Reeve McKenna let out a long, ragged sigh. “I’m sorry, Maggie—about everything.”
It hurt Maggie a little that he regretted what had happened, but she wouldn’t have revealed that for anything. “Which is surely why you abducted me from the inn and brought me here,” she said with saucy contempt.
Dark eyebrows arched in a tanned, ruggedly hewn face. “You think I want to—as you put it—seduce you again?”
Maggie went red and set the teacup and saucer aside, lest she drop them. “What else should I think?” she hissed, not wanting anyone to overhear.
Reeve settled back in his chair and regarded Maggie’s flushed face and stiff countenance for a long time, his lips twitching slightly, his eyes laughing outright. Just when she was about to leap out of her chair and slap him silly, he assumed a serious expression and said, “You’re quite wrong. I regret what happened and I brought you here simply to prove to you that you’re safe with me.”
“Safe?!” Maggie blurted out. “How can you say that after last night?”
Once again Reeve sighed. “I lost my head—I wanted you so damned much, and you didn’t exactly try to discourage me—”
Maggie’s blush returned. “Why did you steal my papers?” she demanded.
To her utter surprise, Reeve reached out and took both her hands into his own. He spoke with quiet sincerity. “It occurred to me that Duncan might find them and put them to a use that doesn’t bear mentioning. You’re still free, though—I’ll make no demands on you.”
Maggie had neither the strength nor the wit to free her hands. “But you’re not planning to return the papers, either, are you?”
Regretfully, Reeve shook his head. “I think they’re safer in my keeping. If Duncan were to get his hands on them—”
“Mr. Kirk,” Maggie began pointedly, her shoulders aching because they were so stiff, “has been a perfect gentleman. And that, Mr. McKenna, is certainly more than I can say for you!”
Reeve chuckled, though there was no sign of amusement in his eyes. “There are worse things than not being a gentleman, Yank.”
Maggie finally managed to pull her hands from his. “Lady Cosgrove would never have sent me to Mr. Kirk’s house if she thought there was any danger!”
Reeve took up his drink again, and he finished it off before answering. “Lady Cosgrove is not familiar with Duncan’s true nature. I am.”
Maggie remembered Reeve’s beautiful mistress and all that had happened during the night, and she glared. “I don’t see how his ’true nature’ could be any worse than yours. Does he keep a mistress and then seduce other women behind her back?”
Reeve’s jawline grew taut and then he thrust himself out of his chair with a suddenness that made Maggie start. But he only moved away, standing with his back to her, his gaze fixed on the empty fireplace. “Loretta is no longer my mistress,” he said in a voice so low that Maggie had to strain to hear him. “When I realized how much I wanted you, I asked her to leave my house.”
Maggie could imagine what it must feel like to know this magnificent man on an intimate basis and then be shunted out of his life without warning when he found someone new to dally with. If she gave in to Reeve McKenna and the feelings he stirred inside her, she would one day find herself in Loretta’s position, and the possibility didn’t bear considering. “I won’t be your courtesan, Mr. McKenna, so it appears that you have acted hastily.”
He turned slightly to regard Maggie with a sober expression that was somehow tainted with mockery at one and the same time. “I’m not the only one who has acted rashly, Miss Chamberlin. You gave me something last night that the man you marry will sorely miss.”
Even though the words had not been spoken in anger or contempt, they wounded Maggie because they were all too true. She was probably ruined for a decent man. She forced back tears, not willing to show Reeve any more weakness than she already had.
Reeve came and crouched before her chair, his voice gentle. “Have you considered the possibility, Maggie, that you may be carrying my child?”
Maggie’s eyes were shimmering when she lifted them to his face. Still unable to speak, she nodded.
“If you find out that you are pregnant, I want you to come to me immediately.”
“W-why?” Maggie managed to ask. She was thousands of miles from home, she was poor, she was facing a prospect that had driven other women to desperate lengths. The misery of it was quite nearly too much to bear.
