The Only Man for Maggie

by Leigh Michaels

  Libby's eyes widened. "Don't you know? Haven't you read your mail yet?"

  "I just got home ten minutes ago. Which reminds me, I brought a pizza, and it's getting very cold. Do you and Dan want to come up, and we'll sort this all out over dinner?"

  "I'll come, but Dan's working overtime. I hate having him gone all the time, but heaven knows we'll need the money." She started up the first flight of steps.

  Maggie lagged behind. "Is that an announcement?" she asked carefully.

  "Of what?"

  "Well, I thought maybe you were telling me there was going to be a little Montgomery after all."

  "Not a chance." Libby sounded impatient.

  That was strange; normally, any turn of conversation which reminded her of the baby she couldn't seem to have would bring Libby to the brink of tears. Whatever had taken her mind off that problem must be a difficulty of enormous dimensions, Maggie thought. Well, it could wait another couple of minutes; the busybody who lived in the second-floor back was, as usual, peeking around the edge of her door and trying to overhear every word.

  Inside the top-floor apartment, Tripp scrambled for his water dish and waited impatiently while Maggie filled it. She shivered a little and closed the kitchen windows. "I guess I did too good a job of airing the place out. This is the kind of evening when I wish the fireplace worked. Wouldn't it be nice to curl up beside a roaring blaze?"

  Libby didn't answer; she went straight to the kitchen table and started sorting through the stack of letters while Maggie closed the rest of the windows. "I thought I left it on top so you'd see it right away."

  "I dug through the pile and probably mixed it all up. I didn't find anything I thought was important, though. What's going on?"

  Tripp slurped the entire dish of water and flopped on his belly on the rug in front of the kitchen sink, as if to say it was nice to be home. It was his favorite spot in the whole apartment—largely, Maggie was convinced, because he was most in the way there.

  She dug his new chew toy out of her handbag and offered it to him. Tripp surveyed it suspiciously for a moment, then dragged it back to his rug and lay down with his chin atop the bone-shaped chunk of rawhide.

  Libby held up an envelope. "Here."

  Maggie stepped over the dog to get to the oven. "Let me just stick the pizza in to warm first. I'm starving—lunch on the airplane was worse than usual."

  She came back to the table and took the letter out of Libby's hand. It was an ordinary business envelope, with the return address—Elliot Development Corporation-printed in the corner. She'd missed it because it looked like a typical direct-mail offer to sell her something she neither wanted nor needed, but now that she'd looked at it more closely, the name sounded vaguely familiar.

  "What's Elliot Development, anyway?" she asked.

  "The people who built the row of townhouses on Westfield Drive, and the condo development along Rock Road, and the enormous apartment block on Elgin Avenue—"

  "Aren't those the apartments that used to be a warehouse?"

  Libby nodded.

  "Now it just looks like a prison with a bad facelift. Are they trying to take over the whole city of Eagleton or what?" She turned the envelope over. "You haven't even opened this, Libby. How do you know what it is?"

  "Everybody in the building got one."

  "What are they trying to sell? The condos?" Maggie reached for a knife and slit the envelope. "You know, the cabby who brought me home from O'Hare thought I was the condo type. If he'd known me any better, I'd have taken it as an insult."

  Inside the envelope, instead of the brightly-colored brochure she'd half-expected, was a single page of stationery. A personal letter, in fact, informing Miss Margaret Rawlings that Elliot Development Corporation had purchased the house and property known as Eagle's Landing and was invoking clause seven, paragraph two of the lease agreement to notify her that she had thirty days to vacate her apartment…

  Maggie's fingers went numb, and the paper slipped from her hand. Tripp raised his head to watch it flutter to the floor, decided it wasn't interesting enough to chase, and put his chin down on his toy.

  "I'm being evicted?" she said shrilly.

  "We all are. I told you, everybody got letters."

  "They can't do that!"

  "They've done it, Maggie."

  "But it's not legal. We've got leases!" She'd signed a new one almost a year ago-but where had she filed the darned thing?

  "It doesn't matter. Dan's read the whole lease a dozen times, and that clause says they can."

