by Diana Palmer
She turned her purse in her hands and hated the invitation. He was inviting his foster sister to move in. Nothing more.
He pulled up in the driveway that circled at the front door and cut off the engine. He turned to her with narrowed eyes. “You want me,” he said bluntly. “I know it. I want you. You know that, too. But nothing will ever come of it unless you want it to. I made a vicious mistake with you once because I was out of my mind with grief and alcohol. I never make the same mistake twice. You’ll be safe here.”
“That’s an interesting choice of words,” she replied slowly. “Safe from your old enemy, you mean.”
His chin lifted. “From him, and from me, Maggie,” he replied. “I won’t make you afraid of me. Not in any way.”
She laughed mirthlessly. “I’ve been afraid of you for years, in between attacks of helpless attraction,” she said matter-offactly. “There has to be a cure somewhere. If I go far enough, maybe I can find it.”
It was a confession, of sorts. He rested one arm over the steering wheel and studied her sadly. “All we have left,” he said softly, “is each other.”
Her eyes flew to his. She was pale, confused, uneasy. She frowned. “Don’t do that,” she said irritably. “Don’t make it sound like you need me. You never have and you never will. I’m a memory adjunct. That’s all I’ll ever be.”
“Our lives are intertwined. You can’t break an eighteen-year bond just like that,” he pointed out. “Some marriages don’t last a fraction that long.”
The word froze her. She averted her face.
“It wasn’t an insult,” he said at once, misunderstanding her reaction. “Your husband wasn’t good to you. You had every reason not to want to remember him.”
“I have more reason than you’ll ever know,” she said without meeting his speculative gaze. “Happy marriages are a fairy tale.”
“Dane Lassiter wouldn’t agree with you,” he mused. “Neither would your friend Kit.”
She shrugged. “They got lucky.”
“You don’t think you could?”
She rubbed at a spot on her purse. “I don’t ever want to marry again.”
He hesitated. “Maggie, don’t you want children someday?”
The question sent her gaze flying up to meet his. The pain, the anguish, the haunted look in them shocked him.
She opened the door and got out.
He followed, determined to find out why she looked that way, when Red Davis sped up the driveway and stopped even with Cord.
“The irrigation equipment’s up and running like a track star, boss,” he called with a grin. “And they promised to replace any part that misfires again!”
“Good work.”
“Thanks! How are you doing, Maggie?” he called to her with a big grin.
Cord’s eyes flashed. “I don’t pay you to flirt with my foster sister,” he shot at the younger man, and he wasn’t teasing.
Davis saw that. He cut his losses, waved and shot off again down the ranch road.
Cord’s attitude puzzled Maggie. It was oddly like jealousy. But that was an outlandish assumption. It would take a miracle to get Cord jealous of her.
He led the way through the living room, where she left her purse, and into the dining room. Four places were set at the table, and an older white-haired man was occupying one of them while June put dishes of food on it.
“Hi!” she called to Maggie. “I hope you like chili and Mexican corn bread.”
“Love them. And there’s supposed to be a cherry pie?” she added hopefully.
June grinned, with a glance at Cord. “Oh, I heard somebody had a passion for it. I’m famous for my cherry pie. You can even have vanilla ice cream on it, if you like. It’s homemade, too,” she added.
Maggie smiled at her. “I think I’ve died and gone to heaven!”
4
The meal was pleasant. Maggie liked June’s father, who was a veteran cowboy. He was good company, and he had a hatful of funny stories about places he’d worked. One involved his breaking a mustang on a West Texas ranch. The wild critter had jumped the corral fence, with him hanging on, just as the boss’s wife drove up in her brand-new blue Cadillac convertible. Seconds later, the horse was sitting in the backseat.
Maggie almost fell over. “What did you do?” she exclaimed.
“Picked myself up off the ground and ran for my life. I jumped in my old truck and took off, without even asking for my week’s wages.” He shook his head. “The awful thing was that I met the man again a few years back, when I was working at a ranch outside San Antonio. It turns out he and his wife were already having problems, but when she pitched that fit, he divorced her. He said he’d laughed about me and that mustang for years.”
“Serves you right for running away,” June quipped.
He chuckled. “It surely did. I haven’t run from anything much since then. But I was eighteen years old and new to cowboying at the time. Sort of like Red Davis is now.”
Cord’s eyes glittered. “Davis is a pain in the neck. If he wasn’t so good with equipment and inventory, he’d already be a memory.”
Darren Travis chuckled. “Well, he’s pretty good with horses, too. And don’t forget that he talked that newspaper reporter out of doing a story on your stint with the FBI.”
“I could have talked him out of it,” Cord said curtly.
“Yes,” Travis said, clearing his throat. “But Red did it without using his fists.”
“Asset or not, he’d better watch his step.”
Maggie ate her chili quietly, listening to the byplay with amusement but without commenting. She noticed June giving her curious looks, followed by curious looks at Cord. Maggie wondered what June had noticed that she hadn’t.
Cord could have told her, although he wouldn’t. Davis had paid just a little too much attention to Maggie. Cord didn’t like it. Until now, Davis had been one of his favorite employees.
