And she was complex, he was certain of that. Last night she had been a sexy harem girl; this morning, a fresh-faced farm girl. She’d played it cool and wary, but her racing pulse and dilating eyes belied her interest. She was obviously intelligent, but incredibly obstinate whenever he suggested professional medical care.
Michael was more than interested. He was intrigued.
When he pulled into the private lot behind the Pub nearly a half an hour later, he hadn’t managed to come up with any answers, but he would. He glanced at his watch. Ten a.m. He had told her he’d stop by around six. Only eight hours to go.
“Where have you been?” Shane asked suspiciously when Michael entered through the private back entrance into the large Pub kitchen. Shane gripped a mug of coffee like a lifeline. He was unshaven, and his eyes were a little bloodshot, but otherwise he didn’t look too bad. The fact that he was alone in the kitchen at this hour spoke volumes. If Callaghan tradition held, the rest of them probably wouldn’t make an appearance until noon at least.
Without going into too much detail, Michael explained about Maggie’s accident.
“Shit. Is she okay?”
“Yeah, I think so.” Michael pictured Maggie as he had left her – snuggled into the oversized couch with her cheeks pink and her green eyes sparkling. He rubbed the center of his chest absently when that same warming sensation he felt in the car earlier started up again.
“Jesus.”
“What?”
Shane looked horrified, backing toward the stairs that led up to their private living quarters. “You’re smiling. Fuck, Mick. Not you, too.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Shane groaned, mumbling something about ‘another one biting the dust’ as he made his way up the stairs, leaving Michael grinning as he started pulling ingredients from the fridge and cupboards.
Chapter Eight
“What do you think you’re doing?” Ian’s voice was hoarse, his eyes red as he emerged from the room he shared with his fiancé Lexi and saw Michael sitting in front of the large, digital screen. Michael wasn’t surprised; Ian did not take kindly to anyone touching the bank of high-grade computer equipment that easily took up the length of the entire wall. As the resident genius when it came to anything digital, Ian was very protective of his machines, and took it quite personally if anyone messed with them. For that reason, Ian kept them all well-stocked with the latest and greatest laptops and notebooks. Ian’s things were strictly off-limits.
“Drink that,” Michael said, indicating a thermos he’d placed beside the monitor. Ian looked at it skeptically, then twisted off the lid and took a sniff.
“The Cure?” Ian blinked in disbelief.
“The Cure,” Michael confirmed. No one knew exactly what was in Michael’s “Cure”, but it was known to end the effects of even the worst bender almost instantly. He rarely mixed it up for anyone, a firm believer in making his brothers reap the fruits of their actions. When he did, it wasn’t for free.
“What’s the price, bro?”
Michael scanned the room. “Where’s Lex?”
“Sleeping,” Ian said smugly. “I don’t think she’ll be getting up any time soon.” Judging by the arrogant smile on his face, Michael had a pretty good idea how Ian had spent a good part of the night. That was one of the benefits of having your wife-to-be nearby after spending the evening drinking and watching women dance seductively all around you.
Michael nodded. “I need you to run a profile.”
“That’s all?” Ian asked suspiciously.
“And we keep it between us, for now.” He would have preferred to keep Maggie to himself for a little while longer, but Michael believed in being prepared. Ian could definitely give him some valuable background and save him a lot of time. Besides, they all had their little secrets, didn’t they?
Ian narrowed his eyes, no doubt suspecting a catch. Michael simply smiled in return. Apparently, Ian must have felt bad enough to chance it. “Done.” He snatched up the thermos and downed the brew before Michael had a chance to change his mind.
Michael waited patiently as Ian stumbled toward the bathroom. He made a fresh pot of coffee in the little kitchenette, then contented himself by munching on some of the cookies Maggie sent along with him and doing a few basic searches. Damn, but the cookies were good. Half the tub was gone by the time Ian emerged fifteen minutes later, showered, shaved, and looking like a new man.