  "That's utterly ridiculous! What's the good of having a lease if the landlord can pitch you out at the merest whim?"

  "It's not exactly a whim," Libby said. She sounded as if she was making a great effort to be fair. "The clause says if it's necessary to end the lease early, the landlord will offer equivalent housing."

  "Like what?" Maggie said suspiciously.

  "Choice of the townhouse development or the condos—"

  "That's what Elliot Development considers equivalent to this?" Maggie flung a hand out as if to encompass the entire room.

  Libby smiled for the first time since Maggie had come home. "Or the prison-block apartments, if you'd prefer."

  Maggie didn't bother to comment on that. "At the going rate, I suppose. What do those things cost, anyway?"

  "Actually, that's the one thing they're being decent about—for the remaining period of the lease, the rent will be no more than we're paying here. Afterwards, when the existing lease is up, it'll be negotiable—"

  "Which is to say, higher."

  "Of course. That's why Dan's working tonight, and every minute he can. It's not a bad deal, and our lease has another ten months to run, but—"

  "I've only got two," Maggie said gloomily.

  "That's a tough break. At least we're lucky to have some breathing room. But we don't want to have to move a second time, you see, so we need to save up a down payment so we can buy the townhouse and never be put in this situation again."

  Maggie stared at her in utter disbelief. "You can't mean you're going along with this!"

  "I don't see that we have a choice. Mr. Kelly downstairs is already gone, and Mrs. Harper is moving tomorrow."

  Maggie shook her head. "I can't believe you're all being such wimps."

  "You do have to look at it from their point of view," Libby said reluctantly. "Mr. Kelly can't drive any more, and Elliot's apartment block is within walking distance of downtown. And you know Mrs. Harper's air conditioning gave her all kinds of problems last summer and it's not fixed yet—so I can't blame her for looking forward to a condo that's nice and new."

  "And full of construction bugs to be worked out," Maggie said direly. "Believe me, I know all about those. All right, I can see why some of the tenants might think it's a good deal. But they could at least have waited till the time was up before they caved in."

  "It is up, Maggie. The last day of the month is next Wednesday. We've got less than a week."

  "It says thirty days!" Maggie scrambled to pick up the letter. "Right here—"

  "And it's dated more than three weeks ago."

  Maggie stared at the letter, and then looked up at Libby. "You didn't let me know?"

  "Maggie, nobody knew for sure where you were! You sent postcards from California, Maine and Florida, but you never put a return address on them."

  "And you didn't think of calling the magazine? I checked in with the office every few days."

  Libby's eyes widened. "Oh. That was dumb of me, wasn't it? No, I honestly didn't. I was so stressed out I just didn't think."

  Maggie supposed there was no point in making a fuss about it, because the damage was done. Or perhaps it wasn't—the fact that she hadn't gotten the full notice period might end up working to her advantage. "It doesn't matter now. We can still fight this. Just stand firm, Libby, and don't agree to anything."

  "I don't know," Libby said doubtfully. "Dan sort of wants things settled, and so do I. I
mean, it would be nice to know what our address will be next week."

  Maggie wasn't listening. She was scanning the rest of the letter, absorbing the details she had been too stunned to notice before. "It doesn't say anything about why they want this place," she observed.

  "I shouldn't think they'd have to tell us."

  "Even though they're throwing us out? What does Elliot Development want with Eagle's Landing, anyway? A hundred-year-old house split into a dozen apartments is hardly their kind of property."

  Libby shrugged. "Nobody seems to know. The workers who are hovering around don't have much to say."

  Maggie thought of the one she'd encountered, and muttered, "Not about that subject, anyway. As far as other things are concerned—"

  "I should think by now you'd be used to male whistles, Maggie. Mr. Kelly tried to get hold of the previous owners, but they're out of the country."

  "Spending the proceeds of the sale, I suppose."

  "No doubt. And the people at Elliot Development were willing to talk about everything except their plans. Dan even called Mr. Elliot himself, but all he'd say was something about a great demand for upscale housing."

  "That's it? "A great demand for upscale housing"?"

  "I think that's what Dan said."

