by Barbara Mack
“Tomorrow, after dinner,” he said softly, and Maggie had a hard time concentrating on his words. She shook her head, to clear it, and a satisfied smile lit up his face, making his teeth flash white against his sun-darkened skin.
“No? That is not good for you?" He laughed softly as Maggie shook her head again and stuttered out something nearly incoherent. "That is not what you meant? Unless you have an objection, we will start your riding lessons tomorrow after dinner,” he said again.
“Oh, that ... that will be fine,” was all she could say, and he smiled again.
“Goodnight, Maggie,” he said gently, and turned to walk away.
“Goodnight,” she said, and watched him walk away. As he turned the corner, he began to whistle.
****************************
“Easy, now, easy,” Nick said soothingly, and Maggie was not sure if he spoke to her or the horse.
This was her second riding lesson; she had spent the first learning how to saddle and bridle the gentle old mare he had chosen for her, and leading the plump old thing around a ring. Nick had taken every excuse to touch her during the lessons, and it was driving her mad. If it all was not so shattering, she might have found it funny. But the joke was on her, and she nearly wept with frustration as he teased her with another gentle graze of his hand. She had started this whole thing to tempt Nick, and she was the one who was tempted. Her mouth went dry every time he got near here, and she tensed in anticipation of his lightest touch.
He had insisted that she wear pants for her riding lesson, saying that sidesaddles were nothing but an invitation to a broken neck, and that there was no room here in the wilds for citified ways and mores. She would be just as safe with him wearing a pair of trousers as she was in a dress; and on a horse, trousers were better. So Maggie was wearing a pair of Tommy’s castoffs, and the unfamiliar feel of the trousers unnerved her. She liked the freedom that they granted her, but the way they hugged her bottom and clung to her legs made her more aware of her own body than she usually was. His hand slid over her leg just now, and she jumped. The placid old mare did not seem so placid to her now, and Maggie could feel the horse shifting uneasily underneath her.
She bit her lip, and clutched the saddle horn. The ground certainly seemed a long way down.
“Loosen up on the reins,” he said quietly. “You are making her nervous.”
Maggie laughed shakily. “She is nervous? I am practically shaking my bones loose up here.”
“And she can tell,” he said. “I am going to lead you around a little. See if you can quit squeezing that saddle horn to death and sit up straight.”
Maggie tried to do as he said. She consciously relaxed the muscles of her legs and loosened the death grip she had on the saddle.
“Feel the motion of the horse,” he said quietly. “Move with the horse. It is like rocking in a cradle. Enjoy the feeling, Maggie, and trust me. I would not let you get hurt.”
Maggie’s eyes fixed to the back of his dark head as he walked her around and around. Her eyes slid admiringly down the rest of him. She could see the movement of his muscles underneath his supple skin, and she wanted to crawl inside him, to get so close she was a part of him. Her longing to hold him and have him hold her was eating her alive. It was more than desire; she wanted him. She was so busy staring at his firm backside outlined by those sinfully tight pants that when he turned around she was caught unawares. He watched her with amusement and a certain satisfaction in his fine dark eyes as she flushed a dark red, and Maggie. jumped slightly when he spoke.
“You are doing better,” he said, his voice low and caressing. “You are not concentrating on how scared you are anymore . . . you must have been thinking of something else.”
Maggie blushed hotter, embarrassed that he had caught her looking at him. She lifted her chin.
“Yes,” she said haughtily. “I was thinking about something else. I was thinking about your dinner guests for tomorrow night.”
He frowned. “Oh, yes,” he said shortly. “Your beau, the good doctor. I am sure that you are planning on having a wonderful time.”
“Kathleen and her parents are coming, too, and Doctor Fell,” Maggie reminded him. “And he is not my beau, you stubborn ox,” she said underneath her breath. Nick’s head was turned away, or she would have seen him smile at her muttered imprecation.
“I am not stubborn,” he said calmly. “I just know when I am right.”
“Which is hardly ever,” Maggie shot back. “You do not know half as much as you think you do.”
