by Abby Gaines
Simon made a noncommittal sound. But she was right. If he hadn’t believed in Holly’s innocence all the persuasion in the world from Maggie wouldn’t have saved her daughter’s hide. It felt good to have relied on his gut again, and to have been justified.
“I guess,” he said, “I won’t need to visit you again.” Damn, that wasn’t what he’d meant to say at all. He’d meant to tell her he’d found a good reason to keep visiting Marionville. That he’d met a woman he thought he could love. “I had a great time with you last week,” he added hastily.
Just thinking about the hours they’d spent together put a smile on his face.
“Me, too.” There was warmth in her voice, and Simon wondered if she was remembering the lingering kisses they’d shared that evening. They had devised their own variation on Scrabble, using a set that looked old enough to have been Holly’s when she was a kid. Every word they made had to relate to the other person. Crook had managed russet, curves and pretty, among others. Maggie had made sweet, agent and, best of all, with a triple word score to boot, I want you. Simon hadn’t bothered to point out that was three words and therefore not allowed. Instead, he’d taken her in his arms and shown her the feeling was mutual.
Not sleeping with her had been torture, but he knew neither of them was ready to move any faster. “How about we—”
“I’m going away.”
His mouth moved, but no sound came out.
“I’m going to Italy,” Maggie said. She sounded apologetic. “It’s time, Crook. I have to do it.”
“You said you’d go when you ran out of ideas. Is that what’s happened?”
“Not exactly. I feel as if everything’s changing, and if I stay still and ignore it my painting will lack something. What I have here isn’t enough anymore.”
“But what about…” Crook didn’t finish the question. Logically, there was nothing between them but a standing joke, a few kisses and a game of Scrabble. So he couldn’t ask her not to grab hold of the dream she’d had for so many years. And she hadn’t asked him to go with her—probably because she knew he would refuse. Which he would.
“I’d better go,” she said at last. “I’ll…miss you.”
“Have a nice trip.” Meaningful, Crook, meaningful.
MAGGIE WALKED BACK to her trailer, the evening breeze doing nothing to cool the heat she felt. Crook was the first person she’d told about her trip, and the telling made it real. Tomorrow morning she would go to the travel agency, confirm her booking and hand over the cash.
She began to prepare a sandwich for her dinner, but lost interest halfway through. What would Crook have said if she’d done what she wanted and asked him to come with her?
No.
She was sure of it. He might break out of the mold enough to kiss Maggie, to drive her around the country so he could spend more time with her, but unlike her he wouldn’t trust a hunch that at some point down the line what they had would turn into a lasting love. He wasn’t the kind of man to give up his neatly planned future. Just as, in the end, her husband hadn’t been.
Maggie wasn’t about to make that mistake again.
A FURY that hadn’t abated overnight—not even when Agent Crook called and told her Dave had confessed and she was off the hook—propelled Holly to Sea-Tac Airport the next day.
Jared’s purposeful stride faltered when he first saw her, then he continued toward her, not quite as fast as before, his chin jutting in an almost boyish gesture of defiance.
He walked right up to her, stopped close enough to kiss her, but didn’t. Refusing to step back from his invasion of her personal space, Holly took a breath to tell him what she thought of him.
Before she could utter a word he said, “You found it.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
JARED SPOKE with a kind of grim satisfaction. Holly would never forgive him for this. Which made this crazy compulsion to return her love irrelevant. He felt a knife twist in his gut, and swiftly quelled the pain. This was what he wanted.
Holly nodded and turned on her heel without speaking. Jared followed her to her car.
When they were on the road, she said, “Am I right in thinking that you plan to con Keith Transom out of fifty million dollars through the contract with Java Code?”
“It’s not a con. It’s not like I’m forcing Transom to bid for EC Solutions. The information’s all there, for anyone observant enough to read it.” Why not split hairs?
“In the very small print of what appears to be a standard contract identical to hundreds of others in the file,” she said.
“You found it. Transom may, too.”
“You used me as a guinea pig, to see how likely that is.”
“I’m amazed you found it,” he said conversationally. “You’re very thorough.”
“So now you won’t go ahead?” she asked. “You’ll assume Transom will also find it?”
Jared hesitated. That had been his original plan, but deep down he’d never thought Holly would find it. “Do you think he will?” he asked.
“Probably not.” She eased off the gas as the traffic ahead of them slowed.
“Are you going to warn Transom off?”
“I gave you my word I’d keep this confidential,” she said.
In other words, she wouldn’t be his conscience.
“I thought,” she said, “you were more than that.”
A low blow. Jared steeled himself against its strength.
“I thought,” she persisted, “we were more than that.”
He forced derision into his voice. “On the basis of a few kisses? No doubt we’ll both get over it.”
He heard her gasp, but he wasn’t prepared for her to come to a halt in the middle of the road.
“Get out of my car,” she said.
Behind them a car screeched to a stop and the driver sat on his horn. Other horns blared.
“Are you crazy?” he demanded. But she was staring straight ahead, deaf to the commotion behind them. Jared cursed and got out of the car. Holly drove off before he could even get to the side of the road. He saw her pull over a couple of hundred yards ahead.
