Yesterday's Scandal

by Gina Wilkins

  She couldn’t have begun to guess how much time passed—minutes…hours…days. There were no words, no coherent thoughts. Only ragged breathing and broken cries. And so much raw, honest emotion that her heart seemed to swell almost to bursting with it.

  She was so desperately in love with this man. It didn’t seem to matter that they’d known each other such a short time, or that there were still secrets between them, at least on his part. She loved him. Whether that love would lead to a happy ending—well, that remained to be seen.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  HIS CHEEK on her breast, his arm across her, Mac lay on his stomach next to her as they very slowly recovered their breath. Their sanity.

  “Tell me this isn’t a fantastic dream,” he muttered after a while, without lifting his head.

  She laughed. “I don’t think you had that much to drink before I arrived.”

  “Half a glass.”

  “So which was more effective at making you feel better? The booze? Or me?”

  He lifted his head to give her a faintly reproachful look. “Fishing?”

  Unabashed, she touched his face. “Yes.”

  “You are infinitely better than bourbon.”

  She grinned. “I’ll take any compliment I can get.”

  Propping himself on one elbow, Mac smoothed her tangled hair away from her face. “You’re in a feisty mood tonight.”

  “I guess being bold and bad does that to me.”

  “‘Bold and bad’? Is that what you’re feeling?”

  “Of course. I don’t do things like this. Ever. I’m always sensible and responsible. I don’t take chances, I don’t have flings and I don’t act on impulse. Not usually. Not until you came along.”

  He considered her words, and he didn’t look entirely pleased by them. “A fling,” he repeated in a murmur.

  “For want of a better term.”

  “I don’t care for that one.”

  “Do you have a better word to offer?” she challenged, still in that oddly daring mood.

  “No,” he said after a brief pause. “But it isn’t a fling.”

  It wasn’t much—but it was something. She decided to be satisfied with that for now.

  Her hand rested on his side, just inches from the scar on his back. “Why did you quit the police force? Was it because you were shot?”

  “Not entirely. I was just tired of giving everything I had to a job and not seeing any real results for my efforts. I’d put one drug dealer behind bars and three more would take his place. For every at-risk teenager we set straight, we lost a dozen more. I started dreading going in to work in the mornings. I felt more and more like I was trying to put out a forest fire with a squirt gun.”

  It pleased her that he’d answered her so candidly, giving her another glimpse into his character. She didn’t think less of Mac for walking away from a job that had grown frustrating for him; she knew it was because he had cared so deeply that he couldn’t stay. “So you went into the restoration business, where you could see definite results. You take something old and neglected and you make it useful and beautiful again.”

  “Something like that,” he said with a slight shrug. Despite his offhand tone, she could tell her assessment had been on track.

  Because he seemed in a mood to talk, she risked another personal question. “How did your wife feel about your change of profession? Was she relieved?”

  “Actually, she rather liked being married to a cop. A contractor wasn’t nearly as exciting to her.”

  That couldn’t have been the only reason the marriage ended, she mused. “How long were you married after you quit police work?”

  “About a year.”

  It must have been a difficult year, she decided, studying his expression. But maybe she didn’t want to talk about his marriage right now, after all. “Tell me about your mother,” she said, instead.

  His eyebrows lifted. “You really are feeling chatty, aren’t you?”

  “I’m sorry. Would you rather I be quiet?”

  “No. Ask anything you like. What do you want to know about my mother?”

  “From what little you’ve told me about her, I can tell you were close to her. She must have been very special.”

  “She was.” His voice held a mixture of pride and wistfulness, making it clear he still missed her very much.

  “She was born in Puerto Rico?”

  “Yes. She was married in San Juan when she was seventeen. She followed her husband to Savannah, where he went to work on the docks and she found work as a hotel maid. A year later, he was killed in a job accident, leaving her a widow before her nineteenth birthday.”

  “And pregnant with you—how terrible for her.”

  “No. Her husband wasn’t my father.” There was no emotion in his voice. “My mother fell in love with another man almost ten years later. He was married to someone else. I was conceived from that relationship. Her very Catholic family turned against her because she had a child out of wedlock. She raised me on her own, without any help from anyone.”

  “Your father?” she murmured, studying his impassive face.

  He shrugged. “I never met him. He had no interest in staying behind to deal with the devastation he had caused in my mother’s life.”

  “She must have been a very strong woman.”

  “She was. She never accepted any assistance from anyone. She raised me on what she earned as a hotel maid. By the time I was five, she was the head housekeeper. She never made a lot of money, but what she had went to my health care and education. I started working to help her out when I was just a kid, but it was always a struggle to convince her to take money from me.”

  “She named you Miguel, but she called you Mac. And she made sure you could speak English.”

  “As I said, she wanted me to fit in. She hoped I would become a doctor or a lawyer. But when I chose to enter the police academy, instead—following in the footsteps of a neighbor I admired and who had always taken an interest in mentoring me—she couldn’t have acted more proud of me.”

  “You loved her very much, didn’t you?”