“Lesson’s over,” he said. “Let’s take you back. You have done pretty well,” he complimented her, then smiled a slow smile that made the blood sizzle in her veins. “Once I distracted you and got you to stop thinking about falling off. We will continue later but not tomorrow, since we have guests coming for dinner tomorrow. And I never thought that I would long for the days when you were afraid to argue with me.”
“You are enjoying this, aren’t you?” she asked furiously as he showed her the correct way to dismount, gripping her hip in a way that made her muscles quiver and tighten. When she slung
one leg over the horse, his hand grazed her buttock.
“Enjoying what?” he asked innocently. “Teaching you to ride?”
Maggie stalked off to the house, leaving Nick chuckling behind her, and that little sound made her even madder and more frustrated than she already was.
Maggie ran the brush through her hair, somberly studying her reflection in the mirror. She was wearing the green dress that she and Kathleen had made together, the one that Kathleen had said matched her eyes, and it looked good on her. The simple straight lines of the dress complimented her somewhat top-heavy figure. She tugged at the sweetheart neckline, wishing not for the first time that she was not so well endowed up front. No matter how she pulled and tugged, a deep line of cleavage showed above the innocent ruffle of the dress, and it looked indecent to her. She flung the brush down, and pinned her hair up quickly. No amount of fussing was going to make her bosom smaller, and she would just have to live with it. Kathleen had not seemed to think the neckline too low; on the contrary, when Maggie complained about it, she said that it was perfectly acceptable for evening, and she could just tuck in a lace fichu during the day.
They had worked on the menu all this week. She had agreed with Kathleen to keep it simple, like the meals that they ate every day. A huge ham from the smokehouse was roasted and juicy. The potatoes were boiled and just waiting to be mashed and they were having green beans and corn that they had canned themselves from the garden. Cherry pies cooled in the kitchen, made from cherries that they had picked themselves from the trees behind the stables, earlier in the summer. That is, if Tommy had managed to keep his fingers out of them. She grinned. He had been wheedling for a piece of that pie all day, and Kathleen had finally boxed his ears for him.
“Get out of this kitchen, Tommy!” she had told him, staring down her nose at him. It somewhat spoiled the effect that Tommy was now a couple of inches taller than her. “Go find someone else to torment.”
“You like me tormenting you,” he had said calmly, then held his hands up in surrender when she made a threatening move toward him. “All right, all right, I will go.” Laughing, he had stuck a quick finger into the slit in the top of the pie and exited the kitchen, sucking the juice off the dripping digit.
Kathleen sent a speaking glance at Maggie. “We are going to have to hide those pies some place ingenious,” she said, and Maggie felt a bubble of happiness rise up in her as she grinned and agreed.
Tommy was just getting to the age where he liked to torment and tease them, and as much as Kathleen fussed, she loved it. And Maggie was frankly glad that Tommy was around to tease and pester them. She had come to love him so much he seemed like part of her family. She had never had any siblings, and Tommy filled a spot in her heart that she had not even known was empty.
Maggie went downstairs to fuss over the table settings ag
ain. It was the first time she had met Kathleen’s parents, though Mrs. Donaldson was always sending over some little something for her with Kathleen, and she wanted desperately for them to like her. She wanted Kathleen to like Duncan, too, and she hoped, prayed, that Nick behaved himself tonight. It had been his idea to have Doctor Fell bring the new doctor over for dinner, along with Kathleen and her parents. She was unclear as to his motivation in this, though he swore it was just for the purpose of introducing Duncan to some of the people he would be taking care of. Though why he had wanted to introduce the man around when the very mention of his name made him clench his teeth together, she certainly did not know.
Ned and Tommy were going to eat with them, too, over Tommy’s initial protests, but Nick had stood firm and insisted that Tommy eat with the company. Maggie had been right behind the swinging doors that led from the kitchen to the dining room during the argument, and she had heard every word of their conversation. She had cracked the door open just a bit and watched unashamedly as Tommy shifted from foot to foot and tried to talk Nick into letting him eat in the kitchen by himself, instead of at the dining room table with the other guests.
