Maggy's Child (6 page)

After that, the battle had raged at white-hot pitch for a good ten minutes.

Then, because however angry she was at him she hated to see him hurt, Maggy had whipped the car into the parking lot of a closed-down warehouse, slammed the gearshift into park, and started wiping at his bloodied face with the feathered hem of her scarlet silk robe.

He had knocked her hand away, grabbed her by her shoulders and kissed her, bloody nose and all. His kiss—the first time he had ever kissed her in a way that was not entirely brotherly—had rocked her world on its axis.

For an instant, no longer, the memory burned to life in her mind. But she wouldn’t let herself remember. She couldn’t. That kiss had happened long ago, another lifetime ago, to another girl. A girl who no longer existed.

Now, staring down at the picture of herself dancing before an audience of blurry male faces, Maggy felt the image sear relentlessly into her brain. There she was,
beautiful at seventeen, with her high young breasts with their rouged nipples—courtesy of the same girl who provided the pot and the fancy hairstyle—bared for all the world to see, along with her narrow rib cage and small round belly button and flaring hips and the tiny triangle of black sequins that covered her sex. Poised on six-inch-high heels, with her long, slender legs clad in sheer black stockings to the thigh, she appeared to be flaunting her nakedness. She looked somnolent, sexy, as though she were loving every minute of her own performance.

“Remember, Magdalena?” Nick’s soft voice flayed her.

She glanced up at him wildly. “No, I don’t remember! I don’t ever want to remember!”

Whirling, she began to run back the way she had come.

He was upon her in an instant, catching her around the waist with one arm and clamping a hand over her mouth with the other as though he feared she might scream. She would have, too, uncaring at the moment of the consequences of being found alone in the woods with Nick of all people. She struggled and kicked as he lifted her clear up off her feet and carried her away from the path through the underbrush until at last she regained some control and stopped struggling in his arms. Then, in the lee of a just-greening wild-cherry tree, he set her upright again.

“Don’t scream,” he said, his hand still covering her mouth. Held tight against him, her breasts flattened by his chest, her thighs plastered against his, Maggy registered anew the size and strength of him—Nick was six feet two, and while he had weighed in the vicinity of 180 as a youth, she suspected he was now 200 or more well-muscled pounds—and made a negative movement with her head.

He rather cautiously removed his hand from her mouth.

“Is that why you came back? To blackmail me?” she
demanded in a shrill voice, shoving against his chest in a futile bid to free herself. “I have plenty of money now, right? So how much do you want?”

One of his arms was still clamped around her waist, and Maggy felt it harden. Her head tilted back in time to catch the narrowing of his mouth and the icing-over of his eyes. Her words had angered him, she saw at a glance, and she was fiercely glad. She wanted him angry. No, she wanted him to hurt, as he was hurting her.

For a moment he said nothing, just looked measuringly down at her.

“A million dollars or I show the pictures and tape—oh, yes, that’s a videotape of your whole performance—to Lyle? Interesting thought, that.”

“I—I can’t get a million dollars. I don’t have access to that much. Nowhere near it.”

His gaze met hers, and he smiled, a slow, lazy, taunting smile.

“I bet Lyle could get it, if I threatened to send copies of everything to the local movers and shakers. TV might even be interested. I can just see your little dance ending up on something like
A Current Affair
, can’t you? With the appropriate blackouts over strategic areas of your anatomy, of course.”

“You son of a bitch.”

“You know how I always hated to hear you swear. I still do. Maybe I ought to up the ante for every cussword that comes out of your mouth.”

“Go to hell!”

“Watch yourself, Maggy May, this could get expensive.”

“Don’t you dare call me that!” The once-familiar endearment stung her like the flicked end of a bullwhip.

“In my experience, blackmailers can call their victims anything they want.”

“Oh, so you have experience? Is that how you make a living these days, blackmailing innocent people like me?”

“I’d hardly call you innocent, Magdalena. Not then, and not now.”

Maggy could feel a hot rush of fury rising inside her. It was a familiar, if long forgotten, sensation. In her teen years she had been renowned throughout the mean streets of Louisville’s west end for her fiery temper. She and Nick had once fought like two angry cats swung together in a sack. Since marrying Lyle, the fight had been systematically knocked out of her.

“How much do you want?” She was quivering with shock and outrage and pain. That Nick could do this to her, Nick whom she had once loved with a fierce wild tide, was unbelievable. No, it was very believable. After all, hadn’t she learned the hard way that no one was what he or she seemed, and that even the best-known, most trusted person had as many unfathomable layers as an onion?

“What would you say if I told you that I wasn’t after money?”

A suggestive glint in his eyes told Maggy what he meant. She laughed, the sound forced and high. “Sex? Is that what you want? Fine. Go ahead, lover. Throw me down on the ground right here and now and get your rocks off. It’s a cheap price to pay to get you the hell out of my life again.”

His eyes narrowed, darkened. “That’s my Maggy May. Foulmouthed and bullheaded.” Taut mockery curled his mouth while his arm tightened around her waist, drawing her up on her toes as he pressed her even closer against him. Maggy didn’t bother to struggle—she knew from experience that Nick, when seriously annoyed as he was at that moment, possessed the strength of two ordinary men—but she glared up at him with all the rage she had kept stored inside her for the last dozen years. His brows twitched together as he absorbed her expression, and then he bent his head to kiss her.

O
nly he didn’t. Maggy, rigid, hating, her arms wedged between them holding him slightly at bay, braced herself for nothing.

Nick let her go and stepped back.

