Maggie flushed, certain he was being sarcastic, since she was the one staring at him like he was ice cream on a hot summer day. Besides, she knew she looked a fright with her hair twizzled up in an untidy ponytail from J.D.’s bath time, the yellow cotton vest and matching skirt she’d changed into before supper equally rumpled. While he stood there looking like God’s gift to women in his blue jeans and plain white shirt with the sleeves rolled up his sinewy forearms. She crossed her arms about herself. “You, too.”
His lips quirked, but his eyes remained cool. And still he made no move to walk past her to his old bedroom. He stood there and watched her without expression while she looked at him. And wondered.
His older brother Matthew was known to be the calm one in the family. Jefferson, also older, was supposed to be the quiet one. She didn’t quite know what to make of this Daniel. The Daniel she’d known had been wickedly sexy. Full of the devil. Teasing her over the least little thing. Making her laugh.
But this man was still. Watchful.
She wondered how else he’d changed in three years. If women still threw themselves at him. If he’d ever caught one of them.
She rubbed at the hard, tight little ache forming between her eyebrows. It was none of her business what Daniel did. It never had been.
She’d been married. To Joe Greene. A man who had, in the end, acted criminally against the Clay family.
“Jaimie tells me you’re still living in Chicago.”
Maggie nodded. Small talk. That was good. She could handle small talk. “I’m a secretary with an interior design firm. And I also manage the apartment building where J.D. and I live.”
His smoky eyes drifted over her. “Quite the city girl.”
She stiffened, taking exception to some indefinable note in his tone. “It’s a decent job, Daniel.”
“So you do remember my name.”
She flushed. He’d always been able to make her feel awkward. It wasn’t anything he necessarily did. Except, perhaps, breathing. Simply existing. It wasn’t as if he’d ever gone out of his way to make her feel edgy and unsettled whenever he was near.
She moistened her lips, dredging for normalcy. “Your family is happy you’ve returned.”
His eyes didn’t flicker. “No more than Jaimie is happy to have you back.”
“That’s different. I only came to...to tell...ah, visit.” Her cheeks burned anew.
“How did you find out about Joe?”
It was the very last thing she’d expected him to ask. She clasped her arms around her waist and moistened her lips. “I hired an investigator.”
“That desperate to find him?”
She lifted her chin. She didn’t like the word desperate. Didn’t like what it implied. “Determined. What about you?”
His lips twisted. “Oh, Maggie Mae, I wasn’t desperate or determined to find our dear Joe. He was our foreman, after all And when his embezzling came to light, he cut and ran.”
As if she needed any reminders. “I meant what brings you back to the Double-C?”
“It’s my home.”
That hadn’t kept him from leaving it three years earlier. Nothing had kept him from leaving. “But what did you do?”
“I turned my truck north and drove.”
“While you were gone.”
His eyes went flat. “This and that. Nothing that would interest you.”
She stood there blinking when he abruptly said “Goodnight” and strode into his room. Closing the door with a quiet, solid, snick.
Maggie’s breath rushed out. She fumbled for her own door. Closed it. Leaned back against it.
Had she changed as much as Daniel? Three years ago, when he’d left the ranch, his home, he’d not been this silent, watchful man with anger bubbling beneath his words. Had he?
Despite the warm night air drifting into the room through the opened windows, she shivered.
Daniel had been...Daniel. He’d been her boss’s brother. It wasn’t as if they’d had any real type of friendship. He’d been nice to her, like he was to most people. That was all. That was it Only she’d repaid it by somehow making him leave his home and everything he cared about. It didn’t matter how she’d argued with him, insisting it wasn’t necessary. That if anyone didn’t belong there, it was Maggie.
“Oh, come on, Maggie,” she whispered aloud. What was this somehow stuff? She knew why. Exactly why.
They’d shared one kiss.
One time.
Bare days later, he’d packed up his belongings and moved away.
She dragged her thoughts from the memory that was painfully, dangerously vivid, despite the intervening years.