So she’d realized she was being childish. Jared ambled toward her, determined not to hurry. Then he saw her get out of the car, come around to the trunk and dump his bags on the roadside. With a squeal of tires, she was gone.
THE ONE GOOD THING about Jared’s perfidy, Holly told herself, it had gone a long way toward killing her love for him.
She was now free to return to her condo, since she’d been cleared of the fraud. But she took no pleasure in its tidy conformity and the security it afforded. Damn Jared, throwing her whole life out of balance. She bit her lip to prevent the tears that threatened.
As if in answer to an unasked prayer, her cell phone rang. “Hello?” Her voice quavered.
There was a pause. Then a familiar voice said, “Holly? Baby, is that you?”
“Mom.” In an instant Holly’s need for comfort transcended the distance she’d put between her mother and herself. Crying, she said, “I’m coming to see you.”
THE DRIVE from Seattle to Marionville usually filled Holly with dread as, with each mile, the mire of her childhood threatened to suck her back in.
Today, she was actually looking forward to seeing her mother. As she pulled into the trailer park Holly tried to see it through Maggie’s eyes, tried to understand why Mom had refused her share of her inheritance from Nana’s estate twelve years ago. That money could have bought her a small house, a regular home.
But even making a conscious effort to open herself to the joys of trailer park living didn’t work. The park was just as depressing as it had been all those years ago. How could Mom not see it?
Holly parked alongside the trailer and made for the door. Before she got there it opened, and Maggie stood framed in the narrow doorway for a second before she rushed down the steps to enfold Holly in a hug.
Holly hugged her back, reduced almost to tears once again by the sudden we
lling of need for her mother. At last she stepped back. “Mom, you look different. Your hair…”
Maggie’s abundant reddish-brown hair had been pinned back off her face, rather than framing it in the usual wild profusion.
Maggie grinned. “No hope of getting a comb through it, but I gave it a good brushing in your honor.”
“You didn’t need to do that.” Holly followed her inside. The old furniture was exactly as she remembered it, though the couch had perhaps lost even more of its stuffing.
“Didn’t I?” Mom’s grin was knowing, but kind. “Let me make you a cup of coffee.”
It wasn’t until Maggie placed a steaming mug in front of her that Holly realized… “You have coffee.”
Maggie usually refused to have it in the house, on the grounds that caffeine was a mind-altering drug. A stance peculiarly at odds with her predilection for other mind-altering substances.
“That’s not all.” Maggie set a plate down on the table in front of Holly.
“Cookies.” Holly eyed them doubtfully. As far as she knew there was only one kind of cookie her mother made.
“Chocolate chip.” And when Holly still hesitated, Maggie added, “Drug-free.”
Holly took one gingerly and ventured a bite. It was a bit overcooked, but unmistakably chocolate chip. “What gives, Mom?” she demanded. “Brushing your hair, buying coffee, baking cookies—what’s going on?”
Maggie put her cup down and gripped the edge of the table. “Honey, I’ve been waiting for years for you to need me. This FBI thing was the first time I can remember you needing help, and it killed me there was nothing I could do for you.”
Holly made a sound of protest, but her mother shushed her.
“When you asked if you could come here today I knew I was being given another chance—we were being given another chance.” She gestured to the coffee and cookies. “I’ve never even tried to understand why this stuff matters to you, but I know it does. It was the only thing I could think of to make you feel welcome.”
Holly swallowed the lump in her throat. “Thanks, Mom.”
“Well, don’t hold your breath for any more baking,” Maggie said gruffly. “Now, tell me what’s got you so upset. Must be a man.”
Holly started at the beginning, with how she’d always resented Jared’s cavalier attitude to rules and regulations, and finished with the sad truth: she’d fallen in love with a jerk who’d been using her all along.
“Poor baby.” Maggie pushed a lock of Holly’s hair back behind her ears, a gesture of comfort Holly remembered from her childhood. It was strangely soothing. “I’m so sad for you. I don’t know him beyond that one time I met him, but he sounds like a good man.”
“Good?” Holly jerked her head away from her mother’s touch. “How can you say that?”
“He went to extraordinary lengths to help you. He obviously cares deeply for his family, since he took his brother’s death so hard. A man who can hold a grudge that long doesn’t have a commitment problem. And, not that it matters, but I did happen to notice he’s gorgeous.”
Holly had to smile at that. “He is gorgeous,” she agreed. “And he’s done some good things. But dragging me into his revenge plan…”
“That was bad,” Maggie acknowledged. “I’ll bet he regrets that now.”
“I don’t think so. I think he was relieved to have it between us, to stop us getting any closer.”
Her mother just listened, letting Holly talk on and on about Jared, which was more help than any amount of advice would have been. While she talked, Maggie made dinner, more the usual fare Holly expected of her, frankfurters with baked beans on toast. But that was okay. Her mother’s gesture with the cookies had made the point.