“I’m telling you, Mick, you could make a fortune on that. You’re a chemical genius, you know that?”
“Yeah, so you say.” But Michael was pleased with his brother’s praise.
“You give this to anyone else?”
“No. Only you.”
“Awesome.” Ian grinned. He grabbed some coffee and sat down, flexing his fingers. “So, who are we stalking today?”
“I want anything and everything you can tell me about Maggie Flynn.”
Ian narrowed his eyes. “Personal or business?”
Michael didn’t answer. He didn’t have to; the look on his face said it all. Ian smiled knowingly. “Right. Personal, then.”
With skill, speed, and the knowledge of how to bypass the security on just about any system, Ian quickly assembled a baseline bio. “Magdalena Aislinn Flynn. Age thirty. Only daughter of Seamus and Erin Flynn, who emigrated back to Ireland when their daughter was just five, leaving her to be raised by her grandparents, both now deceased.”
Michael’s brows drew together. Why would a mother and father leave their only child? “Any idea why?”
Ian shook his head. “No, but I can probably find out with a little more time.”
Michael considered it. He sensed a story there, but he was already pushing acceptable limits by using Ian’s skills to violate her privacy. He wanted to keep the fact-finding to general, semi-publicly available knowledge as much as possible for now. Anything that personal, he would prefer to hear it from Maggie herself.
“No, that’s fine. Go on.”
“She graduated near the top of her class at Pius Catholic High School. Double-majored in Business Administration and Logistics at the state university where she got her Bachelor’s. Worked in the city for a while in the IT department of Dumas Industries. Resigned suddenly a little more than a year ago. Never been in trouble with the law – not even so much as a parking ticket. Hey, are those cookies?”
Michael smoothly moved the box out of Ian’s reach without looking up. “What about medical records? Travel info? Phone records?”
Ian’s fingers flew across the keyboard. “Last recorded exam was about thirteen years ago. Looks like the mandatory one they make you do for college admission. Nothing remarkable. Guess she has something against doctors.” Ian laughed. “Sucks for you, man, huh?”
Michael shot him a withering glance. Ian cleared his throat and continued. “No passport – looks like she was born here. No online reservations in the last five years, unless she used an alias, of course. Has a mobile...” Ian whistled softly “... that she’s amassed a total of twenty-seven minutes on. In the last two years.”
So Maggie was quiet and shy, tended to stick close to home and kept to herself. Had he not seen her house, spent some time with her this morning, it would have been difficult to reconcile those facts with the harem-girl seductress he’d met last night. Such a huge deviation from what appeared to be her normal, everyday life. It begged him to ask the question – why?
“Ah, here’s something. One credit card – personal, non-business, with accounts at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.” Ian chuckled. “Judging by her order history, she’s a big fan of Salienne Dulcette. You could arrange an intro, get in her good graces. Maybe that will help her overlook the whole doctor thing.”
Salienne Dulcette, New York Times bestselling author of erotic romance nearly ten years running, was well known to the Callaghans as Stacey Connelly, the wife of one of their cousins in the next town.
“Oh,” he continued. “And she’s
purchased at least a dozen exotic dance DVD’s – everything from belly dancing to Zumba.” Ian sat back, taking a long pull from his mug and eyeing the cookies longingly. “So how’d you meet her anyway?”
“She’s the redhead that danced at your bachelor party last night. Ended up doing a header off the stage right afterwards, gave herself a nice little concussion in the process.”
“I’ll be damned. Let me guess - you played the role of the concerned physician.” Ian’s eyes glittered.
“Something like that.”
“Did she give you those cookies?”
“Maybe.”
Ian’s eyes grew almost lusty with longing. “They smell awesome. You’re going to share, right?”
Michael pointed to the empty Thermos. “I already paid.”
“For this,” Ian said, waving his hand in front of the computer screen. “Public info, and pretty vanilla stuff at that. You probably could have discovered that all for yourself through Google. But for some of those - ” he pointed at the cookies, “ – I can tell you what you won’t find online.”
