Maggy's Child (31 page)

H
is shirt was unbuttoned to the waist, allowing her to glimpse a wide vee of solid masculine chest, well covered with hair. His heaving shoulders were almost as wide as the open truck door. His torso was lean and hard, his legs long and powerful. His arms were thick with muscle, his hands, curled into fists at the moment, large and capable.

If he had not wanted to let her go, she could not have escaped him. The fact of it was there, stated implicitly in the tall, strong body. But he had released her, despite the discomfort it had obviously caused him, at her protest.

These thoughts jumbled together in her mind as she eyed him warily. Gradually she became aware of other, less threatening attributes of his: the night-black waves of his hair, disordered now by her hands, washed with silver by the rising moon. The ruggedly carved symmetry of his features, the deep dimple at the side of his mouth, the sheer outrageous handsomeness of him.

Nick.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry.” Maggy said it quietly, her hands pressing hard against her cheeks.

He turned to look at her then, one hand braced against the open door, and saw how she huddled on the seat, her knees drawn up to her chin, her hands almost covering her face.

“It’s all right.” He drew in another great gulp of the
cold night air. “I’m all right. Hell, the question is, are you all right?”

“I couldn’t help it.” Her voice was tiny. “It just—happens. It isn’t you.”

“I know. I’m not mad about it. Just give me a minute to pull myself together, okay?”

“Okay.” He shut the door, and she watched, through the windshield, as he took a quick jog to the end of the parking lot and back. When he opened the door again, he was flushed and windblown, but calmer.

“I’m going to get in now, and we’re going home. Nothing for you to worry about at all.” He said it in the kind of soothing tone one might use with an edgy wild beast.

“I’m not worried.” She was still too shaken to find the humor in the cautious glance he cast her before he swung up behind the wheel.

“Put your seat belt on.” He shut the door and glanced over at her. Maggy, still curled into the farthest possible corner of the seat, put her feet on the floorboard and drew the shoulder-and-lap belt around herself. A good two feet of blue vinyl separated them this time as Nick set the truck in motion.

For a long time they were silent. The truck was on the bridge, with the black waters of the Ohio flowing serenely far below and the glittering backdrop of Louisville’s well-lit skyline receding behind them, when Nick looked her way.

“Okay?” he asked softly.

Maggy nodded.

“Magdalena …”

She glanced at him.

“Don’t you think it’s about time you told me what he did to scare you so of sex?” His voice was unbelievably gentle, his expression warm and caring. Maggy cringed.

“I can’t.”

“I think you should.”

“I can’t bear to remember.”

“Please. For both our sakes.”

“Nick …” It was a mumbled plea for mercy.

“Would it help if I told you that I already know he’s gay?”

“What?” Startled, Maggy turned to stare at him.

“Lyle Forrest is gay.”

“No,” she said. “No. That’s not true.”

“Magdalena, I’ve seen pictures …”

“They’re wrong,” she said numbly. “He’s not gay. He’s not even bi, really. He’s basically—asexual, and a voyeur, I guess the word is. He likes to watch, and cause—pain.”

“I have pictures …”

“Look at them again,” she said quietly. “I’m sure they don’t show him engaging in actual intercourse with anyone. Do they?”

His brow wrinkled as he tried to remember. “They show him in leather, with a variety of—sex toys, is the best way I can think of to describe them. Different ones, basically, in each shot. He’s with a naked man, who’s bound to some sort of contraption that has him bent almost double, right in front of ol’ Lyle. Couldn’t identify Mr. Bare-ass, because the shots we got were of his backside.” A faint grin flickered over his face and was gone. “But ol’ Lyle was unmistakable. We assumed from those pictures, and some other information that we had, that our boy was gay, and into some kinky stuff—sort of his own interpretation of the gay-biker-bar scene.”

“We?” Magdalena’s response was sharp as she grasped at every available straw that would enable her to postpone having to tell Nick what he wanted, and yes, she even admitted, needed to know. Her nerves were suddenly, screamingly on edge, because she realized that sooner or later she was going to have to tell him everything. Things she had never told another living soul. Things she could
hardly bear to think of herself. Things that it made her sick to remember.

But she wouldn’t tell him
everything
. Not all at once. One piece of the puzzle she would keep to herself. One piece she would hide for as long as she could, until she had figured out how best to tell him, or even if to tell him.

She had to tell him. She already knew it, no matter how much she might fear his reaction. And she did fear it. Because the fact that Nick was back and loved her was the closest thing to a miracle God had sent her for a long, long time. She didn’t want to jeopardize that one second sooner than she had to.

“Link and I.” Nick’s response took a shade too long, and the glance that accompanied it was guarded. It was almost as if the “we” had slipped out by accident, and he was trying to cover his mistake. But Maggy was too focused on something else he had revealed to take any real notice. She registered the impression of deceit, and filed it away, without considering it consciously for more than a split second.

“How on earth did you get pictures of Lyle doing—that? He—he’s very secretive about his sex life. Not many people have the slightest idea what he is, and I can’t imagine him letting anyone take pictures.”

“He didn’t exactly
let
anyone. He didn’t know it was being done.”

“You spied on him? When? Why?”

“
I
didn’t. He’s got plenty of enemies besides me. One of them did.” Nick’s eyes were focused ahead of them as he turned off the interstate onto the twisty roads that led into southern Indiana’s back country. The rolling hills through which they traveled were dotted with farms, and cows and chickens outnumbered human inhabitants by about fifty to one. Around them the night was still, with only the occasional light in a farmhouse or barn to push away the dark. Nick drove cautiously, as befitted one who
was just becoming accustomed to the hazard posed by free-roaming deer and wandering cattle. The bright beams of the truck sliced through utter blackness to reveal what was ahead—but they were useless for anything farther than twenty feet away.

