The room was empty, and Maggie was hungry. After a quick look around she helped herself to a biscuit and jam and slipped out the rear door into the garden. Arranging her skirts carefully around her, she sat on the ground beneath an acacia tree in full leaf and opened the book to read.
She studied the dialogue carefully, even though she knew the entire play almost by heart, and then nodded off into a fitful sleep. She hadn’t rested well the night before, of course, or the night before that, and she was exhausted.
A tickling sensation along Maggie’s cheekbone awakened her. She focused on the frame of a man, crouching in front of her in the grass, and again knew the hope that Reeve had forgiven her.
It was a fleeting fancy, for the man who had tickled her with a blade of grass was much smaller than Reeve, and of fair coloring. Maggie came wide-awake with a wrench. “Philip!”
Her erstwhile suitor smiled at her. “Hello, Magpie,” he said softly.
Flushed, Maggie fussed a moment with her skirts and her tumbledown hair. “What are you doing here?” she asked.
Philip chuckled at her uneasiness, as if to reassure her. “We’re going to be working together. Given that, I decided that it would be a good idea to make amends for what I did. Or didn’t do.”
Maggie composed herself while she watched Philip consider the question, and when it appeared he’d decided, she said, “I’m glad we didn’t marry, Philip. We both would have been unhappy.”
Philip nodded, and the expression in his amber eyes was gentle. “You’re in love with Reeve McKenna, unless I miss my guess. But things aren’t going too well, are they, Mag-pie?”
Dropping her eyes and biting down on her lower lip, Maggie shook her head. “Not well at all,” she confirmed in a whisper.
Philip curved an index finger under her chin and lifted it. “I’d box his ears for you if I dared,” he said. “Since I don’t, I’ll set myself to making things as easy for you in the production as I can.”
The play was the one thing Maggie had left of this debacle that had overtaken her almost the minute she’d stepped off the ship from England, and she brightened at the thought of it. Perhaps if she threw herself into the role of Kate, if she allowed it to consume her, she would forget Reeve McKenna. Why, by the time he came back from his sea voyage, she might have progressed to disdaining him. She might even be the toast of Sydney, with men twice as handsome and twice as rich seeking her hand.
She sagged. It didn’t really matter how handsome or well-to-do those other men might be: None of them would be Reeve. “When will we start work, Philip?” she asked, her voice small and uncertain.
“Tomorrow,” Philip answered, rising from his crouching position to his full height. “I’ll send a carriage ’round for you at half past nine, so be ready.”
“I will,” Maggie promised, entangling her feet in her skirts and nearly falling when she tried to stand. If Philip hadn’t been quick to catch her arm, she would have tumbled into the grass.
Surprisingly, Philip bent his head to give Maggie a soft, tentative kiss. “Be very careful, little one,” he warned. “There are sharks in the waters you’re sailing, and they have big teeth.”
With that cryptic remark Philip turned and walked away, taking the stone walkway that led around the side of the house. Maggie closed her book and sighed. She hated it when people made ambiguous statements like that and then just walked away.
She started back toward the house, only to have the idea of visiting Tansy dawn upon her. Tucking her book into the pocket of her dress, Maggie decided to try to find her friend. She would telephone Lady Cosgrove for the address.
In the kitchen she found Cora sitting with a cup of tea, her shoes off, her face pallid.
Pleased to see her new friend, Maggie smiled. “Hello, Cora.”
Cora gave a cordial nod and smiled wearily. “I may be too old to look after a four-year-old,” she confided out of the blue. “Maybe I should have stayed in Chicago.”
Still set on finding and using a telephone, Maggie was somewhat inattentive. “Have you been in Australia long?”
“Only a few months,” Cora replied, taking a delicate sip of her tea. Her expression was serious again. “Meant to marry Henry Carver, a missionary. But he passed on, poor dear, while I was still at sea.”
Maggie’s mind had stopped its wandering. “Oh, Cora, that’s terrible—I’m so sorry. Do you ever think of going back?”