“You are part of this household, not a servant. You do not think of Ned and Kathleen and Maggie as servants, do you?” Nick had raised one black eyebrow and waited sternly for Tommy’s answer.
Tommy had hung his blond head. “No,” he mumbled. “But my ma, and you know . . . “
”I would not give a damn if your mother was a sow from the pigpen,” Nick had said bitingly. “That has got nothing to do with the way I feel about you, and nobody else who really knows you is going to care about that, either. You already know the Donaldsons and Doctor Fell, and I have a hard time believing they have ever looked down on you. And if the new doctor shows any signs of doing so, I will boot his backside out of my house so fast that he will not have time to eat any dinner. Got it?”
“Got it,” Tommy had said, a grin splitting his face. Nick had thumped the boy on the back, then put an arm around his shoulders and they had gone off to the stables together, and Maggie had stared after them with tears in her eyes.
She had made a huge centerpiece of dried and fresh flowers and put it on a lace doily in the center of the mahogany table. She had decided against a tablecloth; the table was just too pretty to cover up. The table and matching chairs had been polished until they gleamed, and she admired the smooth flowing lines of the massive furniture. Whoever had made these pieces was a master craftsman.
The china had belonged to Nick’s mother, and the blue flowered pattern was echoed on
the linen napkins and that same blue was repeated in the large oil painting that dominated one wall of the dining room. Maggie smiled fondly over at the canvas. The painting was a rendering of wildflowers growing alongside the roiling, brown depths of the Mississippi river, and it had been painted by Maggie’s mother. Nick had not realized that his parents, through Ned, had commissioned the painting until Maggie had pointed it out to him, and he had mentioned it to his head stableman. But that was certainly understandable; her mother’s signature was nearly unreadable, and the painting had been hanging in the dining room ever since he could remember, he said.
Maggie had found the painting the second week that she had been here, and had stood in front of it for nearly an hour, tears dripping from her eyes. The reminder of her mother’s talent had struck her heart like a blow at first, but now she took comfort in it. It was something that her mother had created, and it would last for generations. As long as it lasted, so, too, did Suisan O’Roarke.
Maggie had found a rosebush still blooming around the side of the house, and she had carefully snipped some blooms and kept them wrapped in a damp cloth in the cool of the storeroom all day. She retrieved them now, and carefully laid each tight bud across the table setting of each guest. It added a beautiful, elegant touch to the table, and she looked at her work with approval. It was perfect. She hurried into the kitchen to put the finishing touches on dinner. The guests were due in any time now and she wanted it all to be perfect.
Half an hour later she was looking around the library with satisfaction, sipping a glass of wine that Nick had provided for all of them. Kathleen’s parents were just as she had imagined them and as Kathleen described; her father was a short, brisk little barrel of a man with a shock of thick white hair. Bluff and hearty, he had grasped Maggie’s hand in his own.
“Well now,” he had said. His piercing blue eyes, so like Kathleen’s, met hers with no artifice. “You are just as pretty as Kathleen said you were. Nick had better watch out, or some man is going to carry you away, and he will be huntin’ a new housekeeper all over again.” He twinkled his eyes at her, and hooked his thumbs in the waistband of his trousers. “If I was twenty years younger, I would give it a little go m’self.”
A tiny, beringed hand came out and smacked his shoulder hard, and Mrs. Donaldson had snorted as she moved to her husband’s side, a most inelegant sound coming from such an elegant lady. Lanny Donaldson was no more than five feet tall and came barely to her husband’s shoulder. She had delicate features and looked like a little porcelain doll with her smooth, unblemished white skin and just a hint of a blush over her prominent cheekbones. Her hair was still dark, having only a few strands of gray, and done up on the top of her head in an intricate coil that Maggie knew that she had no hope of ever reproducing. Kathleen had told her when her mother’s hair was loose, it came down to her knees. She had also said that her mother was very vain about her hair, and Maggie could now see why.