Afterward, Maggie drank tea and Holly sipped at her coffee. It was time to ask the question that had been bugging her for years. “Mom, why didn’t you accept your share of Nana’s estate? And why won’t you bank the checks I send you?” She’d even taken the risk of writing the checks out to cash on the assumption Mom didn’t have a bank account. “Okay, so you want to stay living here. But surely you’d like a new couch or something?”
Maggie eyed the almost shapeless, faded blue sofa. “I’d love a new couch.”
“Then…why?” Holly had always known her mother’s flimsy excuses for not banking the checks hid the true reason.
Maggie sighed. “Sweetie, you might not like this.”
“It’s okay.” Holly braced herself inwardly.
Maggie appeared to be groping for the right words. “Holly, your principles are very important to you, and I admire that.”
I take after my father. She didn’t say the words out loud, but, mortifyingly, Maggie read her thoughts.
“Actually, you get that from me. When I commit to something, I stick with it. And I won’t do something, even something good, if it’s for the wrong reasons.”
In a way that was true, Holly supposed. Maggie never compromised her principles—with the possible exception of providing coffee today. Her commitment to organizations such as Greenpeace and Amnesty International had been dogged, long after others her age had matured into caring less. And the bizarre behavior Holly had found so humiliating as a child was a refusal to conform with a materialistic system her mother felt was wrong.
“Your father…”
Holly started. Her mother never mentioned her father.
“In a way it was my fault he left.”
“He hated the mess.”
Her mother smiled faintly. “That was probably the argument you heard most often, but there was more to it than that. When we met in the late seventies, I was a full-on hippie, flower child, whatever. He was only playing at it. He was never really comfortable out of middle-class suburbia. I’m not knocking him, it’s just the way he was. We got married because of his conservative streak. I’d have been just as happy if we’d shacked up.”
Holly blanched, suddenly knowing the meaning of being thankful for small mercies. She could have been illegitimate as well as everything else.
“I got to write the wedding vows, though,” Maggie said. “You’d probably laugh at them—full of love for the earth and each other. And a promise that we would always cherish the things we held dear at that time. That we wouldn’t change.”
“Everyone changes,” Holly said.
“That’s what your father used to say. Only I didn’t, you see. And if that makes me odd, well, that’s what I am.”
“But Dad changed.”
“Big time.” There was regret in Maggie’s voice. “Three years later we were living in that house in Macken Street, hemmed in by a picket fence. I had you soon after we moved in, and then your father demanded that I give up all my old friends—I thought they were our friends—and conform to his suburban dream. I felt so…”
“Betrayed?” Holly suggested, feeling it on her mother’s behalf. One thing about Jared, he’d never seriously suggested she should be less than herself.
Maggie squeezed her hand. “Betrayed,” she agreed. “He let me continue my painting, but then he didn’t want me to go out to work, so he could hardly object. I was so depressed I let the house get out of hand—my protest against the way we lived—but of course it just caused more trouble. We were heading for divorce, though neither of us wanted it. For me it would have been a betrayal of the commitment I’d made, and for him a disgrace. Then I found out I was pregnant with the twins, and we decided to try again.”
“It didn’t work.”
Maggie shook her head. “He left. He threatened to take you away from me, but by the time he got established he’d changed his mind.”
He did want me—at least a bit.
“Did he keep in touch?” Holly asked.
“He moved far enough away that visits were impractical, and when I moved here, I couldn’t afford a phone. But I sent him your school report cards every year—it was the sort of thing he valued. And the occasional school photo. He sent checks. And the divorce papers when he wanted
to get married again.”
“So he’s married now?”
Maggie shrugged. “I heard he had a couple of kids.”
Holly winced. “You said he sent checks. So why didn’t we have any money?”
Maggie hesitated. “I never banked them.”
“Why not?” So none of it had been necessary—the embarrassment, the scrimping, the squalor.
“If we had parted on better terms, if I’d known he respected me,” Maggie said slowly, “I could have accepted the money as my right. Looking back now, it was the wrong decision as far as you kids were concerned, and I’m sorry. But I was so wrapped up in my own grief. Knowing how he despised me, I couldn’t take what was effectively conscience money.”
“I don’t despise you,” Holly blurted, thinking of her own uncashed checks.
“I know you don’t, sweetie, you’re much too nice for that. But you don’t respect me, either.”
“I do.” Yet she couldn’t maintain the pretence, shameful though the truth was. The checks she’d sent her mother had indeed been conscience money. “I want to respect you,” she amended. “I think I could learn to.” The thought hadn’t occurred to her before, but she knew it was true.
Maggie smiled. “That’s good,” she said. “Because I think I deserve your respect. Maybe not for everything I’ve done, but for some things.”
“So that’s why you wouldn’t take Nana’s money, either?”
Her mother nodded. “My mother felt she had a duty to divide her estate equally among her children. But she hated the way I lived and she couldn’t stand that I’d let your father go. If she’d acted as she felt, she wouldn’t have left me a penny.”
It was dawning on Holly just how strict her mother’s code of honor was.
“If you want to see your father, I’m sure I can locate him for you,” her mother said. “Like a lot of guys who start a second family, he lost interest in his first one. But I would have insisted he see you if you’d asked. I wasn’t sure if you wanted any contact.”
