With Her Last Breath (18 page)

“I’m going home.” Her voice was quiet and firm, slamming that door closed to him again.

Nick’s anger slid into indecision. A stubborn woman, Maggie couldn’t be pushed too far. Leo could circle back, and one good jerk from an intruder could pop open the camper door. “I’d like you to stay here until you’re up to talking with people.”

“They’ll be gossiping about us. They’ll say we’re living together.” Her voice had changed to flat and empty. Her sister had probably put her through the hurtful bogs of gossip and somehow this was about Glenda—the name she called in her nightmares—and not about Maggie.

“That’s good. At least they won’t be feeling sorry for me anymore,” he said lightly, hoping to persuade her to stay.
He
needed Maggie safe, to know that she wouldn’t be attacked again. The thin line on her throat reminded him too sharply of how she had looked, sprawled on the bed, half undressed and vulnerable.

Maggie had drawn inside herself, shutting him out, and that hurt, squeezing him ruthlessly, painfully.

He couldn’t think of anything to do but to take her hand and bend, brushing his lips over hers, telling her that he cared and he waited…

Keep it light
, Nick told himself for the hundredth time. “Scout and I are going down on the beach. She’s stayed close to you, but the exercise will be good for her. We’ll be close enough to hear you call, or blink the porch light. Is that okay with you? Or do you want me to stay?”

Ask me to stay. Tell me you need me
…

But Maggie nodded and slid her hand away, folding it with the other in her lap. “I don’t want you feeling sorry for me, Nick. I’ve managed—”

Her withdrawal from him hurt. Her distrust included him. Wide open and flat, his hand hit the table and he stood, wanting to tell her that she wasn’t alone anymore, that he cared. “Stay here and wallow in it, if you want. Come on, Scout.”

Ruthless? Maybe. Nick didn’t trust the emotions nudging him, the need to hold her close.

On the beach, tossing sticks to Scout, he saw Maggie standing up on the porch, watching them, her arms crossed around herself. Then the porch was empty, and Dante was walking down the beach. With an excited bark, Scout ran to meet him.

“How is she?” Dante asked, playing with Scout.

“She’s a strong woman. She’s working on it.”

“Are you? I’ve known you all my life and I’d never seen you like that with Leo. For a moment there, you scared me and I’ve fought with you over Sarah Brown.”

Nick smiled thinly, briefly, the humor not reaching his eyes. “Third grade. Pink hair ribbons. Classy in lacy socks and black patent leather shoes.”

Dante’s gaze skipped up to Nick’s house. “Maggie is up in the lighthouse. What do you suppose she’s doing?”

“Thinking.” Nick looked up to the solitary figure silhouetted by the light. He knew well enough the time that thinking required; that was where he’d spent hours, prowling through the might-have-beens. “She’s got a lot going on besides Leo and his boys.”

Dante hurled a stick out into the water and Scout waited, leaning forward, but not moving. When Dante gave the hand command “Go,” the dog leaped into the water, swimming toward the stick. He watched and then spoke to Nick. “Let me know if I can help.”

“Okay. I’m not going anywhere.” Nick studied the woman in the old lighthouse. If Maggie needed him, he’d be near.

It was dark when Nick and Scout returned to the house, which was brightly lit, the squares of light pouring out onto the ground. He paused at the front door, listened to the vacuum’s roar, and stepped over the mound of throw rugs. The front door wouldn’t open easily, and fearing for Maggie, Nick muscled it open.

He stepped around the barricade of stacked furniture and hurried into the kitchen where the dryer and washer were in
full blast. Maggie stood on a chair, reaching down into the bucket of soapy water on the counter, revealing the panties she wore beneath his borrowed shirt.

Nick took a chair from on top of the table and placed it on the floor. He needed to sit badly. He’d left a woman vulnerable and wrapped in pain, and now Maggie frowned at him as if he were a trespasser. “You didn’t come in the front way, did you?”

“After I got past that stack of furniture. Yes, I did.”

“Look. I just mopped. Why do you think I put the chairs on top of the table?” She pointed to the damp trail of his footprints leading from the living room.

“Oh.” Nick had been proven guilty. Maggie was in top cleaning form, and he was the intruder. He considered his options and came up with an uncertain “Where do you want me?”