“Hardly anything but that,” Cora confided. “If I can keep this job for six more months or so, I’ll have my passage saved.”
Maggie remembered a time when Reeve had offered Cora’s position to her and deduced that the governess couldn’t have been in residence long. “Are you making any progress with Elisabeth?”
Cora shook her head. “No, but then, I’ve been in this household for only a fortnight. She’s a strange child, Elisabeth. She’s intelligent—I suspect she can read, at least a few words. When I brought out my alphabet cards, with an apple for A and such, she looked at me as though I were a fool. But she mouthed the letters, even if she wouldn’t say them aloud.”
“She must have suffered some kind of trauma, though I can’t imagine what it would have been,” Maggie said thoughtfully.
“It certainly wouldn’t have anything to do with Mr. McKenna,” Cora replied. “The man’s the soul of kindness with that child.”
Maggie felt cold and lonely all of a sudden, and she wrapped her arms around herself and answered, “There was a woman here—Loretta Craig was her name—and it occurs to me that she might have upset Elisabeth somehow.”
“Miss Craig,” Cora reflected. “I’ve heard the maids talk about her. Maybe they know something that would help me reach Elisabeth.”
The distant jangling of a telephone reminded Maggie that she’d planned to contact Lady Cosgrove and ask for Tansy’s address. After excusing herself politely, she hurried off to follow the sound.
The chase led to an enormous room boasting a billiard table, a cluttered desk, hundreds of books, several settees, and a number of leather chairs. She stopped cold in the doorway as Reeve snatched the receiver from its hook and growled, “Yes!”
Maggie watched as his brawny back went rigid. “I want no excuses, Wilkins,” he said after a few more moments had passed. “If you have to turn every pub in Melbourne on end, you do it. I want my brother found.”
The man on the other end of the wire was talking so loudly that Maggie could hear him, though she couldn’t make out the words. Reeve grew more and more annoyed as he listened, then boomed, “Damn it all to hell, I don’t care what it costs! And I expect to find a report waiting when I come back!”
The receiver crashed into its hook beside the telephone and Maggie turned to flee, only to be stopped by a clipped, “Not another step, Yank.”
She was frozen by the glacial words, but she didn’t have to speak. She lifted her chin and remained stubbornly silent.
Reeve had to come around and face her, and he did, his eyes snapping, his hands on his hips. “Did you want something? A different room, perhaps?”
Maggie raised her chin another notch. “My room is fine,” she said. Reeve McKenna would roast in hell before he got a word of complaint out of her. “I merely wanted to use the telephone.”
Reeve gestured toward the apparatus with a sweeping move of his arm. “Help yourself, Miss Chamberlin. Never let it be said that I am an unreasonable master.”
“You are not my master,” Maggie pointed out in a chill fury as she rounded Reeve and swept into the huge, masculine room, passing the billiard table to stand facing the telephone. She had never used one before, and she felt stupid and awkward for hesitating now. She whirled, her hands on her hips, and started because Reeve had been right on her heels. He was standing so close, in fact, that she could see the tiny specks of silver in his aquamarine eyes. “I’m an actress, not a servant, and I’ll thank you to remember it.”
“I own you,” Reeve immediately retorted, “lock, stock, and ba
rrel, you saucy little wench, and I could just as well make you a scullery maid or a mistress, if that’s what I wanted to do!”
There was a limit to what one person could endure, Maggie reflected to herself, deliberately keeping her face impassive as she drew back her foot and planted it firmly in the middle of Reeve McKenna’s shin.
A stunned expression crossed his face and then, an instant later, he howled with pain and reached for the injured portion of his anatomy.
Maggie turned and walked imperiously over to the telephone, taking up the receiver and putting it to her ear. After that she had no idea what to do.
Reeve reached past her shoulder to turn a little handle affixed to the side of the hulking machine, which in turn was attached to the wall.
“Central!” said a nasal voice over the wire, and Maggie jumped, her eyes rounding.
Reeve, standing entirely too close, smiled down at her in a way that could be described only as impudent. Clearly, he intended to eavesdrop on the conversation, should Maggie manage to have one.
