Thea Devine

by Relentless Passion

  He got up and kicked the rocker back behind him. It thumped into the wall noisily, and the slam of the door emphasized his departure.

  But what about her other needs? What about her sinking sense of abandonment? Never touch her again, oh God. And he didn’t care about the rest. He was like everybody else. He had the answer, he could only see that one solution.

  And she couldn’t see any at all.

  It was just one more thing she was not going to think about—for a while at least. There was no rush. Dennis had given her a month. Logan had sloughed her off altogether, and Reese was impatient and conciliatory by turns.

  “You ought to try and get a job on that new paper,” Maggie told him inflexibly. “I just can’t think about what to do right now.”

  “Just keep away from that cowboy,” Mother Colleran warned.

  “It sounds like a threat,” Maggie said.

  “Just some advice.”

  “It fell on deaf ears,” Maggie told her.

  She rode out to the Colleran ranch just to be sure nothing had changed. Nothing was different.

  Another day she went to visit Annie Mapes, and Annie was different. Sean was a worriment; Sean had made more money in the last few months than the ranch had made in a year. He was being seduced, completely and utterly.

  “Are you seeing any of it?” Maggie wanted to know. Somehow it seemed easier to deal with Annie’s problems than her own.

  “A little,” Annie said reluctantly. “Enough. I’m sorry about the fire, Maggie.”

  “Me too.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. What about you?”

  “I think Sean’s going to want to sell up, Maggie, I have to warn you. I think he’s rolling into debt and that unctuous Mr. Brown is going to use it to lever us off the land. Sean’s been gambling too. There’s a red room upstairs at the saloon.”

  “I understand,” Maggie said.

  “And I’ll wind up boarding at Melinda Sable’s new house,” Annie said mournfully.

  “Annie! What are you saying?”

  “Well, you tell me, Maggie. What else will there be left for me? I haven’t got a man somewhere waiting to marry me. I don’t expect to get away from Colville, even after the extension line comes in. I won’t have any money. And the only man I ever loved doesn’t know I’m alive.”

  “Who?” Maggie whispered. “Who is the only man you ever loved?”

  “Don’t be stupid, Maggie. I always wanted Logan, from the time we were growing up. I thought you knew that.”

  Her heart plummeted. “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “You were the only lucky one, Maggie. You got Frank Colleran, and everyone was green about it. And Logan—well, he just never looked at me at all.”

  “I’m so sorry, Annie.”

  “Can’t make a man love where he doesn’t want to, Maggie. But there is a place to get it when you need it. It works both ways in that respect, you know? It doesn’t scare me. When a man needs enough, he doesn’t care what his woman looks like. And when she wants enough, she doesn’t have to be in love.”

  “No,” Maggie whispered, “she doesn’t.”

  “So I’ll be all right, Maggie. I hope you’ll be all right too.”

  She swallowed hard. “ I will.”

  But how was she going to be all right now that she knew Annie’s secret, and when she recalled that she had been blithely planning to hand Logan over to her, giving Annie her heart’s desire.

  She rode out to the construction site where the supervisor welcomed her cordially. “Sorry to hear the news, ma’am, even if you was down on the train coming through.”

  “I appreciate it. Where are they grading out now?”

  “They’re down near the Mapes’ property line, ma’am. I’m hoping he’ll sell out; we can bypass a lot of work if we could go straight on through. But I expect you know that.”

  “I know all about it,” she said dully. So the Mapes would go, and next was Logan, whose outlying pasture was flat, perfect. And then her, or that pie-in-the-sky detour they had mapped out around Gully Basin.

  The work went on, as relentless as an oncoming locomotive. She saw Warfield in the distance, and someone beside him, sketching. She saw the women of the fields, flirting with this man and that. She saw Logan walking away from her, leaving her to the mercy of all of it. She remembered suddenly she had no business here; she had no forum for her observations.

  She had instead Mother Colleran and Reese demanding an accounting for every move. “This is insanity, Reese,” she exploded at one point. “I might just as well…” she almost said, be married to you, but his expression was so hopeful.

  “When are you going to be leaving?” she asked abruptly.

  “What?” He was thrown off balance by her sudden reversal. “Maggie, how can I leave you in such straits? I certainly won’t think of going before you’re settled somehow. I owe that much to Frank.”

  She turned away.

  The net, the net tightening so subtly …

  Arch Warfield accosted her, triumphantly. “So you see, Miss Maggie Bitch, someone else thought what I was writing was worth printing.”

  “And snapped up your mythical contract, I take it? Is he paying you as much as was Frank, under the table?” she flung out words again from someplace simmering inside her. And was that the crux of it, what Warfield had been hinting all that time?

  His snide expression faded and he turned away from her as if he wanted to run.

  She couldn’t get away from anything, from anyone.

  She watched, some mornings, as a construction crew removed the debris from the fire. It was heartwrenching.

  There was no sign of Logan and no blinding flash from the heavens to reveal to her what her next move ought to be.

