My Secret Wife

by Cathy Gillen Thacker

  Gabe took another bite of cereal. “If you can discount Harry,” he said.

  Maggie tilted her head to the side. As she did so, her wavy blond hair shifted, too, gently caressing one side of her face, falling away from the other. “You think there may be something going on there, too,” she presumed.

  Gabe shrugged. He knew it wouldn’t be proper—his socialite aunt and her butler. “Harry has been aunt Winnifred’s most intimate confidante for the past ten years.”

  Briefly, Maggie looked shocked. “You don’t think they’re actually…“

  “No,” Gabe cut in quickly. Perish the thought! “I think they both want to but are too proper even to think about taking their relationship to the next level. Which is why aunt Winnifred is always projecting her own romantic fantasies onto the rest of the Deveraux clan. She wants to enjoy love, but only dares to do so vicariously.”

  Maggie knitted her brows as she thought about that. Finally, she stood. Today she wore good-fitting khaki cargo pants, a white long-sleeved button-front shirt and a denim vest.

  As Gabe shook more cereal into his glass, she shot him an unexpectedly flirtatious glance. “Good thing your aunt doesn’t know we’re married, then.”

  Gabe nodded as he topped off his wheat flakes with more milk. “She’d either think it was for real or that it was only going to last a few weeks.”

  “She wouldn’t be far wrong.” Maggie stepped closer and stood, both hands on her hips, legs braced apart, boot-clad feet planted firmly on the floor. She looked fresh and pretty in the morning light flooding in through the windows.

  “We’re only going to be together until after the baby is born,” Maggie noted practically. “And not publicly until we know I’ve gotten pregnant.”

  Gabe tried not to think about how sexy Maggie would be when she was carrying his child. It was hard enough being near her with nothing between them, but a plan and a certificate of marriage.

  “I don’t think we should tell people that, though,” Gabe replied as he drank in the intoxicating hyacinth fragrance of her skin and hair.

  “Why not?” she asked curiously.

  “Because then they would question the wisdom of our actions.”

  “The way we are?” Maggie quipped lightly.

  Gabe refused to be sidetracked from the serious discussion ahead of them. He finished his cereal and put his glass and spoon aside. “My guess is most of them won’t even expect it to last more than a few weeks, in any case.”

  Maggie narrowed her eyes as she theorized matter-of-factly, “Because of your penchant for playing the Good Samaritan?”

  Gabe wasn’t about to take any grief—from anyone—about that. Not even Maggie. He knew what he did was vital to those around him. “When I see someone in trouble, I have to do what I can to assist them,” he explained. It was just the way he was.

  “And then you lose interest when their problems are solved,” Maggie presumed.

  Her conclusion rankled. It sounded as if he didn’t care, and he did. On the other hand, he couldn’t exactly go around wearing his heart on his sleeve and expect to last more than a couple of days. He had learned to keep a certain emotional distance from those he was trying to help while in medical school. That distance kept his thinking clear, his actions grounded. But he wasn’t sure Maggie, or anyone else who didn’t have a medical background, would understand that.

  “It’s not even that involved,” Gabe said practically as he opened the windows on the first floor to let the fresh ocean breeze in and the still somewhat smokey scent clinging to the interior of his beach house out. “I mean, I know sometimes it looks intense, when I’m in the process of helping a woman solve her problems. But it doesn’t feel that way on the inside. On the inside, I’m just trouble-shooting or working toward a solution.”

  “So when it’s over…?” Maggie walked with him from window to window, lending a hand when she could.

  Gabe shrugged and, finished with the windows, rested his shoulder against the wall. “Then the person I’m helping and I both feel relief and move on.” The person he was helping felt grateful, and he felt the satisfaction he always felt whenever he helped someone, in any capacity. As far as Gabe was concerned, it was a win-win situation.

  Maggie peered at him curiously beneath a veil of lashes. “Are you closer afterward?”

