The Millionaire's Virgin (Mills & Boon By Request)

by Susan Stephens

  ‘I didn’t give you much choice,’ she said bravely. ‘I… was just like the women who ride off into the sunset with you because they can’t help themselves.’

  He looked comically confused. ‘What women?’

  She waved a hand. ‘Doesn’t matter—’

  ‘I’ve never ridden off into the sunset with a woman against her better judgement,’ he protested. ‘I’ve never ‘‘ridden’’ off with anyone.’

  A spark of irritation lit Maggie’s eyes. ‘Will you leave it? It’s just something I thought to myself once, in relation to you, that’s all.’

  A trickle of understanding came to his eyes. ‘I see. Sorry, that was a bit dense.’

  ‘Yes, it was. So, what are we going to do now?’

  He finished his coffee and sat back, then, ‘You may like to think the responsibility is yours, but it isn’t, it’s mine, and only I can redeem things. Go back to your family, Maggie, and forget me, otherwise you’ll be torn to pieces,’ he said very quietly.

  ‘I… my father…’ She couldn’t go on and her throat worked.

  ‘In a sense I’m as bad as he is,’ he pointed out. ‘He’s also a man to whom sons may legitimately mean a lot, it is quite an empire and a very old name. Mid-life crises can happen to the best of married men and Sylvia is gorgeous. He—’

  ‘Don’t,’ Maggie begged. ‘Don’t make any more excuses for him for my sake and if you don’t mean them. Do you really think any better of him?’

  He watched her impassively, then shook his head.

  ‘The other thing is, only—’ she pointed to sea where they’d swum ‘—a couple of hours ago we… we were…’ Once again tears started to roll down her cheeks.

  ‘You may never know how hard this is, Maggie,’ he said abruptly, ‘but one day you’ll be grateful. Can you imagine having to tell your mother why your father hates me the way he does?’

  That stopped Maggie in her tracks. ‘Maybe she knew but decided to live with it?’ she whispered.

  He shook his head. ‘From his reaction when I delivered my threat I could see that neither of you knew.’

  Maggie made one last effort. ‘What if Sylvia hadn’t turned up or found out about me for, well, ages?’

  He ran his hand through his hair and sighed. ‘No doubt I’d have come to my senses before that.’

  ‘Has this—has ‘‘us’’ meant anything to you at all, Jack?’

  Her hands were lying helplessly on the table and he reached over to cover one of them with his own. ‘Yes, it has, but I’m not the right man for you.’

  ‘Why not? Apart from everything else.’

  ‘You can’t separate them, Maggie.’ He hesitated, then shrugged. ‘I just don’t think I’d take well to domesticity.’

  ‘A loner?’

  He narrowed his eyes and looked past her. ‘That’s how I started out in this life. But—’ he withdrew his gaze from the past and concentrated on her again ‘—for the right man,’ he stressed, ‘you’re going to be a wonderful wife. A bit of a handful, prone to some excesses like locking people in sheds and—’

  She pulled her hand away and stood up as his words acted like a catalyst. She wiped her face with her fingers, but although the tears subsided her heart felt as if it were breaking and all the fight drained out of her.

  If he could even think of her with another man after what had passed between them, she had to believe that all he felt for her was a passing attraction.

  Yes, maybe there was affection too, but not the conviction she held. The conviction that she’d fallen deeply in love with him. Not the pain at the prospect of being parted from him, nor the sheer agony of thinking of him with another woman…

  No, she had to believe it hadn’t happened for him as it had happened for her and—talk about being torn between him and her family—that would really tear her apart, going on with him under those circumstances.

  And she remembered her original proposition—she would take full responsibility for her actions and there would be no recriminations. But how to act on those brave words? something within her cried.

  She drew a trembling breath. ‘What do they say? You live and learn.’ She smiled, but she couldn’t eradicate the bitterness from it. ‘I’ll go now,’ she added simply.

  He stood up and watched her like a hawk for a moment. ‘Will you be all right?’

