiled by a thin veneer of courtesy. Of course, Nick didn’t know Lyle as she did.

“Mr. King just purchased a nightclub we were getting ready to foreclose on over in Indiana. Didn’t you also make us an offer on that, Lyle? The Brown Cow?” James Brean glanced at Lyle for confirmation.

“The Little Brown Cow,” Lyle said smoothly. “But unlike Mr. King, who I believe makes his living by running sleazy nightclubs, my interest was purely in the property’s intrinsic value as an investment. I happen to think that the Indiana waterfront is hugely underpriced.”

“What a tip!” Brean said with a laugh, smoothing over the tension that only Maggy and the two men involved seemed to be aware of. “If I only had a few hundred thousand to spare, I’d start snapping up property over there. Do you think the bank would notice if I gave myself a loan?”

“Don’t even make jokes like that!” his wife admonished him with a poke.

“Oh, everybody knows I’m just kidding. You take
things too seriously.” Brean rubbed his side where Ellen’s forefinger had dug in.

“So you bought the Little Brown Cow? It’s such a—cozy little place! So country! Will you be running it yourself?” Buffy sounded delighted as she gazed up at Nick.

“I’ll put in new management who will eventually take over completely, but until the place is profitable I’ll oversee things.” Nick extracted his cigarettes from his pocket, put one to his lips, and lit it before repocketing the lighter and pack.

“Oh.” Buffy looked fascinated.

“So how long do you expect to be in Louisville?” Lyle asked.

Nick took a drag on his cigarette, and let the smoke drift from his lips before replying.

“For just as long as it takes,” he said. Maggy shivered as Nick’s gaze met Lyle’s again. Were the others totally insensitive, that they didn’t pick up on the undertone to the conversation? Couldn’t they feel the hostility in the air? Couldn’t they see the enmity that surged between the two men?

At Nick’s answer, Lyle’s hand tightened so viciously around Maggy’s elbow that it was all she could do not to cry out. She bit her lower lip, and felt a fresh wave of chills run down her spine. Lyle was going to go crazy with rage as soon as they were alone. The prospect made her feel nauseated.

“Do you feel well, Maggy? You look pale.” Ellen Brean spoke with concern.

Maggy opened her mouth to deny any illness—and then realized that here was her salvation. At all costs, she wanted to avoid being alone with Lyle tonight. She knew his moods, and this one scared her.

“You know, I
am
starting to feel ill,” she said. “I think I must be coming down with the flu. David was sick with it all last week.” She sent her best for-appearances-only smile up at Lyle. “I hoped I’d be able to make it through
the party, but I don’t think I can. I’m afraid I’m going to have to go home and lie down.”

“Do you feel that bad, Maggy?” Buffy asked with a little smile. Of course, Buffy would be glad if Maggy went home so she could have Nick all to herself.

“You don’t want to miss your birthday party,” Lyle said. Maggy caught the warning edge to his voice, though she didn’t think anyone else did. He knew that she was trying to slip away from him, but in public there was little he could do to foil her.

“I’ll drive you home.” Nick’s offer was abrupt. Maggy glanced up at him with sudden alarm—she had never intended this—and shook her head.

“No, I …” she began.

“I’ll take you myself,” Lyle interrupted her. He was not glaring at Nick—Lyle was far too subtle for that—but his dislike was expressed in every tense line of his body. Was she really the only one who could see?

“You have to stay and see to our guests,” she said to Lyle firmly. “I wouldn’t dream of taking you away from the party. For both of us to leave would be just too rude.” Her eyes flickered up to Nick’s, and away. “And I wouldn’t dream of breaking up your date. I’ll borrow Sarah’s car. She can ride home with Lucy and Ham. Or Lyle.” She glanced at Lyle again as she finished.

For an instant, no longer, his gaze met hers and promised an awful retribution for her night’s work. Then he surrendered with outward grace. “If you are truly ill, then driving yourself home is not a good idea. And you’re right, it would be rude for both of us to leave the party.” A triumphant gleam appeared in his eyes. “Tipton can fetch you. If you-all will excuse me a minute, I’ll give him a call.”

Lyle pulled the small phone he was never without from his pocket, unfolded it and, turning his shoulder on the group, placed the call. Maggy knew he had agreed to allow her to leave only because he could count on Tipton
to convey her straight home. She would be under guard all the way, and, with the cars locked up, would presumably have no way to leave the estate once she got there. Lyle could exit the party at his leisure, and when he did he would know where to find his errant wife.

The prospect made her shiver.