Again, he took her hands. “Because I’ll marry you, Yank,” he said with quiet patience, as though he’d expected Maggie to know that a wealthy, powerful man such as himself would be interested in making a servant girl his true and legal wife.
“You can’t be serious.”
“I am serious. Nothing in the world could matter to me as much as a child of my own.”
Maggie felt a certain sadness at his words, odd as it was. She wanted, on some level, to be the person who mattered most to Reeve McKenna. “But you have Elisabeth—”
“I love Elisabeth,” he answered softly, “but she isn’t my daughter, she’s my niece.”
Maggie swallowed. “But she calls you Papa.”
“That’s only because she doesn’t remember my brother.” Reeve’s eyes had a faraway look in them now; unconsciously, he fingered the brass medallion he was never without.
Suddenly, despite all her other problems, Maggie’s concern was focused on that strange bit of brass hanging from its golden chain. “What is that?” she asked in a whisper.
Reeve let the medallion fall against his chest again. “I guess it’s a good luck charm,” he said, and that curious distance, tantamount to pain, was still visible in his eyes.
“Tell me about your brother,” Maggie ventured, guessing that Reeve’s brother and that odd talisman were somehow linked.
“Jamie and I were separated, years ago, on the trip out here from Dublin. I’ve been looking for him ever since.” Reeve rose, went back to his chair, and sank into it with a sigh that was almost forlorn. “I’ve hired detectives, gone everywhere I could think of myself—”
“But you never found him,” Maggie finished for him, saddened.
Reeve shook his head. His eyes were averted and his throat worked as he struggled to control some indefinable emotion.
“Elisabeth is his child?” Maggie pressed, though gently.
Reeve’s eyes swung to hers and he nodded. “The detectives found her, in Brisbane, in an orphanage. The people there told me that Elisabeth’s mother hadn’t been married to Jamie, though she’d left papers saying that he was the father of her child.”
Maggie had no doubt that Elisabeth was truly a McKenna; her aquamarine eyes were proof of that. “Why did this woman abandon Elisabeth?”
“She was sick,” Reeve replied on a distracted sigh. “According to the nuns at the orphanage, she died soon after she’d left Elisabeth with them.”
“Perhaps Elisabeth herself remembers something?”
Reeve looked at Maggie as though she were mad, but she knew that his annoyance was based in his deep disappointment at not finding his brother and not in anything she’d said or done. “Elisabeth was two at the time, and if she remembers anything, she can’t or won’t talk about it.”
Maggie didn’t ask if the little girl had been examined by a doctor; she knew this was something that a man as thorough as Reeve would not have overlooked. “Perhaps there was some trauma—”
Reeve nodded. “But what?” he demanded hoarsely. “What could steal away a child’s will to speak? And where was Jamie when all this was happening?”
Maggie looked down at her hands, not wanting to suggest the obvious: that death rather than choice might have separated Jamie McKenna from his child and the woman who had borne her.
“He isn’t dead,” Reeve said in a low voice that challenged Maggie’s secret suspicions. “If he were, I’d know it!”
Maggie was silent. She hoped that Reeve was right, that somewhere, somehow, Jamie McKenn
a was alive and well, waiting to be found.
“Are you hungry?” The question was so trivial, so ordinary, that it jolted Maggie out of her uncomfortable reflections.
“Yes, a little,” she answered honestly.
It was uncanny, but the black woman, clearly Reeve’s housekeeper, appeared again at just that moment. He asked for fruit and bread, and the simple fare was brought immediately.
Maggie ate in silence, wondering how she was going to get herself back to Sydney before Reeve could compromise her again, and when the meal was over, he suddenly took her hand and pulled her outside. They rounded the grand brick house to the rear garden and there, to Maggie’s delight, sat an enormous kangaroo.
“This is Mathilda,” Reeve said by way of introduction. Mathilda regarded Maggie with interest.
Maggie was awed. “Is she tame?”
At Reeve’s nod Maggie approached the fascinating creature and reached out tentatively to touch it. Mathilda’s fur felt coarse instead of soft, and if there was a baby hidden in her pouch, Maggie couldn’t see it, though she did cast several polite glances in that direction.
