“I know your number,” he corrected. “I can’t speak to you, though, unless you pick up. After leaving a dozen messages—”
“Thirteen,” she corrected, without thinking of the implication.
He chuckled. “Then you did get them.”
“Yes, I got them, but only a few minutes ago. Ashley’s seemed more urgent.”
“Then you did intend to call me back?” he asked skeptically.
“Eventually.”
“That’s what I figured. It wasn’t nearly soon enough to suit me. I decided I needed to be more proactive, so I came looking for your sister.”
“I’ll ask again—why?”
“To find out where you ran off to and why you left without a word to me.”
“I did not run off. I’m on vacation,” she said, sticking to her story.
“Do you usually take totally unscheduled vacations?”
“What makes you think this was unscheduled? I could have been planning it for months.”
“Were you?”
“No,” she admitted, “but you didn’t know that.”
“Actually I did. Veronica told me. She said this was highly unusual.”
“My assistant doesn’t know everything,” Maggie said defensively, because the truth was, she was not normally an impulsive person, except when it came to love. And that was a habit she was trying very hard to break. “Why does any of this matter to you?”
“Because something tells me that this sudden vacation has something to do with me.”
“Your ego needs a reality check.”
“Does it really? Okay, then, since you didn’t run off to avoid me, you won’t mind telling me where you are, so I can join you. I have a few days off.”
“As a matter of fact, I do mind,” she said emphatically, ignoring the fact that her blood had suddenly started humming with anticipation.
“Because you’re with another man?”
Maggie sighed. They both knew she wasn’t. She’d made the mistake of telling Rick it had been months since she’d dated anyone else. That stretch of celibacy had been her last drastic attempt to keep from making another mistake in the romance department. Sleeping with Rick had ruined a six-month track record she’d been very proud of.
“That’s not the issue,” she said. “I don’t want to see you.”
Rick chuckled. It was the laugh of a man who knew better. “Give me a couple of hours. I’ll bet I can make you change your mind. If I can’t, I’ll leave.”
It wouldn’t take him ten minutes, Maggie thought with self-derision. She had to keep him far, far away from Rose Cottage.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’ll call you when I get back. Maybe we can go out for drinks and catch up.”
She hung up before he could try to convince her to change her mind. She’d simply have to have faith that Ashley wouldn’t fall victim to Rick’s charm and draw him a blasted map.
It was dusk when a car pulled to a stop in the driveway at Rose Cottage. Filled with a sense of dread—and okay, maybe just a tiny little, traitorous zing of anticipation—Maggie peered out the window. Sure enough, Rick emerged from his low-slung Jaguar. Maggie’s pulse zipped straight into overdrive. Apparently her body hadn’t gotten the message that this man was bad for her. She couldn’t seem to drag herself away from the window. It had barely been a week since she’d last seen Rick, and she was drinking in the sight as if it had been months.
The man was seriously gorgeous. He moved like a sexy, predatory cat, radiating confidence and danger.
He was also the kind of low-key man who could carry off jeans and a T-shirt with a wrinkled dress jacket and move from work to a cocktail party and never appear out of place. Maybe it was because the faded jeans fit in a way that kept all eyes on his trim butt and excellent thighs. No one—no sane woman, at least—ever gave two figs what he was wearing. Not that he didn’t look fantastic in a tux, as well. He did. He’d accompanied Maggie to a black-tie event one night, and it had required all of her willpower not to attack him in the back of the limo he’d rented for the evening. She also happened to know for a fact that he looked pretty spectacular in nothing at all.
His brown, sun-streaked hair was a little too long and his jaw unshaven, but the careless look, too, suited him. The impression he exuded was one of total self-confidence, which, of course, he had. In spades, as a matter of fact. Who else would show up where he’d been told only a few hours ago that he was most definitely unwanted?
Resigned to dealing with him, Maggie opened the door and waited on the threshold. Rick grinned when he saw her.
“Hi, honey, I’m home.”
“I’m not your honey and this is absolutely not your home,” she said, blocking the way when he would have walked right in. She was trying really, really hard to muster the strength and indignation necessary to keep him on the other side of this door. Once he crossed the threshold, she could no longer be held accountable for her actions.
His grin never faltered. “Not happy to see me?”
“No.”
“Not even a tiny bit?”
“Absolutely not.”
He chuckled. “Liar.”
“I am not lying. How many ways do I have to say it?”
“Until you can do it without those telltale patches of red in your cheeks.”
“If my cheeks are red…” She could tell they were. Her skin was burning, in fact. “If they are, it’s because I find you infuriating. It takes a lot of nerve to come here after I told you not to.”
“Bravery should be rewarded, don’t you think?”
She had to fight to keep from smiling. The man was impossible, to say nothing of impossibly sexy.
“Go away, Rick. Please.”
His expression turned serious. “Only if you tell me why you’re so anxious to have me gone. Make me understand and I’ll go.”
She studied him skeptically. “Seriously? You’ll really go if I just tell you why I don’t want you here?”
“Promise,” he said solemnly. He even sketched a little cross over his heart.
Maggie regarded him with undisguised suspicion, but decided to take a chance that he would honor his promise. “Okay, then,” she said. “I don’t want you here because I don’t want to see you anymore.”
He nodded slowly. “In other words, it was great while it lasted, but it’s over, Rick.”
“Exactly,” she said, relieved that he’d caught on so quickly. “That was the rule from the very beginning, wasn’t it? Either of us could walk away at any time?”
He looked perplexed. “Did we discuss that?”
She thought back to the first night they’d tumbled into bed. There hadn’t been a lot of conversation, much less any outlining of the rules of engagement. “It was understood,” she asserted loftily.
He shook his head. “I guess I missed that. Besides, I’m not buying your act,” he said. “You may not want me here, but it’s because you’re running scared, not because you don’t feel any desire for me.”
Of all the times in the world for a man to suddenly develop insight, it had to be now, Maggie thought, beginning to feel trapped and desperate. She had to make him leave before she did something totally insane and jumped right back into bed with him. Her hormones were all but pleading with her to cave now and damn the consequences.
“You said you’d take my word for it,” she protested. “You promised to go. I expect you to honor that.”
He shrugged. “I lied. Well, I didn’t exactly lie.”
“Yes, unless you turn around and walk away right this second, then you lied,” she corrected.
“No,” he insisted. “I just wasn’t clear enough. I want more than a two-second explanation. I want the truth, the whole unvarnished truth. You say it’s over, I’ll take your word for it.”
“Thank you.” She started to shut the door.
“Not so fast,” he said. “I still want to know why it’s over.”
“I doubt your ego can take it,” she said
, seizing on an explanation that was likely to rattle him. “Are you sure you want to hear my reason?”
To her chagrin, he didn’t back down. If anything, he actually looked amused. “Try me.”
She searched for a delicate but unmistakable way to put it that would be guaranteed to take the wind out of his sails.
“You don’t do anything for me,” she said finally, managing to get the words out without tripping over the blatant lie.
Rather than looking insulted or even angry, he actually laughed. “Really?”
“Nothing,” she insisted. “No zip, no zing, nothing.”
“And it took how many times in my bed and yours for you to figure that out?”
“I was giving you the benefit of the doubt.”
“I see. Let me make sure I understand this. You’re not attracted to me, so you took off from Boston just to get away from me? That’s what you’re saying?”
She didn’t trust herself to speak, so she nodded.
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.
3
On 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, real
ly 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.
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