“I imagine the original intent was to use the photos as leverage, you know, blackmail. Just like someone meant to use the ones of you dancing for blackmail. But before the pics of Lyle could be used, the guy who set it up took a powder. The pictures didn’t, though, and when I started doing a little research into your hubby, they surfaced. Cost a pretty penny, but worth every bit of it.”

“Just like the tape and pictures of me surfaced.”

“Just like that.” He cast her a quick, weighing glance.

“What are you doing here, Nick?” she asked quietly. “Really?”

“I told you, baby, I came back for you.”

“That’s a load of crap.”

He sent a quick, unreadable glance her way. “It’s the truth, Magdalena, I swear to God.”

“Don’t lie to me, Nick. Please.”

He sighed. “All right. You want the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? I did come back for you, to see you again, to see if you could possibly be as beautiful and bright and funny and strong as I remembered, to see if there was anything left of ‘us.’ I knew that coming back would have one of two results: you would have been his wife for so long that the girl I remembered was gone, or you could be—as you are. Mine. My girl, always and forever. You know it, too.”

Maggy chose not to acknowledge that last for the moment, though she knew without any doubt at all that it was so. Hadn’t she always been his girl? The twelve years they’d been apart were beginning to seem no more substantial than a dream—no, a nightmare. But something less than real.

“I still don’t understand how—or why—you came
across those pictures—the ones of Lyle and the ones of me—and bought them. Where did you get them, and what were you going to do with them?”

“There are all kinds of sleazy individuals in the nightclub business, and news travels through it like a brush fire. When I put out the word that I wanted information on Lyle, and was willing to pay, material flowed in thick and fast. The pictures, all of them, were just the tip of the iceberg. The ones of you I was going to make sure never saw the light of day. The ones of him—I was going to use them as needed. They are a weapon, Magdalena, as powerful as any gun.”

“Blackmail.”

“Persuasion—and revenge. Did you know that I came to see you, after you got back from your honeymoon? Married or not, did you really think I would let you go so easily? I was going to throw a jealous fit, drag you away and all that—but I never got the chance. You were nowhere to be seen, but your husband was. He had me thrown off his property. I think I even did something dramatic like yell ‘Magdalena!’ at the top of my lungs a dozen times as I was dragged away.”

“I didn’t know.” Maggy’s stomach churned. The idea that Nick had come for her and she hadn’t known—if he had seen her, would it have changed everything?

“I realize that. I figured out pretty fast that he would never tell you. He was afraid he’d lose you if he did. And he would have, sooner or later. You would have come to your senses, realized that you belonged with me, not him. I knew it, and I wasn’t going to give up. I was going to come back again and again until I was at least able to talk to you. To tell you that I would change, do anything you wanted, if only you would come back to me.”

He glanced over at her as if to gauge her reaction to what he was saying, and continued. “That night four punks were waiting when I came out of the apartment and got in my car. They forced their way in after me,
dragged me into the backseat at gunpoint, and drove me north. I thought it was your garden-variety senseless crime for a while. I didn’t get the picture until we made Cleveland and pulled into a deserted park overlooking some river. They yanked me out of the car, said, ‘This is a message from Mr. Forrest—you should have stayed the hell away from his wife!’ and started working me over. When they finished with me, I was unconscious. They stuffed me behind the wheel of my car, wedged my foot down on the gas, and put it in drive. It was parked on an overhang some twenty feet above the water, and the water there was deep. When the car went over with me in it, I’m sure they thought I’d never see daylight again. But the shock of the water woke me up, and I managed to get out of the car. I don’t remember a lot after that, but I was told that a fisherman found me clinging to a log not far from shore and took me to a hospital. It took six months for me to recover enough to get back to Louisville. The first thing I did was hotfoot it to Windermere. There were blue balloons tied with ribbons all over the front gates. Your child had just been born.”

Nick took a deep breath, remembering, while Maggy stared at him in growing horror. She hadn’t known.
She hadn’t known
.

“I decided to leave you alone. You had his baby. That made you his more than mine.”

Guilt and pain combined to twist Maggy’s insides like a sheet being fed into a wringer. She was utterly speechless, but something of what she was feeling must have shown in her eyes, because he gave her a wry smile.

“I couldn’t ever get you out of my mind. Not a day went by in twelve years that I didn’t think of you. None of the women I was with meant a thing, compared to the way I had felt about you. I almost got married once, until I realized that I’d leave the girl behind in a heartbeat if the Magdalena I remembered crooked her little finger at me. Then I knew—I had to lay this thing that was between us
to rest once and for all, or I had to get you back. It took a while, I had to make plans—but here I am. Like I said, I came back for you.”

“Oh, Nick.” She couldn’t find any other words. There
were
no words, to express the emotions that were warring inside her: love and thankfulness and shame and guilt, all mixed up together.

“Glad I did?” he asked, striving for a lighthearted tone and failing utterly.

“Yes,” she whispered with tears in her eyes. “Oh, yes.”

Unbuckling her seat belt, she slid across the seat to wrap her arms around his neck and press a kiss to his sandpaper cheek.

He slipped an arm about her shoulders and dipped his head to kiss her. The truck swerved toward the side of the road. He jerked back to attention, righting the truck just as a horn blared behind them. A car swept by on the left in a blinding glare of headlights, oblivious of the fact that passing was illegal on the two-lane road.

“Damned lovesick kids!” the driver yelled out the window. With another cheery honk it proceeded to roar off into the night.

“Link,” Nick said in disgust. “In my car. If he wrecks it, I’m going to wring his neck.”