She’d come to the Double-C to tell Jaimie about Joe. She would be here for one week. When the week was up, she’d go back to Chicago, to the life she’d built for herself and her daughter. Whatever had or had not been between Daniel and Maggie was in the past. Where it belonged.
She changed into her pajamas, and climbed into bed, pulling the quilt up around her ears.
Where it belonged.
Chapter Two
Daniel couldn’t sleep. He sat in the wide leather chair in the corner of the bedroom he’d had while growing up, and stared at the wall between his room and the one beside his. The one where Maggie slept. No doubt dreaming and grieving, now that her precious husband was dead
Joe. The name spat through his mind. Dead. Good riddance.
Then, because he was the man he was, he retracted the thought. Hell, he didn’t wish anyone dead. Not even a man he’d hated. A man who’d had everything that Daniel had ever thought he’d wanted, and who had tossed it away. Callously. Carelessly. Deliberately.
Elbows propped on the arms of his chair, he restlessly turned a smoothly carved wooden paperweight over and over in his hands as he stared at the wall. As if he could see through it to the woman on the other side.
He didn’t know why he was so surprised to find her here. She was family now, her and J.D. J.D.’s “Auntie Jaimie” was married to Daniel’s own brother Just because Maggie hadn’t wanted what Daniel had tried to give her didn’t mean that she hadn’t kept in touch with Jaimie over the years.
He wasn’t even particularly surprised that she’d come in person to deliver the news of Joe to Jaimie. It was just like Maggie. So responsible. So conscientious.
His hand tightened over the paperweight.
Thank God the woman was going home in a few days. She’d take her kid and the dull gold wedding ring she still wore on her finger, and go back to her life in the big city.
It was too bad that Daniel hadn’t bothered to pick up a phone to tell Matthew that he was coming back. He might have put off his arrival for a week or two. But then, who could have predicted any of this? And even if he could have, what would he have asked his brother?
Oh, by the way, Matt, heard from Maggie lately? Maggie visited lately? Maggie still in love with her husband lately?
He swore under his breath and shoved out of his chair with a squeak of leather and old wood. He plunked the paperweight on the nightstand.
He didn’t expect anything of Maggie. He’d tried to help once, tried to make Joe see sense, and it had blown up in his face.
He’d tried to help again, giving her some time to get over Joe. Giving her space. Doing the honorable thing.
He snorted softly. Honorable. There was a good one.
Maggie had walked away from all that he’d offered her—his home and family—in favor of going in search of the husband who’d left her and her infant daughter flat one cool spring morning. She hadn’t moved on. Hadn’t healed after a failed marriage. Hadn’t removed that gold band.
He had figured he was being noble, doing what his heart told him to do. Even now the notion made him grimace. What he’d been was a fool.
Daniel hadn’t come back to the Double-C. He hadn’t wanted to come back to this place and see the empty brick cottage where she’d lived. Or see someone else cooking meals for the hands in the bunkhouse.
So he’d hooked up with some old contacts of his brother and gotten involved in a life that didn’t allow time for memories—tender, painful or otherwise.
The irony was that by avoiding memories of Maggie, he’d ended up making more memories that he couldn’t face. He might have tried to do the right thing those years before. But what had he done since then that could even remotely be termed honorable?
Not one damned thing.
His brother Jefferson had warned him. But Daniel hadn’t listened, even though he’d known Jefferson was right. Daniel had wanted no time to think. No time to feel.
Well, he’d gotten what he’d wanted. In spades.
And now, he was back. He’d driven through the main gate of the Double-C, home again because he had nowhere else to go, and his head had known it was a good choice.
Only who does he find arriving practically on his heels?
Maggie and her little daughter.
Well, this time Daniel wasn’t panting after a crumb of Maggie’s affections anymore. That was all water under a very old bridge. He didn’t look at her daughter and wish for things that could never be changed. For events that could never be undone.