I
t was not yet nine o’clock when Tipton dropped Maggy off at the house—absurdly early to be returning from a party. Usually her birthday celebration lasted until the wee hours of the following morning. Maggy slid out of the backseat and went inside without a word to Tipton, who stood silently watching as she entered. On Lyle’s orders, no doubt.

The first thing Maggy did was to reset the alarm. That it be kept on at night was one of Lyle’s rules. Supposedly the purpose of the elaborate system was to protect the household valuables from burglars, but in reality Maggy suspected that Lyle had had it installed to keep track of her. There was a monitor by his bed that beeped whenever a door or window was opened, and a computer logged the exact times the system was turned off and on. Thus Lyle would know precisely when she had arrived home tonight, and that she had not gone out again.

Shedding her coat and leaving it on a chair in the front hall—Maggy had gotten spoiled by knowing that Louella would pick up after her, and never gave her action a second thought—she headed toward the west wing, where Virginia’s apartment was located. She meant to look in on David before she did anything else.

The house was huge, with twenty-one rooms, including eight bedrooms, each of which came complete with a private bath and sitting area. The first time she had walked through it she had been thoroughly awed, and not
a little intimidated. She’d been eighteen years old, and three months married to a man who seemed more instead of less of a stranger with every day that passed. She was his legal wife, but Maggy felt she didn’t know Lyle Forrest at all.

Worse, she was even starting to feel like a stranger to herself. A stranger in a strange land, wasn’t that how the quote went? That was how she felt. Nothing—her surroundings, her husband, her pregnancy, herself—seemed quite real. She was no longer the wild, heedless girl she had been, no longer the girl who had laughed freely and sworn freely and said frankly what was on her mind. For the first time in her life, she didn’t know who she was. She wasn’t Magdalena Garcia any longer—but she wasn’t Maggy Forrest, either.

She felt like a nonentity. Lyle had stripped her identity from her as ruthlessly as he had had an anonymous maid at a hotel they had stayed in throw away her old clothes while she slept. He had then summoned a personal shopper to select a whole new wardrobe for her from Bergdorf’s in New York, and despite her annoyance at his high-handedness, she had to admit that the new outfits had looked fabulous on her. Unfortunately, she discovered that she couldn’t reclothe her spirit as easily as she could her body. To her surprise, she found that she valued the person she had been, and it had been both a shock and a blow to learn that Lyle apparently did not.

Yet twelve years ago she had been too young, too needy, too dazzled at the unbelievable Cinderella twist her life had taken to resent Lyle or what he was doing to her. She’d been so poor—and suddenly she was rich. Money for rent wasn’t a problem. Money for food wasn’t a problem.
Money
wasn’t a problem. It was plentiful. Great mountains of it had suddenly been erected between her and the harsh realities of the world. The worries she had faced every day of her life no longer existed. Lyle had
houses, and cars, and servants, and investments. And as his wife,
so did she
. The security of it was mind-boggling. Like Prince Charming in the fairy story, Lyle had rescued her from a grim life, and she was grateful. If her Prince Charming demanded that she transform herself into a princess worthy of him in return, that seemed fair enough.

But some of the things she had to do to earn his approbation were hard. Her half-Mexican heritage was no longer to be a source of pride to her, but something to be hushed up, she learned, because her husband wished it. Her father (a drunken bum, according to Lyle) was not welcome at Windermere, and was not to be mentioned in polite company. Her clothes were all wrong, and her taste in them—jeans and T-shirts, basically, and maybe sequins for dress-up—was a subject for derision. Even her hair, with its unsuitable length and stubborn waves, was attacked and tamed. She felt as if she was constantly being subjected to the same process as her hair. Yet she didn’t protest, because she felt Lyle was right. She was, basically, unworthy to be his wife. That he had married her at all must be counted among life’s minor miracles.

It had probably come about, Maggy had thought since with a touch of black humor, because she’d been praying to Saint Jude, the patron saint of impossible causes, for assistance just seconds before Lyle drove up in his champagne-colored Jaguar coupe. He was a regular customer of hers at the Harmony Inn—one of a group of businessmen who frequently met there for lunch—and the other girls had told her that he was filthy rich. He was always nice to her, and he always left a big tip, and she liked him. So when he saw that she was crying, and called her over to his car to ask if he could be of assistance to her, she had climbed in, barely noticing the luxurious vanilla leather upholstery that would have thrilled her at any other time, and spilled the whole ugly mess in his lap. His solution
had astounded her—and yet she was not as surprised as she would have been had she not just prayed to Saint Jude.