Maggie's Baby

by Colleen French

  He squeezed her arm. “That depends on whether you can forgive me for doing what I did with Lisa, for taking Taylor and not trying to find you, for being so damned angry with you all these years and wanting you at the same time. I was as big a coward as you were.”

  “Oh, Jarrett.” She turned to face him. “I think it’s too late.”

  His face fell. “Too late?”

  She dared a tiny smile. “Too late because at some point over the past few weeks, I realized I already had forgiven you.”

  Jarrett lowered his mouth to hers and she lifted on her toes to meet him. The shape of his lips and the taste of him were so familiar.

  How many times had she dreamed of his kisses? Now that he was kissing her again, she wanted it to go on forever.

  They parted, both breathless, and he pressed a kiss to her forehead. “We can take it slow. As slow as you need,” he said, his voice husky.

  Maggie almost laughed aloud. She was moving slowly all right, like a freight train. There she had been, her mouth on his, her fingernails digging into his back. It had been so long since she’d felt this passionate with any man. The truth was no man had ever made her feel the way Jarrett did.

  Maggie was ready to move on. She felt stronger, more sure of herself than she had since Stanley and Jordan’s deaths, maybe longer. She and Jarrett and Taylor had a lot of issues to mull over, but she really felt as if they were making progress. There was only one nagging detail about the past that was still unanswered.

  Maggie bit down on her lower lip. “Jarrett, can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.” He toyed with her hair. He looked so happy. “Fire away.”

  “How did you know about Taylor? How did you know I was in Tucson? How did you get her so soon after she was born? Who told you?”

  He stiffened, releasing her hair. “Do we really need to go into this? I already said I forgive you. You forgive me. Taylor needs us to be here for her now, not in the past.”

  Maggie was tempted to let it go again, but she couldn’t. “I have to know how you knew I was pregnant when you were in Spain.”

  His intense blue eyes met hers. “I think you can guess.”

  She shook her head. Somewhere deep inside, maybe she did, but she wasn’t ready to admit it, not even to herself. She wasn’t ready to believe in that kind of betrayal.

  “Come on. You've always suspected, haven't you?” His voice took on an angry edge.

  “Tell me.”

  “No.”

  She stared at him incredulously. “No?”

  “Look, it’s late. We’ve got to be going.”

  She grabbed his shoulder as he turned away. “You can’t just say no and walk away.”

  “Sure I can.” He stepped through the doorway, into the living room. “Taylor, grab your things, hon. Time to go home.”

  “But we haven’t had dessert yet, Dad,” came their daughter’s voice from the kitchen.

  “You said you wanted to spend the night with Heather. If you’re going to, it’s now or never.”

  Maggie stood on the deck, her arms crossed in disbelief as he walked into the house. “Really, Jarrett?” she whispered under her breath. Part of her wanted to go after him, but part of her wanted to let him go.

