Shutting off the treacherous GPS, Ben reversed out of the gravel pit and turned onto a winding blacktop road, still without the faintest idea where he was. Well, this was it then—he had no choice. At some point in his life every man was forced to do it. He only hoped none of the guys he knew found out about it.
He would have to ask directions.
He chose a farm on the left, a white house with green trim at the end of a long, uphill driveway. He parked, got out, went up to the front door, and knocked.
A thin, white-haired woman with a mixing bowl in her hands came to the door. She had to be in her seventies, Ben guessed, but she was still very pretty, with bright eyes rayed with laugh lines and a warm smile.
“Hello there, young man—and what might you be selling?”
“I’m not selling anything,” Ben said, smiling back. “I was just hoping for directions. Could you tell me how to find the Maguire farm?”
“You found it.”
“I—this is? Are you—”
“Too hot to stand out there. Come on in.”
Ben did, following her down a wide hallway and into a kitchen. It was twice the size of most modern kitchens, with old-fashioned glass-fronted cupboards, a large, round oak table with bow-backed chairs, and a modern refrigerator that looked spacious enough to hang a couple sides of beef.
The woman found a glass, filled it with cold tap water, and handed it to him. “You look like you could use this,” she said.
“Thank you.” He was about to introduce himself when the back door opened and Mazie Maguire walked in. Ben’s heart seized up before kicking back into gear and setting up a rapid thumping.
Mazie’s eyes met his and widened. They were an intense blue, framed by black lashes and brows. She didn’t look at all like the women Ben had met in L.A. She wasn’t tall, tanned, or surgically enhanced. Her chin was pointed, her skin was freckled, and she wasn’t wearing a speck of makeup. Her brown hair was tied back in a loose ponytail and must recently have been washed because he could smell her shampoo from across the room, a scent that made him go weak in the knees.
She wore ragged cutoff jeans, a sleeveless pink shirt, and was clutching a big bunch of dirt-encrusted radishes. She was barefoot, and even across the room Ben could see her nipples poking through the fabric of her shirt. No bra! The message shot straight from his brain to his gonads.
Mazie ran to him, jumped into his arms, wrapped her legs around him, kissed him openmouthed, and whispered that she couldn’t wait to go to bed with him.
That was the alternate reality version of events, the GPS prankster version.
What actually happened was that Mazie marched to the sink, flung down the radishes, turned her back on Ben, and said, “So what are you here for—did you forget your electric toothbrush or something?”
The elderly woman set down the bowl with a bang. “Marguerite Maguire—where are your manners? You obviously know this handsome young fellow, so introduce us.”
Mazie turned from the sink and with a sullen expression said, “Gran, this is my—this is Bonaparte Labeck. Ben, this is Katie Maguire, my grandmother.”
“Pleased to meet you.” Ben was grateful for the older woman’s understanding smile as they shook hands, feeling that she, at least, might be on his side.
“Why are you here? Why aren’t you in L.A.?” Mazie asked, her tone hostile.
Ben shrugged. “It didn’t work out.”
It didn’t work out, Mazie thought bitterly. Did he think he could just reappear on her doorstep like one of those cats that found its way across seventeen states back to its owner and expect to be greeted with an open can of Friskies? Or in his case, with her open arms? Did he think they were just going to resume where they’d left off? Fat chance.
Against her will, she sneaked a sideways look at Ben Labeck. He was even taller than she remembered and darkly tanned—thanks to all that West Coast sunshine. He was wearing baggy cargo shorts and a short-sleeved white shirt that revealed his muscular forearms—probably he’d been working out at Muscle Beach, doing push-ups while bikini-clad starlets clung to him like barnacles.
She tried not to notice his strong jaw, his wide, full mouth, his broad black eyebrows, or his devastating brown eyes. Which absolutely were not going to devastate her again, because she was immune to his magic now. Picking up a vegetable brush, Mazie began savagely scrubbing dirt off the radishes.
Uninvited, Ben moved next to her at the sink. “Would you like some help?”
“No.”
Then—this was classic Labeck—he simply ignored her no, picked up a paring knife, and started chopping off the tops of the cleaned radishes with those large, competent hands of his.