“Central,” repeated the disembodied voice, sounding impatient now.
“I would like to speak with Lady Cosgrove, at the Girls’ Friendly Society, please.”
Reeve arched an eyebrow at this, and the set of his mouth had softened slightly, Maggie noticed. A series of clicks and whirrings met her ear as the call was put through.
Lady Cosgrove came on the line only after Maggie had spoken to her assistant first, and she was chagrined at interrupting an apparently busy day. She stated her name and was about to ask after Tansy when Lady Cosgrove suddenly cut her off with, “Oh, yes—Margaret Chamberlin. Mr. Kirk has sent word that you abandoned his household—at a very inconvenient juncture—to become an actress.”
The chill in the woman’s voice was withering. Maggie was very careful not to meet Reeve’s eyes. She tried to explain. “Lady Cosgrove, there were extenuating circumstances,” she began, only to hear a loud crash at the other end of the line.
It was too much. Maggie hung up the receiver and turned away, chin high, meaning to escape. She had to succeed as an actress now, for there was no hope of ever earning a certificate.
“Maggie?” Reeve’s voice stopped her, unexpectedly gentle. “What is it?”
Maggie looked back at him, her eyes brimming, and said, “You’ll be pleased to learn that I have just been shunned by the one woman who could have given me another means of earning my living.”
Reeve was standing directly in front of her now, and he inclined his head to one side. “You don’t want to be an actress?” he asked, and he sounded genuinely concerned.
Maggie wanted only to be Reeve’s wife, at that moment at least, but of course she couldn’t say that outright. She dashed at the embarrassing tears with the back of one hand and said plaintively, “I was only trying to find my friend Tansy.”
“The one you were with in Parramatta?” Reeve asked, and now his hands were resting on her shoulders. Maggie was beginning to hope that he’d forgiven her after all.
She nodded and sniffled once, quite inelegantly.
“That’s easy, Maggie. She works for my friend Adam Beckwith. I can drop you off there on my way to the wharf.”
Maggie remembered that Reeve was going to sea, and a new fear overtook her. “Will your journey be a long one—or—or dangerous?”
Reeve smiled, and his hands rested on the sides of her face. One thumb smoothed her tremulous lower lip and Maggie felt a shiver go through her. “Whalers are not crafts built for sight-seeing,” he said quietly. “I’ll be gone a week or two, I suppose.”
“Reeve—” Maggie paused, swallowed. “I’m sorry that I couldn’t tell you about Jamie—”
He tipped his head to kiss her lips, sending another spasm of desire flowing through her body, in the wake of the first. “You did what you had to do, love,” he said. “I know that now.”
“Then you’re not angry with me anymore?”
Reeve’s wonderful eyes were fixed on the ceiling as though he were pondering the question. But there was a twitch of amusement at one corner of his mouth. “I didn’t say that, Yank. After all, you just kicked me soundly in the shin.”
He drew Maggie close and held her, his strong hands splayed on her back. Maggie’s breasts were touching his chest, and even that much contact made her nipples harden beneath her clothes. “Aren’t you going to say that you’re sorry for kicking me too?” he prompted.
Biting back a grin, Maggie shook her head from side to side. “You deserved it. After all, you’ve given me a room the size of a mousehole.”
“I think there might have been some mistake,” Reeve said, pretending to be very serious. “Would you mind showing me this room?”
Maggie’s senses were leaping and her face felt hot. She had a good idea of what would happen if she led Reeve to that attic room, but she couldn’t find it within herself to refuse him. She loved him too much and needed him too badly. Still, she hesitated. “I’m not sure.”
He laid an index finger to the tip of her nose, and though that wasn’t an intimate contact, it stirred responses in other parts of Maggie’s body that longed to be touched in just that way. “I’m going to sea, Maggie,” he said hoarsely. “I want to make sure that all these little domestic matters are settled before I go.”
Maggie began to think that she might have misinterpreted Reeve’s insistence on seeing her room. She led the way through the house to the kitchen and up the first set of stairs but faltered at the foot of the three steps leading to her room. “Where are all the servants? I haven’t seen anyone except for Cora since I arrived.”