Michael considered it. Ian was probably going to do that anyway, but far be it from him to forego such an opportunity when it presented itself; that was just Ian. And there was no better source of personal, local information than his roguish brother. Ian was always plugged in to the local news and gossip. As a general rule, people tended to bare their souls to bartenders, but Ian had turned it into an art form. If there was anything to be learned here, it would most likely come from Ian.
“Six cookies. If it’s worth it, I’ll give you six more.”
“Mick, it’s worth it, trust me.” Ian stuffed one of the cookies into his mouth and chewed, letting his eyes roll back in his head. “Holy shit these are good. What is that... coconut mixed in the dark chocolate? I should take a few of these to Lexi.”
Ian’s bride-to-be, Alexis Kattapoulos, was currently the head chef at one of the hottest restaurants along the East Coast. She coveted traditional, passed-down-thru-the-ages type of recipes. Maggie’s cookies would be right up her alley.
Michael waited patiently while Ian wolfed down a few more and took another gulp of coffee.
“Okay, so you saw that Maggie worked for Dumas Industries, right?” Michael nodded. Half the town worked for Dumas at one point or another; it was easily the largest employer in the county.
“Well, apparently Maggie caught the interest of the golden boy himself, Spencer Dumas.”
Michael scowled. He knew Spencer Dumas. The man was the epitome of the wealthy playboy. Never did an honest day’s work in his life, had to be pulled out of more than a few scrapes by his rich father. Made a point to be at every newsworthy event with at least one centerfold-worthy female on his arm.
“Maggie doesn’t seem to fit his usual type.”
“No,” Ian agreed. “But, rumor has it that Maggie’s land is.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Couldn’t have said it better myself. Dumas wined and dined her for months until she finally said yes. Shortly afterward, she caught him doing the nasty with his personal assistant, overheard him bragging about how slick he was in seducing her, how once they were married, the land would become part of the Dumas Industries assets. Apparently he wasn’t too complimentary in the process, either.”
No wonder Maggie was skeptical of his intentions. That must have been what Sherri had been alluding to. It certainly explained a lot. Michael had a sudden, fierce urge to make Spencer Dumas pay for making Maggie doubt herself.
“Maggie broke off the engagement and quit on the spot, leaving Dumas to explain to daddy how he fucked up royally. Apparently the company had been depending heavily on acquiring her land. Immediately after she showed Dumas her backside on the way out, the shit hit the fan. Several partner companies backed out of a few key projects and DI stock took a decent hit.”
“That had to hurt.”
Ian laughed. “Yeah, a little. Spencer’s been trying to cozy back up to her, saying he’s seen the error of his ways, he’s a changed man, blah, blah, blah, but she’s having no part of it. Actually threatened to slap a restraining order on him if he didn’t leave her in peace.”
Michael’s chest swelled with pride while a possessive fury burned simultaneously in his blood. He barely kept his lip from curling back in a snarl. There was no way in hell Spencer Dumas – or any other man for that matter – would be cozying up to Maggie again.
The unfamiliar surge gave him pause. He had met Maggie less than twenty-four hours earlier, and knew next to nothing about her. Michael was neither impulsive nor prone to such strong, visceral emotions.
“So what is she doing now?” he asked, trying to inject some note of rationality into his voice.
Ian swiveled back to the computer, his fingers a blur. “Looks like she picks up some consulting jobs on the side. She’s building up a good reputation, but that takes time, especially if you don’t have a lot of connections. Ten to one Dumas isn’t stoked about singing her praises, and I doubt she’d use him as a reference anyway. If her last tax return is accurate, she’s barely making ends meet. The property’s hers, but the taxes alone on that much acreage are substantial.”
“How much are we talking about?”
Ian’s fingers danced over the keys. “Two hundred acres at least, all prime agricultural land on the south-facing side of the mountain,” he reported. “Maggie’s family has been acquiring the land quietly in parcels over the better part of the last century.”