She was not going to think about how those large hands felt on her body. She was not going to notice the rumbling timbre of his voice or his smell—sort of like cinnamon coffee cake. She scrubbed furiously at the radishes, wishing she could scrub away the memories: the time they’d started building a snow fort and kisses in the snow had escalated into a passionate encounter that gave a whole new meaning to “Winter Wonderland.” She still had an icy spot on her backside that hadn’t quite thawed out. Or the time they’d body-surfed in Lake Michigan with Ben as her boogie board. Or the pillow fight that had resulted in a blizzard of feathers all over Ben’s bedroom floating down while he was making love to her.
She wasn’t going to think about the way he cracked up when she tried to speak French or how she nearly wet her pants laughing when Ben, who couldn’t carry a tune in a tote bucket, tried to do karaoke singing. Or how he rubbed her back when she got her period. Or how he’d bought her a starfish-shaped piñata stuffed with tiny oranges and chocolates when she was in bed with the flu.
In fact, she didn’t want to dredge up any memories at all that involved beds.
The twins clattered into the house, yelling something about needing potatoes. They skidded to a halt when they saw Labeck.
“Who’s he?” Sam asked.
“Wipe your feet,” Gran said. “And mind your manners. Now come over here and meet your aunt’s gentleman caller.”
Gentleman caller. The expression almost made Mazie smile, but then she saw that Labeck was smiling, and stopped herself.
Cautiously the boys approached Ben. When he offered his hand they both shook it, mumbling their names, then Sam asked, “How tall are you?”
“Six two. And a half.”
“You’ve got a funny nose,” observed Joey, Mr. Tact.
“My own fault,” Ben said. “Never raise your face mask when there’s a hockey puck around.”
“Are you Aunt Mazie’s boyfriend?” Sam asked.
“No,” Mazie said.
“Yes,” Ben said. “Although she doesn’t seem to realize it.”
Outside, a truck door slammed. The boys rushed out of the house, and Mazie could hear their excited voices talking to their dad.
“We’ve got a dog named Muffin.”
“And this tall guy with a funny nose came.”
“We shot a potato fifteen feet!”
“Oh, and Aunt Mazie’s here.”
The boys’ dad was Mazie’s older brother, Brendan Scully Maguire, better known as Scully. He entered the kitchen via the back porch, carefully wiping his feet because nobody dared get dirt on a kitchen floor when Gran was around.
“Sis,” he said, coming up and giving Mazie a bear hug and a smacking kiss on the cheek. “It’s been way too long.”
“How’s Emily?”
“She’s good. She needed the bed rest.” Scully cut his eyes meaningfully toward the twins. “If you know what I mean.” Then Scully turned to Ben.
She supposed there was nothing for it; she’d have to introduce them. “Scully Maguire,” Mazie said, “this is Ben Labeck.” Let Scully figure out their relationship for himself. Hopefully, he’d pull his overprotective-big-brother act and order Ben off the premises.
The two men shook. They were an interesting contrast: Scully short and stocky, with
the Maguire red hair, freckles, and permanently windburned skin. A lifetime of physical work had left him hard as an ironwood stump, with deep weather lines in his face. He wore a DeKalb Seed Corn cap, a faded denim shirt, and faded jeans with rolled-up cuffs.
Labeck was built rangier, with long arms and legs, wide shoulders and narrow hips. Like Mazie, he was thirty years old. The men took each other’s measure as they shook. Apparently Labeck passed some kind of test whose rules were only understood by males, because the first thing out of Scully’s mouth was an insult, which was his stamp of approval.
“You don’t look like as big a dope as what Mazie usually drags home,” he said.
Ben nodded. “Good to hear.”
“So you helping us out here for the week, too?” Scully asked.
“No,” Mazie said promptly.
“Of course he’s staying,” Gran said. “I’ll get the guest room ready. And I’ll need help, Mazie, what with your gentleman caller staying for supper.”
Chapter Four
“Bonaparte,” Gran said. “That’s an unusual name. French, isn’t it? Are you descended from Napoleon?”
“Nothing that exciting,” Ben said. “Bonaparte is my mother’s family name.”
“And you’re from Canada?” Gran asked.