  “I adored her.”

  His simply and sincerely worded reply made her throat tighten. She would like to think that if she ever had a son, he would speak of her with the same respect and devotion with which Mac remembered his mother.

  “After my mother died,” he said, looking into the distance over Sharon’s head as if gazing into his past, “I found out that she had put every extra dollar she made into life insurance policies naming me as the beneficiary. Even after I was grown and supporting myself, she felt she needed to provide for me.”

  “It sounds as though she adored you in return.”

  “She did. I used the insurance money to establish my new business. I think she would have approved.”

  “She gave you the ability to pursue a dream, even if it might have been different from her dreams for you. Yes, I’m sure she would have approved.”

  “You’d have liked her, I think.”

  “I’m sure I would have loved her.” How could she not have loved the woman who had raised this very special man?

  Mac gave a little shake of his head, as if shaking off the memories, and moved a hand over her bare body. “Have we talked enough now?”

  She reached up to brush back a lock of silky black hair that had fallen onto his forehead. “Do you have something else in mind?”

  Lowering his head to her breast, he murmured, “Something’s bound to come up.”

  She giggled, and then gasped when his tongue swept over her nipple. “Okay,” she said breathlessly, her fingers tightening in his hair. “That’s enough talk for now.”

  He gathered her closer. “Good.”

  SHARON WOKE at 2:00 a.m., thirsty and disoriented. After taking a moment to gather her bearings, she turned her head on the pillow to look at Mac. He was soundly asleep, his limbs sprawled, his mouth just slightly parted. Sleep didn’t soften his features much, she mused
. Even now he looked powerful and strong. Still slightly dangerous.

  She knew now that there was a soft side hidden behind that stern exterior. A side he would allow few people to see. She felt fortunate to be one of them.

  She lay there for a moment, just watching him. Fantasizing and hoping…

  Her thirst finally pulled her from the bed. She snatched Mac’s denim shirt from the floor where she’d thrown it earlier and slipped her arms into the sleeves. It was long enough on her to serve as a short robe, covering her enough for modesty’s sake. Wrapping it around her, she headed for the kitchen.

  Mac had left the light on. The kitchen table was cluttered with papers. An open bottle of bourbon sat next to a half-empty tumbler. The cap lay beside the bottle.

  Automatically reaching to replace the cap, she paused when her gaze fell on a photograph lying on top of the scattered papers. In it, a dark-haired woman held a tiny, black-haired, black-eyed baby. The setting was obviously a hospital. In the picture, Mac knelt beside the chair, his right hand resting protectively on the baby’s head, as if to protect the child.

  He looked very much like a worried father.

  Her fingers shook a little as she reached out to touch the photo. She could picture Mac sitting here alone, sipping his drink and staring at this photograph. Only one explanation occurred to her. Had this child been Mac’s? He had told her he and his wife had no children. Could their baby have died?

  No wonder she had sensed such sadness in him when she’d first arrived. Did it still hurt him to talk about it? Was that why he hadn’t told her?

  He deserved his privacy. Prepared to step away from the table, she moved her hand from the photograph. It was then that the name McBride caught her attention. It was written in block letters at the top of one of the legal-pad pages. All of the pages, she corrected herself, looking slowly from one sheet to another.

  Why was Mac compiling a comprehensive file about the McBride family?

  They were all there—parents noted at the tops of the pages and offspring listed beneath. He’d even recorded the ages of each of the cousins.

  She had given him much of this information herself, she realized, remembering several conversations in which the McBrides had been discussed fairly extensively. She’d actually been embarrassed by her babbling, worried that Mac had been bored. But now she wondered if she had been manipulated by an expert.

  But why?

  A pen lay on the pad, as if recently abandoned. Only a few lines had been written on the top page. “Jonah McBride. Wife, Ernestine. Daughter, Savannah, 34. Traveling salesman. Unhappy marriage.”

  He’d learned this information only a few hours earlier, she thought, pressing a hand to her stomach.

  “Would you like to go through my wallet, too?”

  She jumped when he spoke from the doorway behind him. Whirling on him, she scowled. “Don’t you dare go on the offensive with me! Why are you spying on my friends?”

  Leaning against the doorjamb, wearing only a pair of unsnapped jeans, he didn’t change his expression. “Is that what you think I’m doing?”

  That stoic, inscrutable look on his face only made her madder. “And don’t play word games. It’s obvious what you’re doing. You have everything but their shoe sizes written here.”

  He only continued to look at her.

  “Mac, I want answers.”

  “So do I. But we don’t always get what we want.”

  Clenching the back of a chair so tightly her knuckles whitened, she glared at him. “Were the McBrides the reason you came to Honoria?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Were they the reason you were so friendly to me? Because of my friendship with them? Were you using me to get to them?”

  Mac sighed and shoved a hand through his hair. “Sharon, calm down. We need to talk.”

  “I’m perfectly calm. And the only words I want to hear from you are an explanation of what these pages mean.”

  “Can’t you just believe me when I tell you I don’t mean the McBrides any harm?”