  “Not the way you mean,” Gabe said. Not as if he and the various women he had helped had been emotionally or physically involved, never mind head over heels in love. No, it was a different kind of intimacy, an intimacy born of crisis that was also very specific and narrow and short-lived. But again, he wasn’t sure Maggie, with her non-medical background, would understand that. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think I’ve ever been that close to anyone,” he said.

  “IF YOU’D LIKE to reschedule, we have an appointment at four-fifteen,” the fertility clinic nurse told Maggie.

  “No. I’m sure he’ll be here,” Maggie said confidently. Gabe wouldn’t let her down. Not about something this important. Not after he had promised to help her make a baby and had already secretly married her.

  “The thing is,” the nurse continued, looking every bit as uneasy as Maggie felt, “we don’t have a donation from him yet, and—”

  “I’m sure he can do it quickly,” Maggie said, crossing her fingers, and praying it was true. “He’s a doctor, so he’s familiar with medical procedure, and all of that. And he knows I’m ovulating.”

  The nurse looked even more skeptical.

  “If I could just get in a gown, and then wait—” Maggie pleaded, determined to have a baby with Gabe no matter what it took.

  The nurse sighed, glanced at her watch, then finally conceded. “Well, all right. But if he’s not here by four forty-five—”

  “I totally understand,” Maggie said, plucking her cell phone from her shoulder bag. She called Gabe. The hospital operator said he had already checked out for the day, but promised to page him on his beeper. Maggie breathed a sigh of relief, and began to undress. Obviously, Gabe was on his way, and had simply been delayed by traffic. She put on the cotton gown and snapped it at the neck, then sat up on the examining table to wait for Gabe’s return call, her cell phone cradled expectantly in her hand.

  One minute passed. Another. Then five, ten, fifteen. Finally at nearly five o’clock, the nurse came back in.

  “Gabe hasn’t shown up yet, has he?” Maggie surmised unhappily, knowing the clinic would be closing down for the day momentarily.

  The nurse shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry, hon,” she said sympathetically. “Maybe he had car trouble or something.”

  And maybe, Maggie thought furiously, it was something worse. Maybe he had just changed his mind.

  Chapter Five

  “I’m sorry,” Gabe told Maggie shortly after seven that evening.

  Maggie shot him a resentful look, trying hard not to notice just how handsome he looked in the sea-blue shirt and tie and coordinating slacks, or how determined he appeared to be to have his own way.

  “Well, that much I figured.” Deciding she was way underdressed for this confrontation—she had taken a long bubble bath and put on her favorite pair of peach silk pajamas the moment she got home—Maggie started to close the front door in Gabe’s face.

  He caught the door with his hand, his fingers closing over hers, then paused to search her face like the protector he clearly thought he was. “Aren’t you going to at least hear me out?” he demanded impatiently.

  Maggie’s fingers tingled from the warmth and strength of his even while her stubborn determination to kick him out of her life once and for all grew. “What’s there to say?” she asked in a sweet, sarcastic voice meant to provoke him as much as he had already provoked her. She curled her bare toes on the cool ceramic tile beneath her feet and, refusing to succumb to the seductive fragrance of his aftershave, tilted her face up to his.

  Gabe’s glance roved the damp tendrils of her hair at the nape of her neck, caressed her lips, b
efore returning with slow deliberation to her eyes. “I got caught up at the hospital and couldn’t get away,” he told her in a low sexy voice that sent shivers of awareness shimmering over her skin.

  Wishing like heck she’d thought to put on a bra, or at least a tank top underneath her pajamas—anything to cover the tightening of her nipples in the cool evening air—Maggie looked him straight in the eye. “I don’t believe you,” she told him, even more sweetly.

  His jaw dropped at her no-holds-barred declaration.

  Maggie held up a hand before he could interrupt, with his own version of events. She stepped out onto the porch of her beach house—which, unfortunately, just happened to be along the same stretch of beach as his. “You never wanted to do this,” she accused as she propped both her hands on her waist and glared up at him.

  Gabe sighed. “You’re right. I didn’t.”

  Maggie girded her thighs defiantly, prodding, “Because…?”