Her dress was exquisite; ruffled rose silk cascaded down to the floor from a tight, low-cut bodice and it rustled whenever she moved. She was as curved as an hourglass, and obviously enjoyed showing her figure off to its best advantage. She smiled kindly at Maggie now.
“Pay no attention to this terrible old man. He would have to be thirty years younger, and he would have to get rid of me besides.”
“Sometimes I think that would not be such a bad thing,” Mr. Donaldson grumped, but Maggie could tell that he did not mean it. He could not keep his eyes off of his wife, and he touched her arm now, gently caressing the pink silk.
“Tell the girl ‘bout our oldest son, Lanny,” he commanded of his wife, and then turned his bright gaze immediately back to Maggie. “He has got no wife, you know,” he told her pointedly. She blushed, and he winced in mock pain when his wife hit him once more with her small hand.
“Stop it, Arnold, you old goat,” she said. “You will scare the girl off.” She turned her hazel eyes back to Maggie, laughing. “Do not listen to him, dear. He is trying to pay you a compliment in his ham-handed way.”
Maggie smiled at her, delighted by the couple.
“What?” said Mr. Donaldson perplexedly. “What is the point of beatin’ around the bush? You know you was thinking about Daniel, same as I was, soon as you saw her. You just will not come out and admit it until you dress it up in some female folderol. I just cut through all that. Boy needs a wife, and she would make a fine one. Hardworking, Kathleen says, and a sweet disposition. She is pretty, too, and I like her. Do not see what is wrong with that. Saves time.”
He stalked off, still grumbling, to join Nick, Duncan, and Doctor Fell in a discussion of farming methods. Kathleen laughed and slipped an arm around Maggie’s waist.
“That is my father,” she said, and traded conspiratorial looks with her mother. “He likes to come right out with whatever is on his mind. Saves time,” she said gruffly, in a near-perfect impersonation, and they all laughed.
There was affection in her voice, and Maggie felt a sudden, sharp envy of Kathleen and her happy family. She hoped sincerely that Kathleen appreciated them. She had once had a family as loving and secure as Kathleen’s, and she knew how fast that could all be taken away.
Kathleen looked lovely tonight. Her dress was the same sky-blue of her eyes, and it flattered her voluptuous figure. It was long-sleeved and high-necked, but more alluring than if she had bar
ed half her bosom. The sleeves and bodice fit like a glove, making Maggie wonder how she had fit a chemise underneath it, and it outlined her curves with abandon. The skirt flared out from her lush hips in a lovely bell shape. Kathleen caught Maggie looking at her, and made a rueful face.
“Mother picked this out. I was in the library reading and I lost track of time. It looked much more respectable until I actually put it on. I should have known better, with her penchant for flamboyance, but I did not have time to change.”
“No sense in hiding your light under a bushel,” said her mother serenely. “If you have a good figure, you should show it off.”
"Well, I am certainly showing it off in this dress," Kathleen said sharply to her mother. "And just who do you think that I am going to impress here, Mother? Tommy?"
Lanny Donaldson’s gaze rested speculatively upon Duncan Murdoch, who was talking horses with young Tommy now. Tommy was eating up the attention, his bright young face making Maggie smile. Tommy had slicked himself up and combed his hair, but one strand had already escaped to stick straight up on the top of his head. Ned sat nearby, chatting with Arnold Donaldson. Both of them were already tugging at the neck of their stiff shirts, and Maggie smiled when she saw Uncle Ned absentmindedly begin to undo the top button.
“You never know who is going to be around to notice.”
Kathleen noticed the direction of her mother’s stare and a look of sheer panic came into her own eyes.
“Stop it, Mother,” she hissed. “Do not start matchmaking for me. I am perfectly happy the way that I am.”
“Well, I am not, and you should not be,” said her mother. “You are twenty-six years old, and it is well past time you started a family. Your father and I will not be around forever. Most women your age have been married for years and have a houseful of children. I want to hold your children before I die.”