“Out of my way.”

“Oh.” Nick thought the word was brilliant, considering he’d made the leap from protector and friend to offender.

“Don’t you ever polish your furniture? I can’t find any polish.”

She sounded desperate, as if the polish were an anchor to her reality. Maybe it was—routines offered safety. “Um…I don’t think I have any.”

“Good furniture needs care, Nick,” she lectured briskly as she squeezed the soapy water out of the rag and began scrubbing the cabinets. “Wood dries out with heat and air conditioning.”

“Okay. Is that something your mother told you?” he asked slowly, and tried to adjust from the injured woman fighting her past to Maggie, her hair tied with an old bandana, dressed in his shirt, and standing on a chair and working furiously. He noted the iron he’d never used standing on the old wooden ironing board with a sheet pinned around it for padding. His freshly laundered clothing hung above the ironing board. “I didn’t know I had so many shirts.”

“They were everywhere, balled in drawers and closets.
Yes, my mother always kept the furniture polished. I used to love helping her. We—I have what is left of our family furniture. It’s in storage.”

He wanted to ask more, but decided against pushing Maggie now. She seemed tethered to cleaning by an invisible line, as if it were a familiar task that kept her moving away from the darkness.

Assorted buttons and thread from his junk drawer cluttered an area of the countertop beside a mound of his shirts. Nick studied the clothing on the floor and picked up a pair of his favorite shorts—worn and comfortable despite the holes—and his good-luck T-shirt, just as worn. He carefully placed them with the other clothing, protectively shoving them beneath the rest. There were limits to Maggie’s cleaning, after all.

He eased to the living room, taking a better look, and then walked down the hallway. Everything was stacked and pushed aside and stripped as naked as he felt. Somehow she had managed to turn the mattress against the wall, the beds stripped and moved, windows bald without the lined curtains, closets emptied. Nick shook his head at the strength of women locked in emotional battles and returned to the kitchen. “Do you need me for anything?”

“Yes, I do. I haven’t thanked you for helping me. Thank you, Nick.” Maggie tossed the rag into the bucket and stepped down from the chair. She paused, wiping her hands on the shirt, then looked straight at him. “Thank you, Nick,” she said more softly. “A little cleaning is the least I can do.”

“You don’t owe me anything.”

But she did.
Maggie knew Nick was offended, bristling sensations coming off him in waves. She gave way to the tenderness wrapping around her for a man who had held her close and whispered away her nightmares when they came creeping after her. He’d held her like a child in the shower, making her feel so safe and clean. Somehow he’d known that the cleansing away of Leo’s touch was more important to her
than anything else. He’d been careful to retrieve her locket, all that she had remaining of Glenda.

Maggie came to him, studying the goodness in him, the safety and the power. “I hope you don’t mind. Cleaning is therapy for me. I’m sorry if I’ve offended you.”

A quick wash of emotions crossed Nick’s face, first startled, then hungry and then that tightening. “Clean away. Let me know if you need anything.”

He walked out of the kitchen, and the door clicked shut a little too hard. Maggie opened it and found him out on the deck, his hands braced on his waist as he looked up at the stars. “This isn’t easy, Maggie,” he said when she touched his shoulder. “I want to go after that guy and—”

“Don’t. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have anything to be sorry for.” Anger rumbled in his deep voice as he pushed his hands through his hair. “I want to help. I don’t know how. There’s a lot more to this than that attack. You could have been killed, Maggie. Just that easy. Or overdosed and spent the rest of your life like a vegetable. Where’s the anger? Where’s the need for revenge? You didn’t even want the guy arrested. ‘I just don’t want any trouble,’ you said. ‘I can’t take any more.’ I don’t undertand not turning in some scum that will probably hurt other women when he can. I don’t understand how you can just mop and wash clothes and iron and pretend that nothing happened.”

“Life goes on, Nick. I’m trying.” She tried to keep her tone even, not to show all the emotions gathering in her, the regret that she didn’t understand Glenda’s downfall better. Maggie had been so certain, so righteous, so unaware of the depths of Glenda’s pain.
She hadn’t understood
…

Nick turned on her then, furious and dark and primitive. “You should deal with it. You should want to pin his hide to the wall, see that he is arrested, and make him pay.”