“The pictures and tape are a gift,” he said, folding his arms across his chest and watching her like a dog at a rabbit hole. “The negatives are inside the envelope. They came into my possession from someone who did indeed intend to use them to blackmail you, my dear Mrs. Forrest. Luckily for you, I bought them—and they weren’t cheap—before anyone else could see them, and now I’m giving them to you, no strings attached.”

Maggy stared up at him for a moment, too dumbfounded to speak. She had behaved abominably, and she knew it. But she had forgotten how to trust anyone, even Nick.

“Why?” She thrust her hands into the pockets of her anorak, all at once desperately cold.

“Why not?” The words were flippant.

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s all you’re going to get.”

“Nick …” Maggy hesitated, searching his face. The features were the same as those of the boy she had loved: the thick straight black brows, the slightly crooked nose with the small bump on its bridge from where it had been broken that fateful night, the broad cheekbones and square chin. Even the elusive dimple on the right side of
his mouth was the same. But there were differences, too: lines of experience at the corners of his eyes, a hardness that was new, a certain cynicism in the set of his jaw and in the gleam of those bright hazel-green eyes. He was indubitably Nick, her Nick, but he had changed, inside where it didn’t much show. But then, of course, so had she. “I owe you an apology.”

“You do—but don’t bother. I like you better spitting fire than being reasonable. Brings back old times.” He glanced around, his attention attracted by the sound of the dogs barking as they galloped toward them through the trees. “Don’t forget to pick your present up off the path before someone else comes across it.”

“Nick …” But it was too late. He was already striding away. He glanced over his shoulder as she called after him and touched his hand to his brow in a salute.

“Happy birthday, Maggy May,” he said, and then he vanished like a shadow through the trees.

Maggy stared after him, feeling her battered heart threatening to break anew. Ah, Nick. How she had loved him. So much that it hurt to remember. And how like him, to appear out of nowhere after twelve years of silence and tease and mock her and drive her crazy even when he meant to do her a good deed. She should have known he meant her no harm. Somewhere deep in her heart she thought she had known it, but she had forgotten how to listen to her heart.

Seamus and Bridey burst through the undergrowth like a pair of bounding moose and leapt on her with doggy ecstasy.

“Down, guys!” She staggered under the onslaught, patting them, glad of their boisterous advent because it distracted her from thoughts of Nick. Now that he had done what he had come to do, would he vanish from her life for another twelve years?

The prospect made her want to wail like an abandoned child.

“Enough of that!” she said aloud, pressing her lips firmly together and forcing her mind to focus on the purely practical, the here and now. She had learned long ago that it was dangerous to give in to maudlin reflection. If she allowed herself to dwell on the negative aspects of her life, she would be forever in tears, and that would do no one any good, least of all David or herself.

As Nick had reminded her, she had to gather up the tape and pictures and negatives and get rid of them before someone found them and gave them to Lyle.

Lyle would use them against her. Maggy knew he would use them against her. She didn’t know precisely how, but she knew him well enough to know that he would.

He might even be cruel enough to show them to David.

At the thought, Maggy shuddered and hurried to retrieve the incriminating evidence. Everything was where it had fallen, still scattered across the path, and she scooped the items up without looking at the pictures again, shoving them back inside the ripped package and then tucking them inside her anorak with a hasty, guilty glance around. It would be like Lyle to have spies even here.

But now she was letting herself get paranoid. There were no eyes to see nor tongues to tattle so early in the morning in Windermere’s own woods.

She had to get rid of the pictures and negatives and tape.

Standing up, Maggy hesitated, chewing her lip as she considered the problem. Despite her agitation, a tiny glimmer of amusement flickered across her face as the thought came to her that she was pondering the question that must once have tormented Richard Nixon: to burn or not to burn an incriminating tape? But in her case at least, a bonfire of sufficient size to consume every scrap of
evidence beyond redemption would be sure to attract the very attention she was so desperate to avoid.

In the end, she walked deep into the woods and buried everything beneath the ground-sweeping branches of a just-budding forsythia bush, scraping out a hole with her hands and a rock and covering it up again with dirt and leaves and a large, half-rotted piece of log to mark the spot. As a permanent solution, the one she had chosen wouldn’t work, but it was the best she could do at the moment. If she took the pictures and tape back to the house, even for as long as a few hours while she sought another solution, she was afraid they would be discovered. She suspected that Lyle had her rooms regularly searched, hoping to find evidence that she was having an affair. Not that he would care if she was, except that the knowledge of it would give him one more weapon to use against her.

Unfortunately for him, he could search in vain. Since marrying him, she had never slept with anyone else. The very thought was enough to make her feel ill.

If nothing else, Lyle had cured her of liking sex.

Though she had liked it once, too much. With Nick.

But she would not allow herself to remember. The glorious primal passion that had so briefly and disastrously raged through her life had happened to an altogether different person. The girl she had been then was gone forever.

If the knowledge saddened her, why, then, she would just force it from her head. She had learned in a hard school that there was no use grieving over what was done.

There was David now. She thought of her son deliberately, picturing him in her mind, and as she did so the ghost of that laughing, dancing, love-hungry girl receded to the far-distant reaches of her memory that was her proper home.

David was what was important. She would do anything, endure anything, for David.

Mud and bits of leaves still clung to her hands as she
walked back toward the house. She kept them balled in the pockets of her anorak until she reached the kennel for fear that someone might see the state they were in and wonder. With a furtive glance around she called Seamus and Bridey to her, turning on the outside spigot as she did so. If anyone was watching, she hoped he would think that she was merely giving the dogs a drink. Thrusting her hands under the icy stream, she quickly washed the evidence away. Then she dried them on her jeans, turned off the water, and returned the dogs to their runs with the usual quota of apologetic pats. She loved the enormous creatures, but Lyle refused to have pets in or near the house.