  She cast him a look tinged with irony.

  ‘Look, I know—’

  ‘This will take a bit of getting over?’ she suggested. ‘Of course.’ And she squared her shoulders and tilted her chin at him with further, this time patent irony. ‘But I am a Trent, after all.’

  ‘Maggie,’ he said exasperatedly, ‘I meant will you be all right physically? I long since stopped classing you with your father.’

  ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t have, Jack. Physically? Oh, you mean…? Well, I should be fine on both those fronts. I am on the pill and I’ve been careful about what I ate after the other day. No, I’ll be fine.’

  She stopped and stared at him. ‘Provided I do this very quickly,’ she said barely audibly and stood on her toes to kiss him briefly. ‘You were… you were everything a girl could pray for. Take care.’ She turned away and went inside. He moved, then stilled.

  It took her all of five minutes to stuff her possessions into her bag and he carried it to her car.

  She said goodbye unemotionally and he did the same. She even drove off with a wave. Two miles down the road she pulled up and was overcome by a storm of weeping and disbelief—how could it have ended like this?

  To coin a phrase, she returned to the bosom of her family for a few days despite the new ambivalence of her feelings for her father, but some things had changed, she discovered.

  Something in her mother’s voice, when she rang her to say she was home, alerted her to it. A new lightness, a younger-sounding voice—I must be imagining it, Maggie thought—but when Belle suggested a family reunion on the cattle station, Maggie gave it some thought. The fact that her father was home had her in two minds, though.

  Would she find herself unable to hide her hatred for his actions and the misery they’d caused her and Sylvia McKinnon? Was there any way she could heal the breach between David Trent and Jack McKinnon so there need not be this misery, for her, anyway? Come to that, could she hide her misery and despair from her mother?

  In the end her curiosity got the better of her and she used the last few days of her leave to drive up to Kingaroy and the sprawling old wooden homestead, over a hundred years old but now extensively modernized, that had been the birthplace of the Trent dynasty.

  She needn’t have worried about hiding anything from her parents. By some miracle the breach had been healed. They were in love again and, despite observing the usual courtesies, there might have been only the two of them on the planet.

  I don’t believe this, Maggie thought. What has happened?

  She watched them carefully, especially her father. The tawny hair was a little grey, he was close to fifty now, but even so he was attractive—it was not hard to see how he would have appealed to Sylvia six years ago despite a twenty-year age gap. And as always, when he set himself to be pleasant, he was more than that. He was vital, funny—entirely engaging, in fact, until you ran into the brick wall of the other side of his personality, the high-handed, arrogant side she had clashed with frequently down the years.

  To her confusion, however, the weight of Jack’s revelations didn’t add a black hatred to her difficult feelings for her father.

  Because she was so happy to see him making her mother happy again? she wondered.

  Because a certain streak of common sense told her there were always two sides to a story such as— Sylvia had known her father was a married man and should have thought twice about breaking up anyone’s marriage?

  Because David Trent had conveyed enough admiration of her, his daughter, to someone else even although his thirst for a son had driven him to betraying her mother?

  I don’t
know what to think, she acknowledged. I’m all at sea. What would happen if I told him about Jack and tried to smooth things between them? In this new mood he’s in, maybe I could?

  But something held her back. Would Jack McKinnon want her permanently in his life under any circumstances? She had strenuously to doubt it. As for her feelings for Jack, she just didn’t know where she stood there at all.

  Her mother did come down from her cloud nine briefly as Maggie was leaving.

  ‘Darling, are you all right?’ she asked anxiously as they were walking to the car. Maggie had taken leave of her father earlier. ‘You still seem a little quiet.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ Maggie gestured to take in the wide blue sky and the vast dusty paddocks, and artfully changed the subject. ‘I don’t know how this happened.’ She turned to Belle and put her arms around her. ‘But I’m very happy for you, Mum. You’re looking so beautiful.’

  Belle trembled in her daughter’s arms. ‘You can tell?’