  “You’re asking me to trust you?”

  “Yes.” His eyes bored into hers. “That’s exactly what I’m asking you to do.”

  Releasing the chair, she twirled her fingers in the front of his oversize shirt, abruptly aware of how little it covered. Strangely enough, she felt more naked now than she had in his bed wearing nothing at all. “Before I make that decision, will you answer just one question for me? Honestly?”

  “That depends on what you ask,” he said guardedly.

  “Did you first ask me out because of my friendship with the McBrides?”

  “Yes.”

  His starkly honest answer made her heart sink. “Damn,” she whispered.

  Mac had used her. He’d just admitted it. It seemed that Brad had been right. She would try to remember to apologize to him—after she’d had a good cry.

  “I want to get dressed now,” she said, moving toward the doorway in which he stood.

  He didn’t move, but continued to block her passage. “Maybe it started out that way, but that isn’t why I’m here with you now.”

  “I’d like to believe that,” she murmured, unable to meet his eyes. “But I saw what you’ve written on these pages. I don’t know what you’re doing, or why, but I know you got part of that information from me. You used me.”

  “In some ways, that’s true. And I’m sorry. But—”

  “Please let me get dressed, Mac,” she begged miserably. “I can’t think clearly like this.”

  He hesitated for one tense moment, then moved aside.

  She almost dashed to the bedroom.

  She couldn’t look at the rumpled bed while she gathered her clothes and took them into the bathroom to dress. Her thoughts were whirling, her stomach clenching. She had plunged so swiftly from euphoria to despair that she could hardly process what had happened to her. She still didn’t have a clue what Mac was up to, but it didn’t really matter just then. She knew she wasn’t going to like it. If there was a simple, innocuous explanation, he would have told her already. And he had already admitted that he’d first been interested in her because of her connection to the McBrides.

  Foolishly enough, she’d thought it was her personality he’d been drawn to. Her talent, perhaps. Hell, she wouldn’t have been this upset if he’d confessed that he’d only wanted her for her body. But to use her against her friends, to pump her for information about the people she liked so much, and who had been so good to her…well, that really hurt.

  Whatever he was up to, there was no excuse.

  Dressed again in her blouse and shorts, she wished she had worn something more formal that evening. It wasn’t easy to be cool, clipped and intimidating in shorts. But she intended to try. She took several deep breaths before she stepped out of the bathroom. She wasn’t eager to face Mac again.

  He was still in the kitchen. The photograph had been put away, she noted. So had his notes. The bourbon bottle still sat on the table, capped now. The tumbler was empty.

  Mac leaned against the counter, his arms crossed over his bare chest. “Do you feel better now?”

  “No.” She wasn’t sure she would ever feel better again, not as badly as he had hurt her tonight. “Will you tell me now why you’re gathering information about my friends?”

  “I can’t, Sharon. Not yet.”

  “Do you ever plan to tell me?”

  He hesitated for a long time before answering. “I don’t know. I haven’t decided.”

  “Does it have something to do with your police work? Are you undercover for some reason? Do you think any of the McBrides are involved in something illegal?”

  He was shaking his head even before she paused for a breath. “I’m not a cop, Sharon. Not anymore. My reasons for being here are strictly personal.”

  “And you won’t tell me what they are.”

  “There are people who might be hurt. I don’t know yet if I want to be responsible for that.”

&n
bsp; “You must have known when you came here that someone could be hurt. Didn’t it bother you then?”

  “I didn’t know them then.”

  That made her pause to study him. He sounded as if he had begun to like the McBrides. As if he was having second thoughts about whatever had brought him here.

  She thought of what she had seen on those pages. The names of Caleb and his brothers, their wives and children. Notes about their jobs and their marriages.

  My mother fell in love with another man. He was married to someone else. I was conceived from that relationship.

  And his mother had called him Mac.

  The insight came to her in a stunning flash. “You’re looking for your father.”

  A muscle in his jaw was the only part of him that moved.

  “Is that it, Mac? Do you think Caleb or one of his brothers was the married man who had an affair with your mother?”

  He ground out a curse through clenched teeth, and then sighed. “I know one of them was. I just don’t know which one.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I found the name in my mother’s papers after she died. Just the last name. She probably never expected me to find it, or to make anything of it. I contacted her sister in Puerto Rico, who confirmed that she knew the man’s name was McBride and that he was from a place called Honoria, Georgia. She knew that because my mother told her. Mother expected to live in Honoria someday, when her lover divorced his wife and married her.”

  Aware of the bitterness in his voice, she asked gently, “Your aunt didn’t know his first name?”

  “Only the last name—and only because my mother told her that she called me Mac because my father’s name was McBride. A tribute to the man who abandoned her.”

  “So you came here to find out for yourself.”

  “I figured he owed me some answers. I didn’t know when I started this that most of the suspects were dead.”

  Imitating him, she folded her arms and tried to speak unemotionally. “Have you decided which one it was?”

  He shrugged. “I figure Jonah is the most likely suspect.”