Suddenly bored with the American, Mathilda turned and hopped off across the open field, moving at a speed that left Maggie openmouthed with wonder and delight. If only she’d had someone to write to, someone to tell.
There was sadness in her eyes when she turned back to face Reeve again. He understood loneliness; Maggie sensed that and she was comforted. Suddenly, it was as important to her that Reeve find his lost brother as it was to him.
“Elisabeth likes animals,” he said, taking Maggie’s hand in a way that seemed perfectly natural. “She has a few stray wallabies by the barn. Would you like to see them?”
Maggie nodded eagerly, and Reeve led her around the back of the barn, where a wire pen had been built. Reddish-brown wallabies, much smaller versions of kangaroos, hopped about inside the pen, and there was a folded blanket suspended from the back of an old chair.
Before Maggie could ask what it was for, a tiny bright-eyed head appeared above the edge of the blanket, peering cautiously this way and that.
“He’s an orphan,” Reeve explained quietly. “He needed a warm pouch, so Elisabeth and I made one for him.”
In a way, Reeve’s admission of this gentle act touched Maggie’s spirit even more deeply than his lovemaking had. She couldn’t speak for a moment, and her eyes were swimming with silly, sentimental tears.
If Reeve noticed, he pretended that he hadn’t, though his hand tightened on Maggie’s and, behind them, Goodness and Mercy giggled.
Reeve let go of Maggie’s hand and whirled, making a good-natured growling sound and stalking toward the delighted little girls. Their beautiful dark eyes shining, they shrieked with laughter and scampered away.
Maggie was sure they hadn’t gone far. She wondered if Elisabeth ever spoke to them when there were no adults around to hear.
The sky was beginning to grow dark and cloudy, and a swift wind came up from the south. In unspoken agreement Maggie and Reeve returned to the house, this time through a rear door.
The kitchen, roomy and immaculate, was empty. Maggie didn’t protest when Reeve led her up the rear stairway without a word of explanation, and she was, to her shame, actually disappointed when he deposited her in front of a door on the second floor and ordered her to make up for some of the rest she’d lost the night before.
All the same, Maggie was tired and, yawning, she opened the door and went in. The room was not large, but it was pleasant and airy, with a colorful patchwork quilt on a carefully polished brass bed. There was a rocking chair and, wealth upon wealth, a small shelf stuffed with books.
Maggie helped herself to one after dutifully removing her muddy shoes, and stretched out on the bed. She was asleep before she’d reached the end of the first page.
Reeve paced the parlor as he would have paced the study had he been in Sydney, fighting whatever it was inside him that made him crave the silken feel of Maggie’s flesh trembling against his own. Never in all his life had he been as obsessed with a woman as he was with this saucy, gray-eyed Yankee snippet, and he didn’t like the feeling, as treacherously pleasant as it was.
Kala entered the room silently, as she entered every room, and squatted in front of the fireplace to light the fire she’d laid earlier. The wind howled outside, sending huge droplets of rain lashing against the windows. When a blaze was crackling on the hearth, Kala left again.
She was a mystery to Reeve, ageless, as though she might have existed since the Dreamtime, the time of Aboriginal legend, before the start of recorded history. Kala might have been twenty, and she might have been a hundred and twenty, and because he didn’t want to think about Maggie Chamberlin, Reeve pondered his silent housekeeper.
An insistent pounding at the front door brought him out of his wanderings; to save Kala the trouble, he made his way into the entry hall and answered the knock himself.
Few things would have surprised him more than finding Loretta standing on his porch, wet to the skin. A wagon, probably hired at the inn, was just pulling away, the driver’s back hunched against the thundering rain.
“Aren’t you going to let me in?” Loretta asked sweetly, her lips curved in a smile that belied her sodden clothes, her drenched hair, and the forlorn feather drooping from the side of her once fashionable hat.
Reeve stepped back to admit her, having no other choice. “What are you doing here?” he managed to demand as Loretta made a beeline to the parlor fireplace.