  ‘See those steers in the paddock? They could tell,’ Maggie said humorously but lovingly. She disengaged and got into her car. ‘Take care of each other,’ she added with a wave, and drove off.

  She went back to work.

  A month after her stay at Cape Gloucester, she went to see her doctor with an incredulous question.

  ‘I thought you told me I was covered against all eventualities?’

  ‘Sit down, Maggie,’ he invited. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m pregnant! It’s the only explanation I can think of, but I never once forgot to take my pills.’

  The doctor digested this and said slowly, ‘It was a low-dose pill. Sometimes they’re not infallible, as I’m sure I told you—not that we were discussing them so much as a contraceptive at the time, but as a means of helping you with difficult periods. Have you had any cataclysmic upsets?’

  Maggie closed her eyes and thought of explaining that she’d fallen in love overnight, she’d pursued her man relentlessly and given him little choice about taking her to bed—events that had gone around and around in her mind and pointed an accusing finger at her each and every time.

  ‘Gastric upsets or the like?’ the doctor added.

  Her lashes flew up.

  ‘I did mention how they could interfere with the pill,’ he said gently.

  Maggie put a hand to her mouth. ‘I forgot all about that. I… I… was so carried away I didn’t even think of it,’ she admitted. ‘Oh, what a fool I’ve been!’

  ‘Tell me all about it,’ he invited.

  Half an hour later, still in a state of shock, she drove home.

  The doctor’s advice had been copious. Termination was her choice, but even the thought of it was horrific. If she didn’t go ahead with that, the father of the child she was carrying deserved to know about it and no child should be completely deprived of its father even if circumstances prevented its parents from living together. And in that event, she should seek moral support from her family.

  ‘If only you knew,’ she murmured as she unlocked her front door. ‘If only you knew! On the other hand, termination is out of the question, so…’

  Three weeks later she was still grappling with her problems on her own when fate took a hand.

  The property that had started it all was now officially on the market. It had been advertised and there’d been quite a bit of interest—none from the McKinnon organization or anyone bearing that name, however.

  Maggie had been happy to be able to distance herself from it. As the agent who’d received the initial enquiries from the owners it should have been her ‘baby’. In other words, even if another on their team sold it, she would still be entitled to some of the commission, but she’d waived that right when she’d taken four weeks’ unexpected leave.

  But there came a day when a woman rang in requesting an inspection and Maggie was the only one available to do it. Very conscious of the strain she’d put on the team with her unexpected leave, she temporized, then knew she should do it.

  She arranged to meet the woman on the property at four in the afternoon and made a note of her name—a Ms Mary Kelly.

  It wasn’t as beautiful a day as the day she’d met Jack McKinnon on this little bit of heaven, Maggie thought as she pulled her car up behind a smart blue BMW. There were dark clouds chasing across the sky and a threat of rain, but it was still lovely.

  She got out and went to meet Ms Kelly, a smartly groomed woman in her forties who also sparkled with intelligence and had a decisive air about her.

  As they began their inspection Maggie said, ‘Do you intend to live here, Mary?’ They’d quickly got onto first-name terms.

  ‘No. I’m doing this inspection on behalf of a— friend,’ Mary replied. ‘A second opinion is always helpful, isn’t it?’

  Maggie agreed, but realized suddenly that her usual ‘selling persona’ wasn’t quite in place because she wasn’t feeling very well. She struggled on, however. She dredged up several ideas she had for the house, she enthused about the creek, she was just about to suggest a tour of the shed when a violent bout of nausea overtook her and she had to run for a clump of trees where she proceeded to lose her lunch and afternoon tea.

  Mary was most concerned and helpful. She dipped her scarf in the creek, wrung it out and offered it to Maggie to wipe her face and hands.

  ‘Thank you,’ Maggie breathed and patted her face with the cool cloth gratefully.

  ‘Something you ate?’ Mary Kelly suggested.