Ian paused, looking thoughtful. “Hey – I know that place. Mom used to take us there when we were little to pick our own apples and shit. Had the biggest goddamned pumpkins for Halloween carving, too.”
Michael remembered that, too. “Older couple? We used to go on hayrides there every fall.”
“Yeah! Man, that property has got to be worth a fortune. Southern exposure, overlooks the lake. No wonder Dumas wants it.”
Well, at least now Michael understood why Maggie had agreed to dance – she needed the money. It was the one thing that he just couldn’t reconcile.
“Thanks, man,” he said, pushing the last few cookies toward Ian.
Michael looked up to find his brother watching him intently. Ian whistled softly. “So it’s like that, huh?”
“Like what?”
Ian grinned. “Right. The denial stage. I remember it well.”
The snow started falling somewhere around noon. Michael was already showered and dressed, hanging downstairs in the bar room with Jake and Ian. The crowd was small, consisting mostly of a few of the locals, grabbing a few and talking about the impending storm. What was originally supposed to only be a few inches from a quickly moving clipper was now forecast as an all-out blizzard. Eyes were drawn toward the mounted flat screens as each subsequent weather update seemed worse than the last.
By four o’clock Michael couldn’t sit still any longer. He still had two hours before he was expected at Maggie’s, but simply waiting, biding his time wasn’t working for him. He felt anxious, and news of the powerful nor’easter bearing down on them was doing nothing to ease that. Everything Ian had told him was weighing heavily on his mind as well. All he could think about was Maggie. In the house, alone, injured.
“I’m heading out,” Michael said, convincing himself that there really was no good reason to delay any longer. He’d already thrown an overnight bag in the back of the truck, temporarily exchanging his Jag for one of the many vehicles they kept at his brother Sean’s garage. If things went the way he wanted them to, he wouldn’t be back this evening.
He was glad he left when he did. What should have been a thirty minute drive quickly surpassed an hour before he’d even gone halfway. Clearly the reporters urging people to get their errands done before the bulk of the storm hit were not broadcasting from the mountain, where the roads were fast becoming treacherous, the visibility measured in mere feet instead of yards.
Michael breathed a sigh of relief when he brought the truck to
a stop in front of Maggie’s house. The snow was already piling up in drifts along the porch. The weather didn’t bother him as much as the thought of breaking his promise to Maggie. At least he was only a few minutes later than he’d said he’d be.
He’d barely stepped one foot on the porch step when the front door flew open. Maggie stood there, her red hair fanning around her like some kind of ruby halo, her green eyes wide and filled with – worry? Michael felt that odd tingling in his chest again.
He offered an apologetic smile as she ushered him inside. “Sorry I’m late.”
Chapter Nine
She’d been watching the news reports on and off all day, waiting for the call she was certain would come, informing her that he wouldn’t be coming after all. But he hadn’t called, and she vacillated between worry and hope that he might actually try to make it and certain disappointment that he wouldn’t.
As the clock had drew closer to six, Maggie cleaned up the kitchen and went to the living room to wait. The large window looked out onto the driveway, now already covered with several inches of heavy, wet snow. It was dark as pitch beyond the meager reach of the porch light; all Maggie could see were the wicked whirls of white whipping around the porch railings.
Minutes ticked by, the howl of the wind and the rattle of the windows doing nothing to ease her anxiety. As weather and road conditions rapidly worsened, the certainty that Michael would not be coming grew. Even George was anxious. He didn’t particularly like storms, and stuck close by Maggie.
For the hundredth time, Maggie looked at the silent phone, then picked up the receiver to make sure she still had a dial tone. Maybe she should call the Pub and tell Michael not to bother. She would have felt horrible if something had happened to him while he was trying to come to check on her.
Assuming he still planned on coming, that was.
It seemed like an eternity later when she finally saw the slash of powerful headlights cutting through the darkness. With a rush of profound relief, Maggie limped her way to the front door as fast as her aching body would allow.
House Calls: Callaghan Brothers, Book 3 Page 6