  Tonight they had come so close to the beginning of a relationship, and then this. She turned her back to the house, fighting anger and hurt. Maybe it was better this way. Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be.

  ~~~

  “Place stationary bottom shelf between sides A and B, finish out, and fasten with rods,” Jarrett read aloud.

  He sat cross-legged on the floor in front of his couch, bookcase shelves scattered around him. He dumped a bag of screws onto the carpet. “Rods? What rods? What the heck is a rod? There should be diagrams of the parts. I told them I wanted diagrams of the parts.” He let both sides of the bookcase go and they fell noisily onto the pile, nicking his toe as they went down. “Ouch!” He massaged the injured digit. “I’ve got a master’s degree and I can’t understand these directions. How is anyone else going to?” He practically shouted even though he was the only one in the room.

  It was almost midnight. Ordinarily he would have been in bed by now, but he hadn’t been able to sleep. Taylor had gone to spend the night at Heather’s, so he was left alone to pace the house. First he’d tried reading, but nothing held his attention, not even the latest high-tech thriller he’d bought at the bookstore, so he’d decided to do a little work.

  He had employees who put the products together using directions other employees wrote, but he still liked to put furniture together himself on occasion for quality control.

  Irritated, Jarrett got up off the floor and walked to the kitchen to get something to drink. He opened the fridge. His choice was skim milk or pomegranate juice. Deciding he wasn’t so thirsty after all, he let the door swing shut, leaving the kitchen in darkness again.

  Maybe he ought to call Maggie. He shouldn’t have left her house in anger. He wasn’t angry with her, but he knew he’d left that impression—and just when it seemed they were about to bridge that gap between them, just when they might have a chance.

  Jarrett could still taste Maggie’s sweet lips on his. He could close his eyes and feel her touch. She made him feel so alive and good inside—good about himself. She made him feel young again, like he could do anything or be anything.

  “Just call her,” he mumbled to himself. “Tell her you’re sorry.”

  But then he would have to answer her question. He would have to tell her the truth, and he didn’t want to be the one to do it. He wasn’t even sure he had a right to.

  Still, he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep until he talked to her. Before he could chicken out, Jarrett picked up his cell phone. Her phone was ringing when he heard a knock on the back door.

  Chapter 15

  The door swung open and Maggie smiled hesitantly, holding up her ringing cell phone. “Hi.”

  Jarrett grinned and ended the call. He was still wearing the same shorts and T-shirt, but he was barefoot, looking rumpled and all the sexier for his dishevelment. Apparently he, too, had tried to sleep but couldn’t. She walked into the living room, brushing past his warmth, already feeling better. That was the great thing about old friends—they knew you so well, and you knew them so well. “I was going to call, but took the chance you were still up.”

  “Maggie, I’m sorry I left like that.” Jarrett dropped the phone on the counter and ran one hand through his sun-bleached hair. “I wasn’t angry with you. Only with the situation.”

  She gazed at his bare feet. “It was my fault,” she said. “I shouldn’t have cornered you like that. You were right. I know who told you. I ... just didn’t want to admit it.” She fought the lump rising in her throat.

  “Aw, Maggie, I’m sorry,” Jarrett whispered.

  He pulled her into his arms, and she went willingly.

  “Even after everything she did,” Maggie whispered, “I didn’t want to believe it.” She buried her face in Jarrett’s shoulder, breathing deeply, enveloping herself in the scent of fabric softener and his maleness. “I wanted to believe that she really did love me on some level.”

  He angled back and gazed into her eyes. “She did love you. She does still. It's just different than the way people like you and me love.”

  Maggie shook her head, still fighting tears. “No mother could love her child and do what she did.”

  “She thought she was doing the right thing,” he said firmly. “She didn’t want you to end up the way she did—uneducated, with a dead-end job, getting old before your time.”

  Maggie pressed her cheek to Jarrett’s shoulder again. Her mother had gotten pregnant out of wedlock with Lisa. Maggie’s father wasn’t Lisa’s father. She’d always known it, although no one had ever said it. Ruth had married Bob, The Bread Man, so she’d have a wedding ring on her finger when the baby came. Ruth had put Taylor up for adoption to save her daughter from the pain she herself had gone throu
gh. It wasn’t right, but she had done the best she could at the time.

  “And in a way, she was looking out for Taylor’s best interests, too,” he said quietly. “She contacted my parents because she thought our daughter would be better off with grandparents than strangers. I’m sure she never guessed I would be the one to take Taylor.”

  Maggie rubbed her cheek against Jarrett’s soft T-shirt. It was damp where a few of her tears had spilled. “Then your parents told you and you flew home to the states?”

  “I got an apartment and a babysitter. Raised our daughter,” he said, smoothing her hair.

  “Thank you,” Maggie whispered, truly grateful to the very tips of her toes. “Maybe Mom was right. Maybe I couldn’t have cared for her.”

  “I don’t believe that, not for one minute.”

  She sniffed. “I should talk to my mother.”

  “You should talk to her. You’ve put it off long enough.”

  “You’ll go with me?” She was still holding onto him for dear life.

  “I’ll go with you. I told you that. This weekend, if you like. Taylor will be with Heather all weekend. They went to her grandfather’s farm in Dover. She won’t be home until Monday, sometime around lunch.”

  She glanced up, smiling through the tears she’d sworn she wouldn’t shed. “I could love you, Jarrett McKay. I could love you so easily,” she murmured.

  “I already love you. Never stopped.”

  As Jarrett brushed his lips against Maggie’s, she knew everything would be all right. She knew she and Jarrett would fall in love all over again, knew they already had. And she knew she, Jarrett, and Taylor could make a life together. A good life.

  Jarrett lifted Maggie into his arms and she laughed, throwing her head back, looping her arms around his neck. “You’re just too romantic for words,” she whispered, covering his face with kisses as he carried her down the hall to his bedroom.

  A desk lamp softly illuminated the cozy room. He carried her to the tumbled, slept-in sheets of his king-size bed and laid her down gently.

  “This is almost like the first time,” she whispered, smiling and not even a little bit self-conscious. “Remember? In your room when your parents weren’t home?”

  He pulled his T-shirt over his head, revealing his sun-bronzed, muscular chest. “Let’s hope I can do a little better than that.”

  She laughed as she kicked off her sandals and pulled her T-shirt over her head. When she'd decided to come over, she'd already been half undressed, so she didn't have a bra on now. There was nowhere to hide.

  But this was Jarrett—her Jarrett, who had held her in his arms so many times. Her Jarrett, who had made her sandcastles and kissed her until she was weak in the knees in the front seat of his red Mustang. She didn’t want to hide.

  “So beautiful,” he whispered as he climbed into bed, his hand brushing the curve of her waist. He stretched his hard form over her softer, more rounded one, and gazed deep into her eyes.

  “Can’t tell you how many times I’ve dreamed of this.” His lips brushed hers.

  “Me, too.” She drew a line along his lower lip with the tip of her tongue. “Just without the stretch marks.”

  His hand spanned the flat plane of her abdomen and he bent to kiss her navel. “Makes you more beautiful to me. Proof of our love and our love for Taylor.”

  Maggie threaded her fingers through his thick hair and tugged gently. “Come here,” she whispered, “where I can see you.”

  He stretched out beside her in the tangle of sheets so she could touch him and be touched.

  They kissed, they stroked. They reminisced and they reached out to create new memories, discover new responses, heightened pleasures. Within seconds, Maggie’s body was alive with sensation. Within minutes, she burned with a desire fiercer than she remembered.

  As Maggie’s breath came quicker, the urgency inside her intensified, and she wondered if all of the emotional pain she had experienced had enabled her to feel pleasure more profoundly.

  Their bare arms and legs entwined, they merged in a coming together of the past and the future.

  Later, they rested in each other’s arms, panting and laughing. For once Maggie had no tears, only a satisfied grin.

  “Wow,” Jarrett whispered.

  She giggled. She really did feel seventeen again. “Yeah, wow.”

  Then Jarrett pulled the sheet over them both, and they slept in each other’s arms in complete peace, maybe for the first time since they’d parted all those years ago.

