‘I am. If you’d allowed me to finish you would have heard me say that Tim would make a fine husband for the right person who was not me.’
‘Bravo,’ he applauded. ‘I’m all in favour of sticking to your guns. Did that ring a bell with you, though?’
‘It gave me a distinct sense of déjà vu,’ she replied through her teeth. ‘Why are you being so—horrible?’
He shrugged. ‘I thought you needed taking out of yourself a bit.’ He ignored her incredulous expression. ‘How’s the job going?’
Maggie opened her mouth to dispose of this query summarily, but something stopped her. Did she need taking out of herself? Was she floundering in a slough of despond?
‘I’m giving it up in a fortnight.’ She sniffed suddenly. ‘I seem to have lost my edge. It’s become a bit of a chore rather than a pleasure. Besides which…’ she looked down at herself ruefully ‘… I’ve got the feeling I’m about to burst out all over and driving around a lot and getting in and out of cars may not be too comfortable.’
He smiled, and it was almost as if he’d gone from tiger mode to gentle mode in the blink of an eye. ‘You could be right. How about working from home? For me, I mean, or as an associate?’
Maggie stared at him.
‘I adapted the retirement village to your ideas, but now I need an interior decorator.’ He paused and looked around. ‘You have some wonderful ideas and taste.’
Maggie stared at him with her lips parted this time.
‘You seem to have pretty strong convictions about retirement homes,’ he said into the silence with a tinge of irony.
‘Are you furnishing them?’ she queried.
‘Not all of them. There are several levels of accommodation. The ones I will be furnishing are for single occupants, widows and widowers mostly, I guess. I’d like them to be—cheerful and comfortable. But even the ones I don’t furnish will need colour schemes, carpets, curtains, kitchen and bathroom finishes, et cetera.’
‘And…’ she licked her lips ‘… you… you think I could do all that from home?’
‘I don’t see why not. Of course you can check out the site as often as you like, but Maisie could organize all the samples—fabrics, carpet, paint—to be sent here.’
She stared at him again, transfixed.
He waited for a moment, then added, ‘I’ve also set aside some land that can be divided into plots for keen gardeners.’
Why that did it, she wasn’t sure, but all of a sudden, although it was a huge project, it beckoned her in a way that lifted her spirits immediately.
She opened her mouth to say the first thing that popped into her mind—What a pity you don’t love me, Jack—but at the last moment she amended it to, ‘Why are you doing this?’
‘I told you. Your welfare is important to me, as well as the kid’s.’
She fell asleep with tears on her cheeks that night because that unbidden, out-of-context thought—what a pity you don’t love me, Jack—had revealed to her that she still hungered for his love; perhaps she always would. Why it had popped into her mind, she wasn’t sure. Because he’d taken her advice to heart on garden plots for retirees? That didn’t make much sense. Or did it? Could they become quite a team in every respect but the one that mattered most and it broke her heart to think of it?
Her life changed, her outlook in most respects changed from then on, however. During the last few months of her pregnancy she became very busy and found it fulfilling. She did pop out in some directions, but she did also glow, at times, at last.
She also got closer to Jack and the McKinnon empire. She accepted an advisory position on his board, although she demurred at first on the grounds of the speculation it might produce along the lines of whose baby she was carrying.
‘That’s no one’s business but our own, Maggie,’ he said decidedly. ‘Anyway, no one knows of our connection. I haven’t told anyone.’
‘Not even Maisie?’
‘Not even Maisie, although she may suspect, but she’s the soul of discretion. Have you told anyone?’
‘Who the father is? No.’
They eyed each other until he said, ‘Well, then? It could be the start of a new, more suitable career for you as a single mother.’
Maggie opened her mouth, but, much as she would have loved to refute this for reasons not at all clear to her, she couldn’t deny it was something she should give thought to.
‘You could be right,’ she said eventually.
She got to know his sub-penthouse, which was where he did his business entertaining. It was elegant but restrained and she got the feeling that if he felt really at home anywhere, it was Cape Gloucester.
She experienced the dynamic businessman he was at firsthand and knew that she and her mother had been right: he could be as arrogant and ruthless as her father, but he did temper it so that all his employees were devoted to him and his partners in any ventures respected him highly.
Sylvia came to see her out of the blue one day.
‘I got Jack’s permission to do this,’ she said as she stood on the doorstep.
Still blinking with surprise, Maggie said, ‘You didn’t need his permission! Uh—come in. I didn’t know you knew…’
‘I didn’t until a couple of days ago when I came up to tell him some news of my own. I do find,’ Sylvia said wryly when they were settled in the lounge, ‘that it’s not a good idea to cross Jack these days. Actually, it never was, because even as a kid he had an infuriating habit of being right about most things.’
‘I know the kind.’ Maggie looked heavenwards.
‘I suppose you do. You got sandwiched between two such men, didn’t you?’
The reference to her father chilled Maggie a little and perhaps Sylvia sensed it because she went on in a sudden rush. ‘I was as much to blame as your father was. I knew he was married. I should never have got involved.’
Maggie thawed, she couldn’t help it, but she also said honestly, ‘I wondered about that. Still, these things happen, I guess.’