  Maggie sniffed resentfully. "So they want us to take up space in their precious condos instead of living here? Oh, that makes a lot of sense." She sniffed again, more deeply, and leaped up, knocking over her chair in her haste to get to the oven. Smoke seeped from it and billowed out in a cloud the moment she opened the door. On the oven rack lay the blackened ruin of her pizza, twisted and charred.

  "That does it," Maggie said under her breath. "That's the last straw. It's bad enough that this development person—what's his name?"

  "Karr Elliot," Libby said helpfully.

  "Now he's not only trying to throw me out of my home, but he's ruined my dinner too. And I'm going to see that he answers for it!" She dumped the smoldering pizza in the garbage and went straight to the telephone.

  "I think I've got some TV dinners in the freezer. Maybe I'll just run down and pop a couple in the microwave."

  "Are you too chicken to stick around? Libby, I'm only going to call the man. I probably won't even shout much."

  But Libby had already vanished. Maggie flipped the directory pages till she found Elliot Development. When a woman answered the telephone, Maggie asked if Karr Elliot was in.

  "Who's calling, please?" the receptionist asked.

  "Does it make a difference?" Maggie asked sweetly. "I should think either he's in or he's not, and who I am shouldn't change that fact."

  The receptionist was unflustered. "He's not."

  Maggie glanced at her watch. Tomorrow would do well enough; in fact, it might even be better. She could look up her lease tonight and read that clause for herself so she'd be better prepared. "Tell him Margaret Rawlings called. In case he doesn't recognize that I'm one of his new tenants at Eagle's Landing, you might mention that I'm also the associate editor of a magazine called Today's Woman, and I'm quite interested in the way he's going around illegally breaking perfectly valid leases."

  "I'm sure you'll be hearing from him soon, Miss Rawlings."

  "You know, I'm sure of it too," Maggie murmured. She put down the phone and dusted her palms together. That, she thought, should make Mr. Hot-Shot-Developer Elliot sit up and take notice. She'd think all her arguments out tonight, and tomorrow morning, when he called…

  She tried to ignore the twinge of panic at the pit of her stomach. She'd find a way to get around this; she had to. There weren't many places where she could live as inexpensively as at Eagle's Landing, and she needed that financial edge right now. Two more years and she'd have her debts repaid and her head above water again. But right now…

  She put the tea kettle on and unpacked her weekend case. It wasn't much of a job, for she'd taken the bare minimum for her long trip, and almost everything needed to go to the cleaners. She'd just finished washing out her lacy undies and hanging them up to dry in the bathroom when there was a knock on her door.

  Maggie glanced at her watch. That would be Libby, no doubt, with her hands full, trying to carry a couple of hot TV dinners. The woman really was a sweetheart, always trying to cheer up a friend even when she felt rotten herself.

  Maggie flung the door open. "Come on in—"

  Then she realized that it was not a petite young woman on the landing but a tall, broad-shouldered construction worker in a dark blue T-shirt and jeans.

  She stared up at him, mouth open. He wasn't smiling yet, but though Maggie hadn't known him long, she had no trouble recognizing the signs of his dawning amusement—his eyes had started to sparkle wickedly, and the corners of his mouth twitched.

  "Now come on," she said heatedly. "If you think I was issuing an invitation to get better acquainted—"

  "Oh, but you did, Miss Rawlings." He swept her a bow, a courtly gesture which was surprisingly graceful, considering the jeans and T-shirt. "I'm Karr Elliot, and you asked to speak to me specifically. Now, just what is it you wanted, I wonder?"

  CHAPTER TWO

  This man was Karr Elliot? The head of the biggest development company in town went around looking like a common laborer?

  Well, maybe not exactly common, Maggie reflected. Any man with his height, broad shoulders, impressive muscles, and level gaze could never be called common. Given time, she could no doubt come up with a few other appropriate adjectives—but he wasn't common.

  "You know," she said tartly, "you could have told me who you are."

  His eyebrows climbed. "Why? I'm not in the habit of announcing myself. If you'd wanted to know my name, you could have asked. Women often do that."