“Money goes a long way in making people
not
pay. It wasn’t worth the trouble for everyone, including you and Dante. I found that out the hard way.”

Nick’s hands braced on his hips, then one pushed back his hair. “I get that idea. You don’t trust anyone but yourself. Let me get this straight: You wanted to protect me and Dante from some jerk who needs a lesson on how to treat women. Have you thought about yourself? Have you thought about what might have happened? That he intended to let his buddies have you?”

“Please don’t lecture me, Nick. I’ve been attacked before. I managed then, too. I know how to take care of myself. What I need to do to survive.”

His blank look changed to fury, his voice so quietly sarcastic that it shook the kitchen. “Oh, that’s real nice. I thought you might tell me about that, but I really don’t know anything about you, do I? Lock me out. That’s a pretty damn helpless feeling, Maggie. Thanks. Just feed me bits, but not the whole story. I got a little bit of the picture when you were still drugged. Don’t let me get too close. Arm’s length is fine with me.”

Maggie tried to force the bitterness out of her tone. “It isn’t a pretty picture. There’s nothing to tell. It’s over. I was in the bathtub. A man broke into my home and tried to rape me. I stopped him. He was injured. I wasn’t. My sister was too caught up in her own world by then. My ex-husband didn’t believe me. Ryan preferred to think that I’d misunderstood a ‘business partner and a friend’ dropping in unexpectedly. And he didn’t want ‘conflict of interest’ in their ‘profitable arrangement.’ He wanted me to forget the ‘misunderstanding,’ as he called it. Ryan didn’t want me to make trouble. I did, but it didn’t help. Men in power have a way of making problems disappear, including me.”

Maggie shook her head. “My sister died—overdosed—just eight months after that. I’d made enough trouble trying to salvage her by that time, and for a while after she died. I wanted revenge and made even more trouble. The police weren’t listening to me at all. I tracked down her…customers and the men who used her, and created scenes wher
ever I could find them—at work, at a party. A troublemaker is bad news for business, so no one would hire me. Then I divorced Ryan, struggled around for a year trying to find steady work, and eventually moved on with my life.”

Nick’s hand slapped the countertop. His emotions were all out there—the frustration, the anger, and the caring. “Clean away. The house could probably use it,” he said finally as if defeated, and turned his back on her. “What do you need me to do?”

“I need you to…” Maggie hesitated, forming her thoughts. She needed Nick’s tenderness, the way he held her in the night and day, soothing her. She needed the honesty of his passion and hunger. She needed to feel his strength—and her own—and she needed to give him what she couldn’t express with words. “I need you to make love with me.”

His body tensed, and it was a long time before he spoke; she counted each second with racing heartbeats. “Payback?” he asked in a deep, uneven voice. “No. I don’t want that.”

“No, because I need you. I haven’t needed anyone for a long time, Nick. I haven’t wanted anyone in my life. And now there is you.”

He was silent, her heart beating so loudly it sounded like a drum. Then he said very softly, “You’d better be certain about this, Maggie. I’m not too steady right now.”

She tried to keep her answer light, when she wanted him desperately, the safety and the passion burning the air between them. “I’m certain. I’m taking a shower now. I could use company. But I’ll understand if you don’t want me.”

If he didn’t want her, she’d be even more empty than before, Maggie thought as she tilted back her face to the shower’s spray. Because now she cared for him.

Celeste stood in the shadows of her front porch. She needed the quiet night and the warmth of her home and animals. She held Earth close to her, stroking the cat’s fur and listening to the pleasured purr. Celeste thought of her father, the way he
squirted milk from a dairy cow into a waiting kitten’s mouth, the way he was always safe, big hands holding her from danger.

At her side, the goddess wind chime moved within her silvery pipe cage, the musical sounds blending with the soft scents of summer.

She could only wait for the man hovering around Maggie, coming to harm her and bringing Celeste’s death.

The uneven rumble of an ill-kept motor announced the arrival of a van pulling in front of her home. After the slam of a door, Celeste studied the powerful man moving toward her, anger cut into the grooves of his face.

He brought the smell of whiskey and anger, but the big fists knotted at his side, the rage on his face didn’t frighten Celeste. It wasn’t her time to die; he wasn’t the man from Maggie’s past.