The Complete Groupie Trilogy (92 page)

She walked around to face him, giving him something more to look at than staring blindly toward the ocean. She put one hand on her hip. “Don’t tell me I have to start over from scratch with you. You get your heart broken and all of a sudden you’re willing to throw in the towel? That’s not the Graham Baxter I know.”

He wore an ironic smile. “And who is the Graham Baxter you know, Mags?”

“He’s one of the strongest and smartest and kindest guys I have ever met. He’s got more determination in his little finger than most people do in their entire bodies. Not only did he build a multi-media corporation, he willed himself to walk again after a paralyzing gunshot wound. And he certainly wouldn’t sit here on this deck, drinking like a fool over some idiot too stupid to know what’s good for her.”

He shook his head. He knew that she was unhappy with Andy’s choices, but he didn’t want her trashing her like that. She wasn’t a fool. She was just young. Everyone was allowed to be stupid when they were young. “You
don’t understand,” he offered.

“Then explain it to me.”

“I love her, Mags. Right or wrong. I’ve loved her since the very first moment I took her in my arms and asked her to dance. She fit just like the missing piece of a puzzle. Without her…” he took a deep breath. “Without her, I feel incomplete.”

She sighed. Then she put the snifter down on the table beside his wheelchair. She turned back to him with an outstretched hand. “Dance with me.”

Confusion knit his brow. “What?”

“Dance with me,” she repeated.

He hesitated for only a moment. But he had come to trust Maggie over their long year together. It was too late to question her methods now. He struggled to his feet, cinched his robe and walked into her arms.

She pulled him close and they began to sway, with nothing but the melodic rhythm of the ocean to guide them. “Close your eyes,” she whispered as she laid her head on his shoulder. He complied. She continued, almost hypnotically. “Feel my arms,” she instructed as she circled him in a strong embrace. “Feel my body,”
she whispered against his ear.

His eyes were closed so using only the sensation of touch he concentrated on every curve of her body that touched his. She w
as warm and supple in his arms.

“Love is a circle, Graham. You get what you give, like the ebb and flow of the tide. It restores and renews the parts it takes away; otherwise it’s not really love at all. In every other case it’s just a dance. Two bodies
responding to each other until the music has ended and they have to move on.” She pulled back again and his eyes opened to stare into her face, illuminated by the moonlight. “It’s time to move on,” she said.

He didn’t say a word as his eyes traveled across her face. Ultimately they landed on her parted lips, and for a crazy moment he wanted to know what her kiss would taste like. It was crazy. She was his nurse… his friend… but she was also a very real woman standing in the circle of his arms. He could feel her heart thunder against her breast, which was pressed so
firmly against his solid chest.

Even more remarkably he felt himself stir for her. It was as if he was seeing her for the first time. She was rewriting his history by erasing the ghost of Andy and penciling herself in the empty space. And somehow, he didn’t find it that objectionable. She was right; they were two bodies responding to each other, both free of any other obligations that would prevent them from enjoying it.

Andy had been the pot at the end of the rainbow he would endlessly chase but never quite catch. Maggie was the one who, at the darkest moments of his deepest despair, would show him a flicker of light at the end of the tunnel. “Mags,” he whispered as his head began a most imperceptible tilt towards her own.

Her eyes widened as she read the intent in his darkened eyes. For an infinitesimal moment she had found herself reaching back, almost out of some primal instinct to respond to the man she’d grown to love. But before their lips could meet she wrenched herself from the embrace. She was many things, but a substitute she had sworn to herself never to be. She cleared her throat and headed toward the house. “Dinner’s getting cold,” she said as she disappeared into the kitchen.

Graham was left to catch his breath in the cool night air. His robe had loosened and his body betrayed him, so he waited a moment before he followed her inside.

He was contrite once he faced her. “I’m sorry, Maggie. That was totally inappropriate.”

She shook it off with a wave of her hand. “My fault entirely,” she said. “That’ll teach me to go off the spine,” she added with an embarrassed grin.

He walked over to where she stood, preparing their plates to keep her hands and her thoughts busy. He turned her to face him, taking both her hands in his. “You helped more
than you know,” he assured her.

She nodded, but she wasn’t completely sure she hadn’t just thrown her heart away. If he had kissed her, she strongly suspected she’d never get it back.

The rest of their evening was quiet and comfortable, with no further mention of what had almost happened on the patio.

But that night, when he retired to the privacy of his bedroom, he couldn’t stop thinking of how her body felt in his arms, or the look in her eyes before they almost kissed. Every time he closed his eyes he could feel her, and his hungry body responded in kind.

That night, for the first time in three years, his dreams included another woman.

The next morning she was business as usual as she drove his therapy harder than normal. She chastised him for slacking off on his exercises, and by the end of their routine he was sweaty and exhausted – but feeling more in control than he had all week she’d been gone.

She drew his whirlpool bath but didn’t stay once he slipped his robe from his shoulders. She left him in total privacy until his soak was finished, then she helped him to the massage table where she worked out some of the kinks their grueling workout had left in his legs and hips.

As he lay on the table, naked except for a towel, all he could think about was how her body felt against his, her arms around his shoulders and her breath against his face. Every touch was layered now with more intimate subtext. He couldn’t separate the feeling of her strong fingers against the muscles of his thighs and buttocks with thoughts of how her fingers would feel elsewhere on his lonely body. This new longing surged throughout him like a wildfire out of control, resurrecting some feelings he hadn’t felt since before he was shot. This wasn’t the early awakening he had experienced with Andy.

This was a phoenix exploding from the ashes.