  The second edition of the Clarion came out, heralding the Denver North approach to Colville, track being laid so many miles a day to reach Colville by the end of the week.

  Maggie couldn’t look at it, let alone read it, though Reese brought it in to show her.

  She was a woman without a purpose, she thought. She just sat in those stuffy rooms or she made brief forays outside to walk, to think, to try to feel some inner pulse. But there was nothing; there was a blank.

  The thing that hurt the most, she thought, was Logan’s defection. It was an ultimatum he had given her. Marry him or else. She had a fantastical notion that he could have started the fire for the very same reason: to force her to make a decision; to destroy her livelihood so completely that she would have to turn to him.

  Something in her protested that he couldn’t be like that. But even she didn’t know what men could be like. Look at how Frank had changed so radically in the second year they were married. Maybe Logan resented her working as much as Frank had. Maybe it was desperation. Maybe it was possible she was misreading everything.

  But even these thoughts could not blot out the memories of his lovemaking. She missed it. She wanted it. She almost didn’t care what he thought or wanted as long as he came to her.

  And that made her as desperate as Annie Mapes, she thought. She had been a captive all the time she had thought she was free.

  Dennis arrived. “I have an offer for the property, Maggie.”

  “Which property is that, Dennis?”

  “Don’t be difficult. The town property, let’s call it.”

  “I haven’t said yet that I wanted to sell.”

  “Nonetheless, there has been a lot of interest in it. I think you should at least listen.”

  “I’ll listen.”

  “Ten thousand dollars.”

  Even her eyebrows went up. “My, my. Let me guess—Mr. Brown.”

  His eyebrows arched in surprise.

  “No one else is throwing around that kind of money, Dennis. Don’t be obtuse.”

  “So?”

  “You must let me think about it.”

  “You can’t take too long to think about it, Maggie.”


  “Why is that? Is there some other fire-razed property on Main Street they want to bid on?”

  “Let’s just say there are other properties.”

  “Whose buildings they will have to raze, isn’t that so?”

  He was getting uncomfortable. She knew too damned much for a woman. “It’s possible.”

  “And they might offer as much if the location were as good as mine, but they still would have the expense of tearing down a building, am I not correct?”

  “It is possible,” he conceded again.

  “I need time to think about it.”

  “Maggie,” he began, exasperated with her altogether.

  “Dennis, this is Denver North; you didn’t expect I was going to leap at the offer.”

  “I expected you were going to leap at the chance to replenish your finances, frankly.”

  “Oh?” Now she was a little taken aback by his bald pronouncement. “What do you mean, Dennis?”

  “I mean, you have been eating into capital with large bites, Maggie, and you have to consider selling to offset your expenses.”

  “Such as?”

  “The hotel, the clothes, your meals, and the removal of rubble from the building site,” he enumerated. “You really can’t keep on this way, Maggie, supporting your mother-in-law and Reese and yourself and expect the money to keep coming.”

  “I see.” Pressure. She felt more pressure. And the thought that if she didn’t have to take care of the ever ungrateful Madame Mother, and Reese, who in all his mystery had taken to disappearing everyday, she could live quite comfortably off the income from Frank’s estate all by her blessed self.

  “I still have to think about it, Dennis. Give me a day.”

  He looked doubtful. “Whatever you say, Maggie.”

  She looked at him curiously. “Are you afraid of Mr. Brown?”

  “No, no, no. I just want to do what’s best for you, Maggie.”

  “With my consent.”

  “I think you would be wise. What on earth would you do with that property? Even if you wanted to build a house, you surely wouldn’t want to be right in the center of town.”

  “Probably not,” she agreed. “I’ll think about it.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  “Yes,” she said, “you tell him.”

  Pressure. Denver North was going to win one way or another. If they couldn’t have one thing, they would take another, but somehow they were going to get Maggie Colleran.

  But why would anyone want to “get” Maggie Colleran?

  Or was someone after something else and she just got in the way?

  She went again, as if she were drawn to it by some invisible rope, to the Morning Call building site. Ten thousand dollars …

  From the opposite direction, she saw another figure walking along briskly toward the same destination and her step faltered. Melinda Sable. She had never said a word to Melinda Sable in all these years. She knew what the woman was, and what she had been to Frank, and she had never been able to forgive it.

  She watched curiously as Melinda stepped across the street and stared at the vacant building site, almost as if she were trying to make up her mind about something.

  She walked slowly toward the woman, loath to turn away, feeling as possessive of the land as she had about the building, not wanting Melinda Sable to go near it, to even look at it, and she needed to know why Melinda was there.

  “Hello, Maggie.” Melinda was the bold one, with her soft voice and golden curls and knowing eyes. She knew a secret that Maggie did not.

  “Melinda.” She could hardly bring herself to say the woman’s name. She couldn’t believe she was standing side by side with her looking at the end of Frank’s ambition.

  “The thought occurred to me,” Melinda said suddenly, “that this would make a much better location for me than where I am building now.”