  Gabe’s glance drifted leisurely over her in a frank, sensual appraisal, before returning to her face. He lounged against the railing on her sunporch and continued to search her eyes. “You want to know the truth?”

  Wasn’t that a loaded question? “Nothing but,” Maggie assured him bluntly, over the tumultuous rhythm of her heartbeat.

  Gabe shrugged his broad shoulders. Abruptly, his expression was as impassive as his eyes. “It seems like a cold way to bring a baby into the world. It’s okay for someone for whom there is no other way. But it seems to me that whenever possible a baby should be made in person, and in love.”

  Maggie had always felt the same, until her desperation to have a child coupled with the possibility of infertility cancelled out everything else. She crossed her arms in front of her, then asked defiantly, “Then what are you proposing we do?” Despite her efforts, she was unable to quell the hurricane of emotions spiraling through her.

  Gabe looked glad she had asked that. He crossed the distance between them, took her into his arms, so they were pressed together length to length, and lowered his glance to hers. “This.”

  Maggie barely had time to gasp in shock and surprise before Gabe caught her head in his hands, tilted her face up, and then his lips were fastened on hers in a riveting, passionate kiss that literally robbed her of all thought and reason. She melted against him as his tongue swept the inside of her mouth, and he possessed her in a deep, sexy way that took her breath away. The hardness of his chest pressed against the softness of her breasts. Lower still he was even harder, more masculine and insistent. Tremors of arousal swept through her, igniting to flame. Maggie hadn’t expected Gabe to want to make love to her in order to make their baby. But now that he was holding her this way, kissing her so passionately, she couldn’t imagine him not making her his—even if it was just for a little while. She clutched his shirt, and still kissing him madly all the while, dragged him across the portal into the house. The door shut behind them, and then they were locked together.

  “Maggie—” Gabe murmured, as he briefly came up for air.

  Whatever he was about to say, Maggie didn’t want to hear it, didn’t want anything interfering with her ultimate goal of having a baby, someone in her life to love. “No thinking, Gabe,” she insisted, just as ardently, as she grasped him by the hand and led him swiftly and irrevocably down the hall, and up the stairs. “No talking,” she insisted fiercely. “Just feeling.”

  Too many things had almost happened and then hadn’t, in her life. For too long, she’d been alone. But not anymore, Maggie thought. Not when Gabe was here after all, ready to help, and she was ovulating, their baby about to be made. Still pressing hot, wanton kisses down the slope of his throat, she guided him into her bedroom, and over to the white cottage-style double bed.

  Gabe wanted Maggie fiercely as they tumbled onto the tidy mint-green comforter on her bed. But something about the way she was rushing him along, the way she had stopped kissing him as she straddled him and nervously unbuckled his belt, grappled clumsily with his zipper, gave him pause. Maggie was acting like a frightened virgin on a mission to get pregnant, not the confident, sexy, fiercely independent woman he knew.

  Like it or not, the relationship between them was turning clinical—and desperate—again. And Gabe couldn’t help but compare that with the lusty and fulfilling relationship she’d undoubtedly had with his older brother, Chase. He’d lived in Chase and Mitch’s shadows for all of his life—he didn’t want to come up last again. Not in the category of making love. And especially not in Maggie’s estimation of him, as a man, as a lover, as a friend. And that, Gabe realized reluctantly, as Maggie’s silky, warm fingers brushed against his waist, meant he could do only one thing.

  He caught her hand before she could draw the metal slide all the way down, held it captive there against his fly. He looked at her firmly. “This isn’t right either,” he said. He wanted Maggie. Oh, how he wanted her. But not this way. Hurriedly, furtively, and without heart. Because if they did it that way, she’d regret it—and resent him for it later. Maybe not right away, but eventually. And that was a path he wasn’t going to take. They’d let too much drive them apart already.

  Maggie tensed from head to toe as hot-pink color flooded her face. She laughed shakily and pressed the back of a hand to her soft lips. “I’m not surprised.” Bitterness and hurt flooded her face as she withdrew her other hand from his fly, scooted over to the edge of the bed. Light-green eyes radiating despair, she regarded him helplessly. “In fact, I probably should have expected as much.” Looking all the more distressed, she shoved a trembling hand through the honey-colored softness of her hair, pushing it away from her face. “This sort of thing always happens to me on my wedding night—or in this case, the delayed-by-one-day wedding night.”