She shook out her skirts and then tossed a smile back over one shoulder, countering Reeve’s question with one of her own. “Are my clothes still upstairs in our room, or have you tossed them out?”
Reeve scowled, wishing he could find it within himself to toss Loretta, as well as her damned clothes, out into the storm. “I don’t come here very often, Loretta,” he said evenly. “So your clothes are just where you left them.”
Loretta was shaking out her voluminous skirts again, leaving puddles of rainwater on the hearth. “Good,” she sighed softly, and then she countered that gentleness by flinging back her head and yelling, “Kala!”
Reeve winced, but before he could protest Loretta’s officious manner, Kala had appeared, silent as always, her expression questioning.
“I want a hot bath drawn,” Loretta dictated snappishly, “and I’ll have a glass of sherry the moment I’m settled in the tub. Once you’ve brought that, you may lay out—let’s see—my blue lawn gown. The one with the feathers stitched to the neckline.”
“Loretta—” Reeve began in a dangerous rumbling voice as Kala hurried off to start the bathwater running.
Loretta turned, her face puckered into a childish pout. “Oh, Reeve—surely you wouldn’t deny me the comforts of your home on such a nasty night! I don’t have anywhere else to go, after all—”
“You have the inn. And I’m taking you there as soon as you’ve changed clothes, so you might want to put on something more practical than lawn and feathers!”
Loretta’s dark eyes snapped. “So it’s true! You have brought that little Yankee scrap into this house!”
Loretta’s network of efficient informants never ceased to amaze Reeve. “Surely you didn’t come all the way from Sydney just to see if Maggie would be here?”
“Of course I didn’t. I knew you were here to race Samaritan and I came to try to talk some sense into you.”
Reeve kept his distance, his arms folded across his chest, one eyebrow rising in silent question.
“I can’t accept that it’s over,” Loretta said briskly. “You loved me once and I’ll make you love me again.”
“I never loved you and you never loved me, Loretta,” Reeve pointed out. “We agreed on that from the beginning, didn’t we?”
Theatrical tears swelled in Loretta’s eyes, shimmering in the firelight. “My feelings have changed.”
“Actually, it’s your fortunes that have changed, isn’t it? Have you found your allowance
inadequate for your needs, my dear?”
“You’re a beast,” Loretta muttered miserably, going so far as to let her shoulders sag and lower her head a little. “How can you say such things, after all I’ve been to you?”
Reeve sighed. There were times when it was impossible to reach this woman. “Take your bath, Loretta,” he said in exasperation. “Drink your sherry. Then prepare yourself for a trip to the inn, because you’re not spending the night in this house.”
A tear slipped down Loretta’s cheek—or was it a raindrop? Either way, she turned in a swirl of out-raged femininity and swept up the stairs to lounge in Reeve’s spacious marble bathtub.
Reeve nursed a foolish hope that she would be gone before Maggie awakened from her nap, knowing all the while that the wish would not be granted.
Maggie woke to the sound of a woman singing. The voice was full and rich, obviously that of a trained professional. She knew without question that Loretta Craig had come home.
Despair thickened in her throat, making it ache, but she would not cry. She tossed back the quilt that had covered her, sat up, and began the laborious task of putting her shoes back on. When she’d done that, she smoothed her hair, now slipping from its pins, and stood.
In the hallway outside her room the singing was louder, and Maggie could make out the words. Something quite fitting, about being a bird in a gilded cage.
Squaring her shoulders and lifting her chin, Maggie made her way down the front staircase. Please, God, she prayed silently, don’t let me cry in front of Reeve or that woman. I’ll be virtuous to the end of my life if You’ll just not let me cry.
When Maggie reached the bottom of the stairs, she was dry-eyed. Catching sight of Reeve pacing back and forth in the parlor just to her left, she hoped she truly would be able to be virtuous for the next twenty or thirty years.
“Maggie,” he said almost forlornly as she crossed the threshold and stood facing him, her hands caught together in front of her in a dignified manner.
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