He just wished he could look at Maggie’s blue-green eyes without feeling his gut tighten. Without wondering if her pale corn-silk blond hair still smelled of wildnowers. Without wondering if her lips were still as soft as—
“Hell.” He yanked open the door and strode down the darkened staircase, instinct with him as he skirted furniture, rounded the table in the pitch-dark kitchen and burst through the mudroom to the warm kiss of midnight air.
He crossed the gravel road separating the house from the corrals. Walked in the still silence toward that neat brick cottage where Curly, the cook, now lived. The garden that Maggie had once nurtured and enjoyed was long grown over with mown grass. No more flowers. No more carrots and cucumbers and whatever else she’d grown in that little plot of garden.
He found himself staring at the spot where the clothesline used to stand. The line that he’d put up for her simply because he’d heard her mention once that she liked the way her sheets smelled when they dried in the sun.
He closed his eyes, swallowing an oath as he tried to cut the memory off at the pass. But it was too late and it swelled in his mind, until he was standing in Just this spot. Only it wasn’t the dog days of summer. It was the fresh dawn of spring. And the sight of Maggie stretching on her toes to pin a sheet in place made him forget about the chores awaiting him.
The brisk breeze tugged at his cowboy hat, and he resettled it and slowly crossed the gravel road to the hard, bare ground where the odd patch of snow still lay. The breeze played with the long sheets that Maggie was trying to hang, and his step quickened as one end blew from her grasp, barely held in place by the one corner already pinned to the line. He caught the snapping corner and held it to the line. “Having a little trouble?”
Maggie’s eyes sparkled with humor, and she quickly went onto her tiptoes as she reached up to slip several clothespins over the sheet he held securely anchored. “Nothing a few extra hands won’t cure.”
He couldn’t help smiling back at her. “Think these’ll do for now?” He held out his hands, palms up.
Her eyebrows rose a fraction. But she didn’t hesitate for long, as she bent down and retrieved the next wet sheet from the basket by her feet. She handed him one end and pointed to the line behind them that ran parallel to the one already filled with wet linens. Her movements were practiced and quick.
Reach. Smooth. Pin.
Each time she reached, her soft blue sweater rose an inch at her waist, revealing the narrow leather belt threaded through the loops of her soft blue jeans. Each time she reached, her arms stretching above her head, that soft blue knit tightened against the full thrust of her breasts. By the third sheet, he had to do something. So he grabbed a bunch of clothespins and jammed them in place, himself. “I hung this line too high for you,” he said.
She propped her hands on her hips, her head tilting to one side as she turned amused eyes his way. “And just what good would this line do me if it were any lower? The only thing I’d be able to hang on it without them dragging on the ground would be pillowcases.”
She shook her head, chuckling, and turned back to her task.
“A step stool, or something, then.”
She laughed outright. “Oh, Daniel, don’t be silly. I’m not going to drag a step along with me.” She nipped up on her toes, slipping a pin over the center edge of the latest sheet. “All this stretching and stooping gets me back in shape after having J.D.” She fastened the corner and reached for the last wet sheet in her basket.
“You’re in fine shape.”
She rolled her eyes and pushed one end of the sheet into his hands. “Easy for a man to say,” she replied easily. “You’ll never have to learn what a lot of work it is to get back to your prepregnancy size.”
“And I say you look fine to me.”
She Just smiled, but he could see a touch of shyness in her eyes. Better than wariness, he figured. God knew Maggie had reason to be wary, considering her husband had recently abandoned her and their baby girl.
It just wasn’t in Daniel to be sorry that Joe had cut out on his family. Maggie was better off without the lying thief. And—
A gust of wind whipped through the sheets and Daniel caught the sheet before it could blow from Maggie’s hands. Her fingers felt cold beneath his and before he knew what he was doing, he’d wrapped her fingers in his, warming them against his palm.
And it was as if the ranch disappeared and it was just the two of them. Standing there between the snapping, fresh linens. Was it the same for her?