‘Something else has happened to me. I’ve fallen in love again when I thought it could never happen to me.’
‘Not a married man?’
‘Not a married man, but he will be married to me shortly.’
On an impulse Maggie got up and crossed over to Sylvia to hug her with some difficulty that caused them both to laugh.
‘I’m so happy for you,’ Maggie said, with a genuine feeling of warmth.
‘Would there be—any possibility your mother and father have—have…?’ Sylvia hesitated.
‘Got together again?’ Maggie supplied. ‘Yes! They have and it’s wonderful to see.’
Sylvia breathed deeply. ‘That’s an enormous relief. But has he forgiven you for Jack, and this?’
‘This?’ Maggie patted her stomach affectionately. ‘He’s putting a good face on it. I don’t think they’ll ever be friends, but somehow or other I made them see that they had to be civilized at least. Not that they’ve met yet.’
‘Maggie, why won’t you marry Jack?’
‘Sylvia…’ Maggie paused and searched Sylvia’s blue eyes ‘… you could be the one person who knows how hard it is to pin the real Jack McKinnon down. I think there’s a core in him that will always shy away…’ she stopped to think carefully ‘… from any true attachment and it goes right back to being put up for adoption as a baby.’
Sylvia heaved a sigh. ‘Even under a loving adoption arrangement, it can be like a thorn in your flesh or you can secretly hold the belief that your mother was this wonderful, wonderful person who is always tied to you by an invisible string. That’s the path I opted for. Jack went the other way. You could be right but—’
‘The thing is,’ Maggie interrupted quietly, ‘I’m an all-or-nothing kind of person.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘In lots of respects I’ve come to see I might be a chip off the old block, after all.’
‘He, Jack, I mean—’
Again Maggie interrupted. ‘He’s been wond
erful in lots of ways.’
‘He was wonderful to me when I—when your father—without Jack to pick up the pieces, I don’t know where I’d be.’
‘Yes, he is rather good at picking up the pieces, isn’t he?’ Maggie said slowly.
Sylvia looked awkward. ‘I didn’t mean you.’
Maggie grimaced and decided to change the subject completely. ‘Tell me about your new man? And would you like to see the nursery?’
‘Well, well, kiddo.’ Maggie patted her stomach after Sylvia had left—she’d taken to talking to her baby ever since she’d come out of her slough of despond. ‘That was your aunt. Come to think of it, that’s yet another difficult situation resolved. Which only leaves us but, hey, between the two of us we can conquer anything!’
A couple of days later, she got an even greater surprise.
Jack held a dinner party to celebrate the retirement village foundations being dug.
Actually, it was Maisie who organized it all down to the caterers, the flowers and guest list.
Maggie received her invitation in the mail. Jack was overseas until the afternoon of the dinner, but she didn’t RSVP until the last moment. She was in two minds.
Then she thought, What the heck? She was part of the team and although, at eight months, sitting for any length of time was uncomfortable, she felt absolutely fine.
She also went out of her way to look absolutely fine. She chose a long French navy dress in a silk georgette that, despite being a maternity dress, was the essence of chic. It was round-necked, sleeveless and spring-like in tune with the new season. The fine pintucking on the bodice was stitched with silver thread.
She got her hair and her nails done; her tawny hair was loose and lightly curled so that it looked gorgeously windswept as only an expert hairdresser could achieve.
Her shoes were a complete folly, she knew—high, strappy silver sandals she couldn’t have resisted if she’d tried. She covered the few patches of pregnancy pigment on her cheeks with a glowing foundation and her lipstick matched her nail polish.
She stared at herself in her beautiful rosewood cheval-mirror and addressed her unborn child again…
‘You couldn’t say we were hugely pregnant, honey- child. I’ve been very careful dietary-wise and I’ve been pretty active. Incidentally, you’re pretty active these days, a right little gymnast! But I am more, well, rounded, even in the less obvious areas, although it doesn’t seem to look too bad. Not tonight anyway.’
She turned away from the mirror ruefully and swept her silver mesh purse off the bed.
Maisie was more positive about it when she met Maggie at the door of the sub-penthouse.
‘Maggie,’ she said affectionately—they’d become good friends, ‘you look fantastic!’
‘I second that.’ Jack loomed up behind Maisie and Maggie took an unexpected little breath.
She hadn’t seen him for a week, but it was more than that. He wore a dinner suit and the beautifully tailored black suit and white shirt highlighted his tall, strong lines and broad shoulders. It shot through her mind that she loved him however he looked.
Windblown and with blue shadows on his jaw, wearing an old football jersey with the sleeves cut off as he’d often been at Cape Gloucester—but this Jack was electrifying.
She swallowed something in her throat. ‘Thanks, you two! You sure know how to make a very pregnant lady feel better.’
It was a buffet dinner for about twenty people and because it was a calm, warm night there were tables set out on the veranda high above Runaway Bay and overlooking the Broadwater and the ocean beyond.
The food was inspired and fine wine flowed although Maggie didn’t partake of the wine and she ate sparingly. But the company was pleasant, she knew everyone and she enjoyed herself.