  "I'll bet they do," Maggie muttered. She could almost feel sorry for them, deluded creatures—thinking that any man who was so good-looking must have a personality that was just as attractive. Maggie knew better.

  "And since at the time I didn't know who you were," he went on logically, "I didn't see any reason to introduce myself. For all I knew, you could be a perfume distributor making your regular rounds—not one of my tenants at all."

  Maggie decided there was no point in pursuing that subject. "What were you doing up on the chimney, anyway?"

  "Taking a look at my new property."

  "I expected you'd have inspectors and engineers to do that sort of thing."

  "I do, but now and then I like to have a look for myself."

  Maggie shook her head a little. "Don't your employees think that's sort of strange?"

  "On the contrary. They seem to respect the fact that I don't mind getting my hands dirty."

  As if the mere word was a magnet, her gaze dropped to his hands, resting easily on narrow hips. If she'd looked at his hands before, Maggie realized, she'd have known there was something out of sync about this man, for his hands didn't match his clothing. They were big, strong and well-shaped, with long fingers. But while they showed the marks of physical work, they weren't the hands of a laborer; there was no grime ingrained around the nails, which were well-shaped and cared for…

  "Would you like a closer look?" he said mildly, and held out both hands as if for a parental inspection. "I washed them before I came upstairs."

  Maggie was embarrassed to be caught staring, but she wasn't about to admit it.

  "Just as your mother taught you, I suppose."

  "Of course. And I wiped my feet, too. So may I come in?"

  It wasn't very polite to keep him standing in the hallway, and being rude would do her cause no good. Unwillingly, Maggie took a step backward. "Would you like a cup of coffee?"

  He didn't seem to notice the reluctance in her tone. "That would be great."

  Maggie waved a hand toward a pair of sofas, arranged at an angle on an Oriental rug which marked off the apartment's sitting area. "Make yourself comfortable while I fix it."

  But Karr Elliot didn't immediately sit down. Instead, he remained standing in th
e foyer area, looking around the room. With evening coming on and the immense oak tree on the west side of the house blocking the setting sun, the corners and the upper reaches of the high ceilings had grown shadowy, and the room looked even more vast than usual.

  That impression was increased, Maggie knew, by the sparsity of her furniture. The couches, the library table that served as her desk, a couple of reproduction Oriental rugs, a pair of chairs that were more comfortable than elegant, an enormous antique wardrobe, and her bed—that was about it. The only things she had in abundance were house plants and books; greenery occupied every window, and the books filled the shelves and the mantel.

  The floor creaked under Karr's weight as he crossed the room, and instantly his attention was focused on the random-width oak boards beneath his feet. "Doesn't that sound drive you mad?" he asked. "It's like fingernails on a blackboard."

  Maggie shrugged. "It's part of the charm of an old house. Besides, I'm smaller than you are, so the floor doesn't creak when I walk on it."

  Immediately, she regretted calling his attention to her, as that deep blue gaze once more traveled slowly over her from head to foot and back. She wouldn't have been surprised, when the appraisal was over, if he could have calculated her weight to the ounce.

  But he merely said, with an ironic note in his voice, "Creaking floors and leaky roofs—oh, yes, old houses are so charming." He sat down and tipped his head back as if to study the peak of the ceiling directly above him.

  The tea kettle was whistling. Maggie spooned coffee into a filter and poured the boiling water slowly over it. "If you're not charmed by old houses, why did you buy one?"

  He didn't take his eyes off the ceiling. "To the best of my recollection, it seemed a good idea at the time."

  "That means you think it's none of my business."

  "Well, the last time I looked, your name wasn't on my list of financial backers, so-"

  "Never mind. The roof doesn't leak, by the way. At least it's never dripped on me. Why are you worried about it, anyway?"

  "Did I say I was worried? It was merely an observation. There's so much damaged slate up there I'm astounded to hear it doesn't leak like a sieve." He appeared relaxed, his legs sprawled, but his gaze was moving steadily over the entire room. Maggie was willing to bet he wasn't missing a thing, from the deep carving on the walnut mantel to the mismatched antique chairs pulled up to her kitchen table.