The edge of the sheet dragged to the ground, but he barely noticed. And Maggie didn’t reach for it, either. He saw her gaze flicker over their hands, then skip up to his face and away.
She moistened her lips and swallowed. But she didn’t pull her fingers from his hold.
A lock of hair drifted across her face, and she lifted her free hand to brush it away, but he beat her to it. The glistening strands of blond felt like silk against his rough fingertips as he smoothed it behind her ear. Her lips parted soundlessly.
And though he knew it was too soon, too early for her, he knew he was going to kiss her. And she knew it, too. He could see it in her beautiful blue-green eyes. “Ah, Maggie Mae,” he murmured. “I’ve waited so long.”
Ever mindful of moving too fast, even if his heart was pounding like a runaway train, he ran his knuckles along her satin-smooth jaw. Her chin tilted upward and her soft lashes drifted down.
Daniel settled his lips over hers, reining in the overwhelming urge to pull her against him. To twine his hands in her silky hair and never let her go.
Instead he kissed her lightly, gently. She swayed, murmuring his name against his mouth, and he tasted the soft inner curve of her lips. And it was so sweet and so welcoming and her tongue flirted with his and—
She gasped and yanked out of his arms so fast she nearly tripped over the laundry basket behind her. Her cheeks were flushed as she smoothed her hair behind her ears, looking everywhere but at him. “I...you...we—”
She looked at him and he felt sorrow down to his toes at the panic in her gaze. “It’s okay, Maggie Mae—”
Daniel dragged his thoughts to the present, but her name echoed inside his head. His Maggie. Only, she wasn’t.
She was not his. She never had been.
She’d flushed and stammered and stuttered that afternoon. But the gist had been there. And the gist had been a crumb of a husband named Joe, who—despite his recent abandonment of Maggie and his daughter—she wouldn’t betray.
Even three long years later, even beyond death, Maggie was still holding to him.
Daniel raked his hands through his hair, shoving away the thought. He leaned his bare back against the wooden rail fence and tucked his thumbs in his belt loops. What the hell was he doing, staring at the cottage like he could move
time backward? Hadn’t he learned that wishing and wanting were useless notions?
He threw back his head with a long breath and stared up at the velvety sky that soared over the earth. Over the Double-C.
His heritage.
His home.
He was through trying to find something that he’d only ever known here at the Double-C. It had only led to tragedy, anyway.
He was home to stay. As soon as he’d walked in the door of the big house after his absence, Matthew had bluntly announced his plans for expanding again. Daniel hadn’t yet agreed, but he would.
He would agree to take on his fair share. It would be a decision made strictly with the head.
The only kind of decision Daniel would ever make again.
So it was a good thing that Maggie and her kid were here only for a few days. A damned good thing.
Some things came back easily, Maggie realized the next morning when she awakened before dawn. She lay in bed for a moment, her attention lingering on the darkened window. It had been several years since she’d needed to rise at such an ungodly hour. But back just one day—less than twenty-four hours—at the Double-C, and she was easily falling into the early-to-rise routine.
More likely it was the knowledge that Daniel slept on the other side of the wall that had nudged her to wakening.
She huffed impatiently and shoved back the covers, slipping out of the bed.
She was awake. She might as well put the time to good use. She tugged on her aging chenille robe and peeked outside her door. Daniel’s bedroom door was still closed. But Maggie’s nose picked up the faint scent of coffee wafting from downstairs, and she hurried into the bathroom for what was surely the fastest shower on record. Then back to her room—Daniel’s door thankfully still closed—where she hurriedly dressed and tidied up the bedroom.
She was just giving the quilt-top a final smoothing hand when she heard a footfall on the other side of the wall.
He was awake.
She closed her eyes. Then she heard the faint creak of a bedroom door, and she froze. But no footsteps passed by on the way to the staircase. No soft knock sounded on her door.
A Wedding for Maggie Page 3