“Cord said you were a widow,” Travis said suddenly, smiling at Maggie over his chili spoon. “Wasn’t your husband Bart Evans from Houston?”
Maggie stiffened. “Yes.”
“Dad…” June said abruptly, trying to ward off trouble.
Her father waved a hand at her. “I’m not being nosy, but I knew him, is why I mentioned it. That was when he was living with his second wife,” he recalled, totally oblivious to the discomfort he was causing Maggie. He sighed, fingering his spoon. “Her name was Dana,” he added with a faint smile. “She was pretty and sweet, never hurt a living soul.” His face hardened. “He put her in the hospital.”
Cord actually flinched. He knew Maggie had gone rigid. He scowled at Travis. “He did what?”
Travis winced when he saw the turmoil he was responsible for in his dinner companions. “Gosh, I’m sorry! I didn’t think…”
“He put his wife in the hospital?” Cord was relentless. “How?”
Travis sent an apologetic glance at Maggie, who was white and totally without appetite now. “He beat her senseless because she burned the bacon,” he continued. “It wasn’t the first time, but it was when she finally confessed it. I made her tell a police officer, and her husband was arrested and charged with domestic abuse. He denied it, of course, and then he apologized to Dana and tried to get her to come back to him,” he added angrily. “But I wasn’t having that. Men who abuse women don’t stop. I took her to a good lawyer and we convinced her to file for divorce. She wouldn’t even take a settlement. She was such a good person.” He put down his chili spoon with painful deliberation. “She had a stroke two months later that left her paralyzed on one side and unable to function alone ever again. They said it was probably from the beating she took, but nobody could prove it. He had a great lawyer.”
Cord felt sick to his stomach. He’d suspected Evans might have hit his second wife. He’d never suspected that sort of violence. And what had Maggie gone through? He stared at her with muted anger. She’d never told him anything about this, and she certainly knew about
it.
“I’m sorry,” Maggie told Travis unexpectedly. “I know that she’s still in the nursing home.”
Travis’s intake of breath was audible. “You do?”
She nodded. “When my husband…died—” she almost choked on the word “—I had his estate split between his two ex-wives. There was more than enough to keep Dana in comfort for the rest of her life—even enough to hire the best specialists in stroke management. I don’t guess you know that she can speak now, and she’s relearning other skills as well—reading and writing, too. I don’t know that she’d remember you, but I imagine she’d enjoy company. She has no family.”
Cord was shocked. He’d not only just learned what Maggie had done with her wealthy late husband’s fortune, but even more surprising news.
“You go to see her?” Cord asked.
She nodded. “Frequently. From what was left of his estate, after I split it between his ex-wives, I funded an outreach program for abused wives that helps them with money to finish their education or learn a technical trade.”
“Good out of evil,” Travis said, and his eyes warmed as he looked at Maggie. “You’re a winner, Miss Barton. A real winner.”
“It was a way of making amends for him. Maybe he wasn’t a bad person when he started out in life,” she said. “Some people just snap, in different ways. He had a drinking problem that he wouldn’t admit.” She shrugged. “Later it turned to a drug problem he wouldn’t admit. He was self-destructive.”
“He was a potential murderer,” Cord said coldly, without knowing how close to the truth he really was.
Maggie didn’t look at him. She couldn’t afford to let him see how accurate that guess was.
“He was,” Travis agreed surprisingly. “Dana told me that his first wife had a hip injury from a beating that left her crippled, as well. She moved out of state to get away from him.”
Maggie smiled. “I found her in Florida. She was working in a home for elderly women and coaching a volunteer baseball team at the facility. It was a real hit. She can’t run, but she can still bat.” She glanced shyly at Cord. “She’s using her share of the money to found a baseball camp of her own for retired people. I hear she’s got an ex-vice-president and two ex-governors on one team.”
Everybody laughed. But Cord was looking at her with different eyes. This was a facet of Maggie that she’d never let him see. She did her good works without telling anybody. He’d always assumed that she lived on her inheritance from her late husband. It had come as a surprise to find her having to work for a living at all. Amy had left them a little money, but she’d lost the bulk of her fortune to bad investments long before she’d died. He’d often wondered if that wasn’t why Maggie chose investment as a career.
Now he could see how caring a person she really was. Bart Evans had left an estate worth a fortune. He couldn’t imagine a woman who would willingly give up that kind of money out of the goodness of her heart. Until now.
“She went through enough, like poor Dana did, to deserve something good in her life,” Travis said, watching Maggie. “But you kept nothing for yourself. Why?”
Maggie lifted her coffee cup in numb hands and sipped at the cooling liquid. “I wanted nothing of his.”
Travis’s eyes narrowed. “Your memories must be pretty bad, too.”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t look at him. But her fingers trembled as she put her cup down. Something exploded inside Cord.
He tossed his napkin down impatiently, got to his feet and pulled Maggie to hers. “You can have your cherry pie later. I want to talk to you,” he said, nodding to the others as he took her hand and led her away to his office.
He closed the door behind them, glaring at her. “Why do I constantly have to learn things about you from strangers?” he demanded. “You couldn’t tell me that the rat was abusing you? I’d have mopped the floor with him!”