But Maggie had made it clear on more than one occasion that their relationship was just business. Though his thoughts raced with the idea of taking her into his arms or acting on these completely inappropriate feelings, he knew she was way too professional to allow it to happen. It was why she changed her mind at the very last second out on the patio. He saw her head tilt ever so slightly toward his own. He knew that she, too, was caught up in the moment.

She was only human, after all.

He respected her for her resolve and her integrity to her character and to her job. But there wasn’t enough cold water in Malibu to extinguish the fire her impromptu therapeutic dance had ignited.

And somehow he found himself grateful. It helped lift the cloud Andy’s constant rejection had darkened his world with for so long. He felt frustration and exquisite longing, but he
felt
. For the second time in his life, he was returning from the dead.

It finally dawned on him that in both instances, Maggie Fowler was the reason why.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

West Los Angeles

February 25, 2011

From the moment he stepped off the podium, Vanni’s phone alerted him to an incoming text message. He knew who it was before he even read it. He knew that he would have some explaining to do, given he didn’t tell Holly about what was going on with Andy and their baby pr
ior to the public announcement.

He was stuck between a rock and a hard place. On one hand he wanted to keep both of the pregnant women in his life de-stressed enough so they could safely carry healthy babies. On the other, just the existence of another woman in his life was enough to drive both of them crazy. His priority had been Andy. She was going to be his wife, and as such she came first above anyone. His children came next, and while Holly was being hospitalized for being so sick, it just made the most sense not to upset her any more than necessary.

And truthfully he just didn’t want another tantrum.

From her “You lying son of a bitch! I never want to see you again!” text, he figured she had launched into aforementioned tantrum with near-psychotic abandon. How much of that was her personality and how much was due to her pregnancy hormones, he couldn’t be sure. But he was on his way to the hospital to find out.

PING tailed him the entire way despite his best efforts to ditch them. He had begun to recognize their slimy faces by this point. They weren’t exactly shy about hiding who they were. One was already staked out at the hospital entrance. “Coming to see Baby Mama #2?” he asked with a smug little smirk Vanni immediately wanted to knock right off his face. Instead he shoved past and headed up toward Holly’s floor.

The nurse tried to stop him as he marched toward her room. “Miss Neal doesn’t want any visitors,” she cautioned, but he was undeterred. He didn’t even knock as he entered her room and found her curled up into a sobbing ball on the bed. She sat upright the minute she saw him.

“Get the fuck out of here!” she screeched, but Vanni advanced around the bed, his mouth set in a grim line.

“Calm down, Holly.”

She grabbed the pregnancy book from her nightstand and launched it his direction. “Don’t you tell me what to do, you son of a bitch! You’re a two-timing liar!”

He picked up the book that had missed him by a mile. “I never cheated on you, Holly. We weren’t a couple when Andy and I were together in October. You showed up when I asked you not to, remember?”

“I was trying to help you!” she wailed. “I loved you!” Tears poured down her face. “I loved only you.” Her face screwed into a hateful scowl. “But you slept with that whore instead! That fat cunt was only using you!”

“That’s enough, Holly,” he warned in a low voice.

“Get out!” she screamed again. “What do you want from me anyway? You have it all. You have your nice little happy ending. Leave me the fuck alone. We don’t need you!”

“Yes, you do,” he corrected. “Who do you think is paying your hospital bill?”

“I never asked you to!” she screamed louder. “I never asked you for a goddamn thing, you miserable bastard!”

His voice never elevated and he never stood any closer than the foot of the bed. “You asked me for a baby, didn’t you?”

She grabbed whatever she could find and threw it where he stood. “Get out!” she kept screaming.

The nurse had returned with security, which escorted him out of the room where her doctor waited. “This is not good for her,” he said. “You can’t keep upsetting her like this. Her blood pressure is elevated and her nausea is worsened by all the stress. Maybe it would be best if you didn’t come and see her for a while.”

Vanni let out a deep breath. “She’s going to take my kid away from me,” he confessed his greatest fear. “If I just have time to help her through the initial trauma, she can get used to the way things are going to be. Better now, while she’s here, than chasing her all over the country, right?”

“My concern is my patient, Mr. Carnevale,” the doctor reminded. “Your personal life is your own. I can’t have that kind of environment in this hospital around my patients.”

“Fine,” Vanni said. He hadn’t wanted to involve any attorneys at this point, but it was clear he would have to in order to protect his parental rights. “You’ll be hearing from my attorney,” he said as he turned to leave. He found Holly leaning up against the door frame. She nearly lost her footing and Vanni rushed over to catch her before she wilted straight to the floor.

She had torn out her IV to come chasing after him. It was clear she was still weakened by her condition.

He carried her like a doll back to the bed. The doctor checked her vitals while Vanni stood off to the side. “I can have security remove him from the room, Miss Neal,” the doctor said. She shook her head.

“No need to complicate this any more than it already is,” she said in a shaky voice. “I’d actually like to talk to him in private.”

“If that’s what you would like,” the doctor said. “But security will be right outside the door. If you need to, you yell for them,” he said. He sent a contemptuous glance toward Vanni as he left the room.

Her big blue eyes met Vanni’s. “Would you really try to take my baby away from me?” she asked.

“I could ask you the same question,” he said as he sat in a nearby chair.

“If you get married, a court might give you custody. I have nothing to offer a baby right now. I can’t work. I’m dependent upon my brother, who is working day labor. You have money and now a family of your own,” she eked out painfully. Her eyes beseeched him. “Please don’t take away the only thing I have left in the world.”