Reeve gave Maggie’s bottom a surreptitious pinch. “This is their day off,” he said.
Maggie’s cheeks were flaming. “I’m not going into that room, Reeve McKenna, unless you promise me something on your honor!”
He reached out boldly to caress her breast. “What?”
“You have to swear that you’ll marry me the minute you get back to Sydney,” Maggie blurted out, and she was afraid to breathe while she waited for his answer.
“Done,” he said, just when he had stretched her patience to the breaking point.
Maggie pulled him into the little room and closed the door, and Reeve looked around with a mock frown on his face. Even while he was doing this, he was unbuttoning the bodice of Maggie’s dress.
“This will never do,” he said as he lowered her camisole, baring her breasts. “No air, no light—”
Maggie drew in a sharp breath as he suddenly bent his head and took greedy suckle at her right breast. Her fingers knotted in his hair. “The—door, Reeve—” she managed to choke out. “Someone might—come in—”
Easily, he maneuvered her so that her back was to the door. While he teased and tasted her puckered nipple, he slowly lifted her skirts. She felt the ties of her drawers give way and then he was pulling them down, kneeling before her.
“Hold your skirts, Maggie,” he ordered gruffly, and she did, bunching the stiff gray fabric in her fists. Her drawers were around her ankles now, like filmy hobbles, and Reeve made no effort to free her. All his attention was focused on baring the hidden rosebud he sought.
Maggie felt his breath on that nubbin of flesh and whimpered. The position of vulnerability was delicious, as was the suspense with which he teased her, giving her an occasional flick of his tongue but otherwise withholding the attention she longed for.
“Ooooo,” she gasped, lifting her skirts higher and trying to step out of her drawers.
Reeve took one of her ankles into his hand and lifted it free, setting her foot down a good distance from its counterpart. Then, with his fingers, he fondled and caressed Maggie until she was moaning senselessly.
“You’ll move your things to my room, Maggie,” he said gruffly, between brief, fiery tastings of her sweetness.
“Ummm,” Maggie pleaded, and then she gave a little cry as Reeve took her full into his mouth and began drawing at her.
She flung her
head back and forth against the door, and her hair, always ready to tumble down, flew about her shoulders in cascades. Still, Reeve feasted.
“Oh, please, oh, please—” Maggie begged, all but blinded by the force of her need.
He drew on her in a long, excruciatingly pleasant motion of his lips, again and again, saying gentle and wicked things between samplings. By that time Maggie was feverish; she forgot about holding her skirt and plunged her hands into Reeve’s hair, desperate to end the teasing.
With an arrogant masculine chuckle, Reeve set about driving Maggie to the very edge of madness. There was a blinding burst of passion, an explosion that hurled her toward the sky, and she descended slowly, quivering.
Reeve rose to his feet and Maggie’s skirts fell back into place, though her breasts were still bare and proud. She was almost disappointed when he reached out and closed her hand over her bodice so that she was covered, but a second later he was lifting her off her feet, carrying her out of that dismal little room, and down the stairs to his spacious one.
Early the next morning Maggie awakened to find herself alone, and she knew before she read his note that Reeve had gone to sea. She was sad and frightened, but then she remembered his promise that they would be married as soon as he returned.
Humming, Maggie dressed hastily. Later that day the housekeeper moved her things from the attic room to Reeve’s.
Chapter 16
THE MOMENT MAGGIE ARRIVED AT THE VICTORIA THEAtre and walked in through the stage door, she was set upon by two costume women, clucking and sputtering over her gray woolen dress. “Not fit for a cleanin’ rag,” said one.
“It will never, never do,” added the other. Maggie flushed with embarrassment and then felt true relief when she saw Philip walking toward her, an angelic smile lighting his face.
“Good morning, Maggie,” he said, taking both her hands in his and giving them a reassuring squeeze. His amber eyes took in the pair of fluttering seamstresses with an expression of amusement. “Time for a fitting, is it?”
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