If I Loved You

by Kress, Alyssa

  At least, she'd manage if Corporate Edges would send in their check.

  Maggie scowled and shook her stabbed hand, then stuck the bleeding spot in her mouth. The big landscaping firm would come through. They always did. Eventually.

  She just wished 'eventually' would happen a little sooner this month.

  Maggie took her finger out of her mouth and examined her wound. It wouldn't hurt to wash it off, she admitted, and maybe find her gardening gloves at the same time. She turned back toward the sales building.

  Inside the cool, dark room a well-fed calico cat lifted its head from its position curled up on the counter. Oh, it's you, the cat seemed to say, and then yawned and lowered its regal head again.

  "Well, who were you expecting?" Maggie asked the feline. "Your fairy godmother, perhaps?"

  The cat didn't answer, didn't even bother to lift its head again.

  "No fairy godmothers here," Maggie told the animal. Then it came to her, why she'd been feeling upset. She huffed and said to the cat, "I'm not even allowed to play the role of evil aunt."

  The cat closed its eyes.

  Maggie stuck her tongue out at it. She'd liked to have made a similar gesture toward her former brother-in-law. She'd asked Ian so sweetly, so politely, repressing every biting, sarcastic—and true—epithet she'd liked to have expressed.

  Couldn't she take the kids that weekend? she'd asked her former brother-in-law. He never had time to take them out of town, and her friend had a cabin at Lake Tahoe. The kids could have a ball—swimming, fishing, maybe even horseback riding. And he wouldn't have to worry about rushing home from his business trip in Raleigh. She'd get some time with the kids, they'd have an outing, and he could relax. Everybody would win.

  Had he listened? Had he given her idea one iota of thought? Ha! Did the great and mighty Ian ever give anything Maggie said his serious attention? Ha!

  Maggie did an angry wiggle dance in the hall as she moved past the cat and toward the tiny, utilitarian bathroom. She was just pushing her finger under the faucet when the phone on the counter rang.

  "Damn," Maggie said, but without heat. A phone call could mean an order, and an order would mean money. It could also mean a bill collector, true, but Maggie was a born optimist. She turned off the water and hurried to the phone.

  "Hello?" She hoped she didn't sound breathless. "Country Garden Nursery. Can I help you?"

  "Hello," said a thin female voice on the other end of the line. "I'm—that is, I'm looking for a...Maggie O'Connell?"

  "That's me." Maggie admitted the fact cheerfully. It wasn't a bill collector. They only used first names.

  The woman on the other end of the line cleared her throat. "I don't quite know how to...You see, it's Mr. Muldaur. I'm Eileen, his secretary."

  Maggie felt a brief spurt of hope. Maybe there was some problem. Ian hadn't been able to return home from Raleigh in time. He wanted her to take the kids for the weekend, after all.

  "Yes?" she asked, eyebrows rising in cheerful anticipation.

  "Um. Your name was on his emergency card, the one in the company's file."

  "Emergency?" Maggie's burgeoning smile halted.

  "Yes. They just came to take Mr. Muldaur to the hospital." At this point the voice of the woman on the other end of the telephone broke.

  Maggie felt her pleasure take a similar tumble. The hospital?

  "Samaritan Sinai," the woman on the other end of the telephone said. "I think—well, aren't there some children? Nothing like this has ever happened, and I feel so—I don't know how to reach anybody."

  The woman was clearly breaking down, practically in tears. Maggie, meanwhile, felt like she was going into shock. Ian had been taken to the hospital? No. No, no, no. She'd already been through this, with Sophia. She wasn't going to do it again.

  And the children! No. God couldn't be letting this happen to them again.

  Maggie felt a cool, clear anger settle over her. "What happened?" she asked.

  But the woman on the other end of the phone was crying in earnest now.

  "Listen." Maggie gave her voice the chill she'd often heard Ian, himself, use, the kind that was sharp enough to cut through anything. "Listen," she said again, one degree softer. "I need your help. You have to get a hold of yourself. Why did they take Ian to the hospital? What happened?"

  "He—fainted. Briefly. The ambulance— They said heart attack."

  Heart attack? Now Maggie knew there had to be some mistake. Ian was fit as an athlete. There wasn't an ounce of flab on his lean, rangy body, or at least none that was obvious. And he was how old? Forty? Forty-one? "That couldn't be right," she said, out loud.

  There was the faint sound of tears from the other end of the line.

  "Listen," Maggie said again, confident. "I'll take care of the children. Don't worry about it. You just—" Just—what? Soak her head in some Zoloft? "Never mind," Maggie said. "I'll take it from here." And she set down the telephone.

  It took only half a second for reaction to set in. The hand that still rested on the telephone began to tremble. Maggie had never liked Ian, not from the first time he'd darkened her parents' door on Sophia's arm. He was arrogant, controlling, everything she disliked in the male of the species. And yet she felt as if she'd been punched in the gut.

  Ian, with all that confident male power, brought down? The thought was...oddly devastating.

  And made worse by the fact she'd just been thinking ill of him.

  Maggie drew in a sharp, quick breath. She took a step back from the counter. Thinking ill of Ian had not caused this problem, but beyond that her brain went into a tailspin. She'd abruptly, unexpectedly, been handed the reins, and now she had to do something. But what?

  Maggie twirled on her heel. Her eyes stared unseeingly out toward the desert mountains. She ought to go to the hospital—or should she get the kids from school? Close up the nursery? She needed her keys.

  You're panicking, Maggie. She closed her eyes and let out her breath slowly. Mentally, she apologized to Ian's secretary for having ridiculed her emotional state. Maggie took another breath. First, call the hospital, get information, she told herself. Based on that, she could figure out if she should get the kids or go straight to the hospital.

  She turned back to the counter and picked up the telephone. She punched 411 to get the number for the hospital. She concentrated on breathing slow, keeping balanced, while she tapped her fingertips on the counter.

  After about two seconds of that, she hung up the phone, grabbed her keys and ran out the door.