“From Africa?” she asked deliberately. “From the Middle East? From Central America? And exactly how would I have found you to tell you? And why would you have listened? You hated me!”
It was a painful question. His conscience had driven him clear of the States after Amy’s funeral. He couldn’t even face Maggie, remembering what had happened between them.
He turned, with his hands rammed deep into his slacks’ pockets. “Eb could have found me,” he said dully.
“I can handle my own problems, Cord, whether you think so or not,” she replied. She perched herself on the thick arm of a leather chair. “I’d already started divorce proceedings when Bart…crashed his car. I did them from the hospital…” She stopped at once, but it was too late.
His eyes flashed at her from the window. “The hospital?”
She bit her lower lip, hard. “All right. I was his third victim. But it was only the one time,” she added firmly. “And he knew as soon as he’d done it that I’d go after him with everything I had. I told him so, even before the ambulance came!” Her face looked odd, full of hatred and outrage. “I called my attorney and the police, in that order, and I had a call in to Eb,” she confessed, averting her eyes.
That irritated him. “Why to Eb and not me?”
Because Eb would have known where to find Cord, and she’d wanted him at that moment, wanted someone to share her pain and grief and anger. But it had taken Eb a while to phone back. By then, she’d come to her senses. She told him only that she’d had an accident and didn’t want him to find out and contact Cord, because it was a minor one. She’d lied her head off, then and now. She was tired of lies, but afraid to let Cord know the truth. It would serve no purpose now, except to hurt him. She couldn’t do that.
“He was afraid of you,” she recalled quietly. “I think that was why he ran.”
He moved close to her, staring down into her eyes intently. “Keep going,” he coaxed when she stopped.
She shrugged. “He got in his car and took off as soon as the ambulance picked me up. He was drinking heavily. He ran his car into a telephone pole doing ninety. It was instantly fatal.”
“And no great loss,” he replied tersely. “All this time, and you never said a word!”
“The past is the past, Cord,” she told him, her eyes searching over his face like loving hands. “You’ve had tragedies enough of your own, without adding my problems to them. I’m an adult. I have to be responsible for myself.”
His face clenched. “Is that what you think? That I’m too wrapped up in myself to care what happens to you?”
“I’m just a stray kid that Amy Barton picked up,” she replied. “No relation to you. None at all.”
That hurt. It really hurt. He was picturing Maggie being beaten to her knees, badly enough to send her to the hospital, by a drunken man, and no one to protect her. He hated the thought of Bart Evans. He wanted, so badly, to go back in time and be less selfish. If he’d stayed in Houston, instead of running off to lick his wounds, Maggie could have been spared that anguish. He’d failed her. And it wasn’t the first time.
“He’d never have touched you if I’d been in town,” he said coldly.
She lowered her eyes to her lap. If he’d been in town, and learned the truth, he’d have killed Bart Evans. It was better that he never knew.
“It cured me of wanting to get married, at least,” she said whimsically.
“What a waste,” he said without thinking.
She looked up, surprised.
He wasn’t smiling. He looked sad. “What a hell of a life you’ve had,” he murmured. “And I have a feeling that I don’t know the half of it.”
Her flush of color told him that he’d guessed accurately. He wondered just how many terrible secrets she was keeping.
“You don’t trust me with secrets, do you?” he asked, frowning.
She closed up. “You have enough of your own. I don’t share mine.” She stood up. “I want my cherry pie.”
He caught her by the waist as she started past him. “Not yet. Evans must have had a reason for hitting you,
no matter how drunk he was. What was it?”
Her heart ran away. She could still picture his furious face when he realized that Cord was responsible for her condition. He was outraged, infuriated, ready to kill her.
Her eyes were shadowed, full of pain. Bart had told her what he was going to do to her, and that she’d never disgrace him. He was going to eliminate this problem! And he’d hit her, and hit her, finally knocking her violently down over the stair railing and into a marble table. She’d fought back, for all the good it did her. But when she hit the table, breaking it, and felt the agonizing, twisting pain in her belly, she knew what he’d done. She’d screamed at him, threatened him with what was going to happen when Cord knew. He wasn’t so drunk that he didn’t remember who Cord was, and what he did for a living. He’d managed to dial the emergency number and waited only until a weeping, moaning Maggie was carried off to the hospital until he’d packed a bag and gotten into his luxury car for a rushed trip out of town. It had ended in his own death. Maggie had her own grief to face.
“You look as if the memories are killing you,” Cord remarked, bringing her back to the present. He drew her closer. “Talk to me. Tell me.”
Her sad eyes met his and she shook her head. “It’s all over.”
His thumbs moved lazily against her rib cage while he watched her reaction to his touch. “You like me to touch you,” he murmured quietly. “I don’t know how I went so many years without noticing. Or maybe I just didn’t want to notice.”
She pulled against his hands, to no avail. “I’m leaving the country very soon,” she pointed out, hating the breathless sound of her voice. “You won’t ever have to notice anything again.”
“I’ll be completely alone,” he said solemnly. “So will you.”
Her face tautened. “I’ve always been alone,” she said in a husky tone. “Let me go.”