  Gabe blinked. “What are you talking about?” he demanded, beginning to be as upset as she was about the mess they had once again made of things. “You’ve never been married before,” he said.

  “Actually,” Maggie retorted, slowly, “I have. Only it was never really legal—so from that standpoint it doesn’t count.”

  “Which is why,” Gabe guessed, “you didn’t tell the clerk about it when we applied for our marriage license.”

  “Right.”

  Knowing this was one story he had to hear, Gabe shifted from a prone to a sitting position and leaned back against the painted white headboard. “So how long ago was this?” he asked.

  Maggie swallowed hard, looked deep into Gabe’s eyes, and continued, “When I was sixteen, I dated someone my mother and father didn’t approve of. And I eloped.”

  Sixteen! Gabe took a moment to let that sink in, even as his heart went out to her. “That doesn’t sound like a very good introduction to lovemaking,” he told her sympathetically. Understanding—because he had made his own share of very foolhardy decisions as a teenager.

  “Isn’t that the truth.” She hung her head in shame. “My ‘husband,’ who was eighteen, was so anxious and guilt-ridden about what we’d done he was unable to perform. Anyway, our parents caught up with us the next day. Because my boyfriend and I had used forged letters of parental permission for me, it was easy to get the marriage annulled. My boyfriend and I were so mortified by what had happened that we never spoke of it or saw each other again. And now here I am ‘married’ again—for all the wrong reasons—and my husband is unable to perform.” Maggie stood, clasped her hands together in front of her. “Maybe the universe is trying to tell me something.” She turned away from him and released a troubled sigh.

  “Like what?” Gabe demanded, almost afraid to hear the answer, given the tension in her feminine, five-foot-five frame.

  Maggie swung back around to face him and looked him straight in the eye. She clamped her lips together as if she were not going to allow herself to continue. Then to his chagrin, she did anyway.

  “Like we should end this travesty of a marriage now, Gabe,” she stated in a low, excessively stubborn tone. “Before we further humiliate ourselves or anyo
ne else finds out about it.”

  “OKAY, SO WHAT’S the emergency?” Jack Granger asked Gabe the next morning when they met for a run before breakfast.

  Gabe knew if anyone could help him figure out what to do next, it would be Jack, who was not only a trusted friend and former college roommate, but an attorney for Deveraux Shipping Company. On the other hand, Gabe decided on the spur of the moment, there was no need to humiliate himself unnecessarily.

  “A friend of mine has a problem,” Gabe fibbed as they jogged down the beach, making tracks in the sand.

  “Okay, shoot,” Jack said affably.

  Deciding they were taking it way too easy, Gabe took a deep breath of the salty ocean breeze and picked up his speed. “He wants to know how he can stay in a secret marriage not yet consummated when his bride wants out.”

  Jack shrugged off-handedly as he easily kept pace with Gabe. “Do what the politicians do. Delay, delay, delay. And hope that whatever objection there is will sort of fade away in the meantime.”

  Gabe grimaced in remorse. Unfortunately, he didn’t think Maggie would soon forget the way he had stopped making love to her. Especially when it so closely mirrored the way he had come on to her, and then decided it would be best if they didn’t date each other after all, two years ago.

  Jack continued to study Gabe thoughtfully as they raced along the dunes. “By the way,” Jack continued sagely as they ran single file through a hedge of waist-high sea grass waving in the breeze, and over several uneven hills of sand along a particularly narrow section of beach, “your friend who’s keeping this a secret—if he’s prominent,” Jack warned, “and the marriage record is published anywhere within the state or general geographic area, your friend can bet his marriage won’t stay secret for long.”

  Too late, Gabe realized he and Maggie should have gone a lot farther away than Sunset Beach, North Carolina, to be married, but he couldn’t worry about that now. He had to worry about Maggie and their marriage and the mistakes he had made.