All the same, she attempted to leave a little early. She was making her explanations to Maisie when Jack’s hand closed round her wrist. ‘Stay a bit longer,’ he said quietly. ‘It won’t be long before the party breaks up. Then I can drive you home.’
‘But I drove myself here,’ she objected.
‘Doesn’t matter. You shouldn’t be out and about on your own at this time of night.’
‘That’s true,’ Maisie agreed.
‘I am a little tired, though,’ Maggie said and stifled a yawn.
‘How about I settle you in the den where you can put your feet up and bring you a cuppa?’ Maisie offered.
‘Oh, thank you!’ Maggie said gratefully. ‘My shoes are killing me.’
Maggie had never seen the den and it brought a slight smile to her lips. There was definitely a nautical flavour to it.
There were gold-framed ships on the walls; there was a wonderful antique globe of the world and a polished brass sextant on the coffee-table. There were also deep, inviting buttoned leather armchairs…
‘And this one,’ said Maisie triumphantly as she pushed a lever on the side of the chair, ‘is a recliner chair.’
‘Just what I need!’ Maggie slipped off her shoes and sank down into it gratefully.
‘Tea’s on the way!’
Maggie had her tea, then she stretched out in the chair, to find she couldn’t keep her eyes open.
Half an hour later something woke her from the gentle slumber she’d fallen into. Her lashes lifted, and Jack was standing beside the chair looking down at her, Jack looking austere but divine with his streaky fair hair tamed tonight and that wonderful physique highlighted by his dinner suit.
Her lips parted as their gazes caught and held, then she struggled upright.
He held out his hand and helped her to her feet.
She opened her mouth to thank him, but the words died on her lips because he was studying her—in a way she knew well, a way that was anything but austere—from top to toe. The sleep-flushed curves of her face, the glorious disarray of her hair, her mouth and throat, her full, rich breasts beneath the fine navy georgette, the mound of his child…
His gaze was intent and heavy-lidded and the pressure of his fingers on hers grew.
He still wants me, Maggie thought chaotically as her colour fluctuated and her breathing grew ragged. That’s how he used to look at me before he made love to me, just like this… So that the power of his gaze was almost like having his hands on me.
Have I not been the only one to suffer from the unassuaged ache of being physically deprived of him? Not the only one plagued by so many memories of our lovemaking? she wondered wildly. But what does it mean? I was so sure that he’d stopped wanting me.
She was destined not to know what it meant. A phone rang softly on the desk.
He turned his head at last to look at it, a hard, irritable look, then as it rang on he shrugged and walked over to it.
‘Maisie,’ he growled down the line, ‘what the hell—?’ He stopped.
From then on he answered in monosyllables until he said, ‘All right. Will you drive Maggie home?’
She looked a question at him as he put the phone down.
‘Sylvia rang. Our mother is critically ill now and not likely to survive for more than a day or so.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly. ‘Don’t worry about me—but will you get a flight at this time of night?’
‘No, and the earliest flights tomorrow are booked out so I’ll drive. If I start off now, I’ll get there early tomorrow morning, anyway. I’m sorry.’
‘That’s all right! Just—take care. On the road.’
‘I will.’ He picked up her hand. ‘You take care too.’
The baby moved at that moment and she put her hand on her stomach with his over it.
He blinked as he felt the movement. ‘How often does that happen?’
‘Quite a lot nowadays.’ A smile trembled on her lips. ‘He or she loves doing cartwheels so we could have another gymnast on our hands.’
Maisie coughed discreetly from the doorway, and the moment was lost. ‘Sylvia again,’ she said apologetically.
For the next few days Maggie fel
t as if she were on cloud nine.
Don’t equate wanting you with loving you and not being able to live without you, she warned herself, but it made no difference. The long months of unhappiness, of blaming herself for her situation, of feeling that she hadn’t lived up to what he needed in a woman melted away behind her.
If he could still want her when she was eight months pregnant, maybe he always would? Had she been proud and foolish all that time?
But I didn’t know, she thought dazedly. He hid it so well. Why?
This thought occurred to her as she was walking down a busy pavement in Southport on the way to her doctor. She didn’t even notice the man who passed her, then turned round and came back to her.
Until he said, ‘Hang on—don’t I know you?’
Maggie blinked and stared at him uncomprehendingly.
‘You weren’t pregnant then and all you were wearing was a bra and jeans while you and Jack McKinnon were—supposedly, although I had my doubts—trying to get out of the roof of a shed.’
Maggie suffered a surge of sheer revulsion at the hateful way the man’s eyes gleamed, and recognition came to her. It was the journalist who’d been with the private detective when she and Jack had been locked in the shed.
When he put his hand on her arm to detain her, she wrenched it free. ‘Go away,’ she ordered and made a dash for her doctor’s surgery only a few doors away.
She heaved a huge sigh of relief as she passed through the doors and no one followed her, although she supposed it was always possible he would hang around until she came out.
Maisie, she thought. I’ll ring Maisie and ask her to pick me up. Maisie will know how to handle it.
She got out her mobile phone and did just that.
But the first question she asked Maisie was if she’d heard from Jack.
The Millionaire's Virgin (Mills & Boon By Request) Page 30