“Quebec Province. A town called St. Amelie near the United States border.”
“You sound like an American,” Scully observed.
“That’s because I’ve been living in the States since I was eighteen,” explained Ben, who was enduring the third degree with remarkably good grace.
They were eating supper in the dining room because Gran believed that the kitchen table was okay for lunch and breakfast, but decent lace curtain Irish like the Maguires ate their suppers in the dining room.
Ben ate ravenously, remarking on how delicious everything was and outrageously flattering Gran, who seemed to enjoy the compliments. There were fresh greens from the garden served with homemade buttermilk dressing, pork roast and gravy, mashed potatoes, sugar snap peas, four kinds of rolls, and three kinds of cheese. Muffin, who’d sussed out Sam and Joey as pushovers, crouched beneath the boys’ chairs waiting for them to smuggle him tidbits.
“Muffin isn’t supposed to eat table scraps,” Mazie told the boys. “You aren’t feeding him under the table, are you?”
Sam and Joey looked her straight in the eye, and then, in true Maguire fashion, told a bald-faced lie. “Nuh-uh,” they chorused, eyes wide and innocent.
Labeck stifled a laugh. Mazie looked over at him from directly across the table. It felt strange having Ben Labeck here in the house where she’d grown up, almost as strange as not seeing her parents and her brother Jimmy here. Mazie’s parents lived in Florida, near a clinic that could treat her dad’s condition. Mike Maguire had been severely injured in a farm accident several years ago, suffering a head injury that had left him in a coma. He’d survived, but his internal circuit breakers were scrambled. The doctors said it was transient global amnesia—short-term memory loss similar to dementia in some ways, but not as debilitating. Scully had taken over the farm, while Jimmy, uninterested in farming, had moved to Minneapolis and worked as a building contractor.
Gran directed an expectant gaze at Ben. “Now, how was it that you and Mazie met?”
Ben halted in the middle of shoveling in a forkful of mashed potatoes, shooting Mazie a desperate look.
You’re on your own there, she telegraphed back to him.
“Well,” Ben said, obviously floundering, “when Mazie … umm … had the opportunity to leave her … umm, place of residence—”
“Broke out of prison, you mean,” Joey supplied.
“Every kid in our class was jealous of us,” Sam said.
“Right.” Ben grinned. “So your aunt broke out of prison, terrorized six counties, and outwitted a federal marshal. And I sort of helped her.”
The Maguires’ eyes swiveled to Mazie as though this was a verbal Ping-Pong game. She took a deep breath, then said, “Ben hid me in his apartment. He should have turned me in, because he could have been charged with obstructing justice and gone to jail himself. Instead he helped me find the person responsible for my husband’s murder—”
“You had a husband?” Sam asked, frowning.
Mazie nodded.
“But he got killed, right?” This was Joey.
“Yes. Everyone thought I’d done it, and that’s why I had to go to prison.”
Sam started to ask another question, but Katie Maguire apparently thought they were getting into dangerous waters and decided to change the subject. “What do you do for a living, Bonaparte?”
“Make it Ben, okay? I’m a camera technician for a TV station.”
“In Los Angeles,” Mazie said.
“No,” Ben corrected. “I quit there. I asked for my old job back, at WPAK in Milwaukee. I’ll be starting back there next week.”
“Cameraman,” Gran said. “That must be exciting.”
Ben shrugged. “Sometimes it is. Most of the time it’s just pileups on the highway, blizzards, house fires—that kind of thing.”
“We had a house fire near here just yesterday,” Gran said. “The neighbors down the road, the Carnahans—their house burned to the ground.”
This got even the twins’ attention.
“Everyone got out alive, thank God,” Gran went on. “Their barn didn’t catch fire so they’ve still got their livestock, but the house is completely destroyed. Four kids and the parents, all of them without a stitch of clothing or a stick of furniture, poor souls.”
Gran turned to Mazie. “You know Teresa Carnahan, don’t you? She was Teresa Hinz before she got married, a few years ahead of you in school. She was one of the queens. Nothing but bad luck for those queens. It’s the Miss Quail Hollow Curse.”