  “That’s nice,” Maggie said. “What do you expect me to do about it?”

  It was rude, but she knew nothing would faze Melinda; it was one of the reasons for her success. That and her voluptuous body and her little-girl voice.

  “Sell it to me,” she suggested huskily.

  Maggie laughed. It was outrageous that this woman could have enough money to make an offer. “I’d rather pitch a tent and live here myself,” she said finally.

  “Oh, Maggie. Don’t waste time over fruitless emotions. Don’t you think Frank would have loved the irony of me winding up on the ruins of his biggest enterprise and worst failure.”

  Maggie’s eyes flickered at the latent hostility in Melinda’s words.

  “Frank didn’t love anything,” she said carefully, “not even you. He loved power and he gave it all to me, Melinda. I think he would have adored the fact that you must come begging to me, and that you still get into bed with whoever pays the highest price, man or corporation.”

  “Ooooh, little cat. How forthright you are, Maggie. I hope you understand after all this time that it was the one thing that Frank could not stand about you.”

  “I know it; he had to buy submissiveness, didn’t he, Melinda. He bought me and then he bought you.”

  “Yes, and which one of us do you think was the better bargain? Which do you think he needed more—the newspaper or a soft, pliant woman?”

  Maggie’s whole body went hot, as though Melinda had suggested something that had lurked deep within her for years and defined it. She felt a hazy comprehension and wanted to strike out at Melinda because she had known what Maggie had not: that Frank had married her to get control of the newspaper.

  “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie,” Melinda said chidingly in her soft girlish voice. “You never did understand that a man adores a woman who enjoys his sensual favors, but the one thing he doesn’t adore is for her to tell him what she wants. He wants to discover it, he wants to persuade her, he wants to coax her to do things that seem forbidden. And if he can do that, Maggie, he comes back—again and again and again, to see if he can beg her to go a little further and little further yet.”

  Her heart was pounding painfully. So that was the secret: Maggie was the whore and Melinda was the good girl. Nothing else had mattered except his utter possession of the one and his total power over the other. And they could have gone on that way for years, she thought, but someone had killed him and they never knew who.

  Like A.J., she thought, suddenly, blindingly.

  “A man wants to be the only one to initiate a woman into those sexual secrets, Maggie. He gets very upset when he sees all that passion coming from within, without his tutelage. You would have been so much smarter to lay back and make him show you what to do. But you were so young then, and he did need a woman who knew how to be feminine and pliant all at once.”

  “Yes,” Maggie said, “he was just like that.”

  “So it would be delicious revenge if you would consider selling me the land, Maggie. Or we could be business partners. You do have a talent for it. And you have a nature, by the way, that a certain kind of man would pay dearly to explore and test over and over again. Wouldn’t Frank love the idea of that? You could get everything you ever needed from such an arrangement, and you would never have to commit to anything but a certain amount of time per day. You could be so exclusive, Maggie. And you would be wealthy and free. Just like me, Maggie. Think about it. We never were enemies, you know. We both knew exactly what Frank was like, and we both gave him precisely what he needed.”

  Oh yes, Maggie thought, she had it exactly right. They had both known. She pulled him one way and Melinda the other, and he had loved it. That was Frank. He had loved denying her, and he had reveled in giving it to the baby-voiced Melinda, who knew just how to manipulate him. The bastard had never known it either, she thought. Melinda was the smart one and she was the fool. She even felt a moment’s temptation at what Melinda was offering her: all the sensual gratification she could handle—and autonomy.

  The proposition had a certain delicious appeal, she thought; she could even unders
tand why Annie Mapes might succumb to it. She even felt a momentary gratification then at the thought of striking back at the men who were even now trying to cage her. They could just pay their way and take only what she offered and nothing more. She would have the power then to give or deny, and when she was tired, she could just walk away.

  It was a heady, seductive proposal, and she stood a long time staring at the building site thinking about it.

  Chapter Sixteen

  She had absolutely nothing to do, that was her problem, that and the terrible decision of whether to sell her property. Then there were all the things caving in on her: Logan’s defection, Melinda Sable’s revelations, the sheriff’s covert surveillance of her, the feeling she was being pressured, pushed, manipulated, the notion that Frank was laughing at her.

  And what was Reese doing?

  “I’m waiting for you to come to your senses, Maggie. I could make you happy. I know you weren’t happy with Frank.”

  “I’m not happy now either.”

  “Give me my chance then, Maggie.”

  She shook her head, but the errant thought occurred to her that if he had come to her at Melinda’s house, she could not have refused him and would have had to do whatever he had paid her for. He was so much like Frank in so many ways, she wondered if he were like him that way too.

  “Let me help you rebuild.”

  “I don’t know if I want to.”

  “Then let me take you away.”

  “I want to stay here.”

  Reese’s frustration with her was intense. Anything he proposed she would negate. He pushed his mother out of the way and pursued her intently.

  “Let’s walk, Maggie.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “There’s an architect newly arrived in town. He could draw up plans for a new office building.”