  ‘No.’ Maggie shook her head, and for some reason, maybe because she’d told no one but her doctor, it all came tumbling out. ‘I’m pregnant and this is, so I’m told, morning sickness in the afternoon.’ She grimaced ruefully.

  ‘You poor thing,’ Mary said slowly and with a gathering frown.

  ‘Oh, it hasn’t been too bad! It just.. catches me unawares at times. There.’ She rinsed the scarf thoroughly and handed it back. ‘Thanks so much—unless you’d rather I kept it and sent it back to you properly laundered? Oh, by the way, no one at the office knows about it yet so—’

  ‘I won’t tell them,’ Mary promised. ‘Are you sure you’re all right now?’

  ‘Fine! Would you like to see the shed?’

  ‘No, thank you, I think I’ve seen enough. Uh…’ Mary hesitated as if she had her mind on other matters, then she said, ‘Is there much interest in the property?’

  ‘Quite a lot, I believe, although there’ve been no offers yet.’

  ‘Do you think the owners have much up their sleeve—are prepared to negotiate, in other words?’

  ‘Look, I’m not sure about that. I did have it originally, but Mike Davies is now the agent in charge, so to speak, only he wasn’t available this afternoon. What say I get him to give you a call?’

  ‘That would be fine, Maggie. Now you take care! How far along are you?’

  ‘Roughly two months.’ Maggie held out her hand. ‘Nice to meet you, Mary.’

  They parted and Maggie drove home slowly. Although she hadn’t got to the shed, the whole exercise had woken all sorts of memories in her and reactivated all sorts of heartaches to fierce and hurtful from the dull pain they’d coagulated into.

  She also knew she would have to make some kind of a decision very shortly. Follow her doctor’s advice or go into hiding and cope with it all on her own?

  In fact, there was only one lessening of the tension for her, and that was her growing curiosity about the baby. And the thought that it might fill the gap in her life Jack McKinnon had created.

  She showered and changed into loose long cotton trousers and a long white shirt as the threat of rain earlier became a reality and thrummed on the roof in a series of heavy showers.

  She made herself an early dinner, a snack really, of toasted cheese and a salad. She was just sitting down to eat it when her doorbell rang.

  Her eyes widened in shock as she opened the door and Jack stood there.

  ‘You!’ she breathed and clutched her throat.

  ‘Y
es,’ he agreed dryly. ‘Let me in, Maggie. It’s wet out here.’

  ‘Of course.’ She stood aside. ‘But what are you doing here?’

  ‘Come to see you,’ he said briefly. ‘Brrr… It’s not only wet, there’s a distinct tinge of winter in the air.’

  ‘Come into the lounge. It’s warm in there.’

  He followed her through, then eyed her snack on the coffee-table next to the TV remote.

  ‘I’m not very hungry,’ she said defensively.

  He looked around the lovely room, then his gaze came back to her and he looked her up and down comprehensively. ‘How are you?’ he asked abruptly.

  She moved and pushed her hands behind her back because they were shaking. Nothing had changed about him, although he was more formally dressed than she’d ever seen him in a beautiful charcoal suit with a pale grey shirt and a bottle-green tie with anchors on it.

  But his clothes didn’t change him. They added a kind of ‘high boardroom flyer’ touch, but they didn’t disguise the perfection of his physique. His streaky fair hair was shorter and tamed, but he still had a tan, and she could see him in her mind’s eyes, aboard The Shiralee wearing only shorts…

  She couldn’t read his grey eyes at all—why had he come? Was it to say—I made a mistake, Maggie. I can’t live without you…?

  ‘Maggie?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said jerkily. ‘Sit down. Would you like something?’

  ‘No, thanks. Don’t let your supper get cold.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right.’ She sat down and pushed the plate away.

  He sat down opposite and studied her penetratingly. Then he said quietly, ‘Any news?’

  Foolishly, her mind went quite blank. What’s he asking me? she wondered. How can there be any news? He was the one who sent me away… ‘No,’ she said bewilderedly.