Katie Maguire was the most down-to-earth, commonsense person Mazie knew, but an undercurrent of Irish superstition ran through her, impervious to reason. When Gran went to bed her rosary had to be placed just so on her bedside table. When her St. Christopher statue fell off her dashboard and broke, she took it as a warning and refused to drive until a new statue was installed. She was careful not to step on sidewalk cracks, walk under ladders, or open umbrellas in the house. Pray to the Lord, but throw salt over your shoulder—just in case: that was her philosophy.
“Gran,” Mazie said gently, “there is no Miss Quail Hollow Curse.”
“Then how do you explain how three of those queens are dead, and none of them forty years old yet? What are the odds? Look at that Annie Shottenstein, killed in a car crash only two years after she won the title.”
“That wasn’t a curse. That was stupidity.” It apparently had never occurred to Annie Shottenstein, whose talent number ought to have been “If I Only Had a Brain,” that driving ninety miles an hour on a curve was a bad idea.
“What about Janelle Weiss, then?” Gran said. “Brains out the wazoo, attended Stanford on a scholarship, and she died when her car drove off a cliff. She wasn’t speeding and the weather was sunny and clear.”
Mazie shrugged. “It was in San Jose. Weird stuff happens in California.” A lot of Wisconsinites shared that view. Cults, earthquakes, mudslides—you were just asking for trouble if you moved to California.
“All right, Miss Smarty Pants—what about Jeanette Arpell—died from a drug overdose. And Hannah Lensmeier? In and out of rehab for her drinking problem. That Gonzales girl—what’shername—”
“Kayla?”
“Right. Got hooked on meth and lost all her teeth.”
“Who wants dessert?” Mazie held up the lemon Bundt cake, still warm from the oven, hoping to divert Gran. Everyone was quiet for a few minutes, happily digging into the cake, which Mazie had baked herself. It had a lemon curd center and a vanilla glaze and—even if she said so herself—was delicious.
But as a diversion, it was short-lived.
“Then of course there’s Miss Quail Hollow 2002,” Gran said, eying Mazie meaningfully. �
��Convicted of murdering her husband, sentenced to life in prison—what is that if not the Curse at work?”
Bang!
Everyone turned to look at Ben Labeck, who’d slammed down his coffee mug and appeared to be choking on his cake. The twins jumped out of their chairs and pounded him on the back.
“Mazie,” he wheezed between coughs, “was in a beauty pageant?”
Chapter Five
“It was an achievement pageant,” Mazie snapped.
Scully guffawed. “Mazie didn’t tell you, Ben? Well, lordalmighty, sis—why so modest? You, Mr. Labeck, have the honor of dating a genuine vintage beauty queen, slightly tattered around the edges, but still—”
“It was years ago.” Mazie shot Scully her shut-up-now glare. “Nobody cares about that stuff anymore.”
“Not care—what are you talking about, Mazie? I care.” Ben’s eyes glinted evilly. “I definitely want to hear about this. Did you have to parade around in bikinis and heels?”
“The whole ball o’ wax,” Gran told him, grinning. “Mazie kicked those other girls’ butts. Prettiest Miss Quail Hollow ever, let me tell you.”
“You don’t have to. I can see it for myself,” Ben said.
Mazie’s face went the color of the beet relish.
Gran patted Mazie’s knee. “Oh, come on, honey. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”
“Yes, it is! It branded me for life as a shallow, empty-headed twit.”
“Oh, hell, Mazie—you didn’t have to enter a pageant to prove that,” Scully said.
Mazie chucked a dinner roll at him. “I only entered the pageant for the scholarship. Why is it that a guy whose only skill is dribbling a ball gets a full ride through college while a girl has to parade around half-naked to get a measly one-semester scholarship?”
“Don’t pay any attention to Scully,” Gran said. “He bragged his head off when you won the pageant. We were all proud of you, Mazie, but I have to admit I was a tad nervous about it too, your being queen only a year after that poor little Fanchon girl.”
“Canwebeexcused?” the twins interrupted. Without waiting for an answer, they bolted from the table and ran outside, Muffin at their heels, yapping excitedly.
Tangled Thing Called Love: Life and Love on the Lam (A Loveswept Contemporary Romance) Page 2