  ~~~

  Maggie adjusted her sunglasses, staring straight ahead, the wind whipping at her ponytail. Jarrett, behind the wheel of her car, reached over and patted her knee.

  “Nervous?” he asked.

  She grimaced. “I feel like I could puke.”

  He cracked a grin. “Oh, come on. Things are never as bad as you imagine they’ll be.”

  “Ha! You don’t know Ruth. She is not an open-up-and-share-your-feelings kind of gal. I walk up to her and say “Mom, why’d you give my baby away?” and she might kick us both out the screen door.” She glanced out the open window and watched the telephone poles fly by. “Or she might give such a reasonable explanation that we walk out of there thinking she might have done the right thing.”

  “You and I both know she had no right to do what she did. No matter what she says or how she tries to justify her actions, she was wrong, Maggie. She was wrong and she needs to know it. She needs to hear it from you.” He covered her hand on the seat with his. “But no matter what she says, at least you will have told her how you feel about it all. Maybe you can find some peace, even if she can’t.”

  Maggie closed her eyes. She really did feel sick to her stomach now. Maybe it was the passing poles making her motion sick, or maybe it was just the thought of talking to Ruth about Taylor. “I know I need to do this. I’m just not looking forward to it.”

  “What you can look forward to is a night with me.” He glanced sideways at her as he returned his hand to the wheel. “I made reservations at a little inn on the Chesapeake Bay. We’ll check out a few antique shops, I’ll buy you an ice cream cone, we’ll have dinner by the water, and then . . .” His tone grew low and sexy.

  “And then?” She couldn’t resist a smile. How had she lived without him all these years? He could always make her smile.

  “And then you might get lucky, lady.”

  She laughed, and somehow knew that no matter how horrendous her meeting with her mother might be, Jarrett would help her get through it.

  ~~~

  “Want iced tea?” Ruth asked nervously, hovering in the archway between the kitchen and the living room.

  She was dressed for work in a white polyester nurse’s aide uniform, her leather shoes streaked with white shoe polish.

  Maggie had offered again and again to buy her mother colored smocks for work; everyone at the hospital wore them these days. They were so much cheerier than the stark white. But Ruth refused. Dingy white polyester was what she wore because it was what she had always worn. The eleventh commandment: Thou shalt not instill change in thy dress or manner. Ever.

  Maggie hadn’t told her mother she was bringing Jarrett. Needless to say, Ruth was shocked to see him after all these years. Shocked, but not shocked enough to ask her daughter why he was there—why either of them were there, for that matter. Ruth lived by the don’t-ask-questions-you-really-don’t-want-the-answers-to rule.

  Jarrett sat on the edge of a couch covered in a slipcover that sported limes and lemons. “Iced tea would be nice, thank you. With lemon, if you have it.”

  “Don’t have lemon.” Ruth fussed with her hair. Her roots were showing. Maggie had offered to pay to have her mother’s hair professionally colored monthly, too, but she refused. Miss Clairol was what she had always used.

  Jarrett leaned back and smiled. Maggie could tell it was forced. “Plain tea will be fine, thank you.”

  Too nervous to sit, Maggie stood near the TV cabinet. The
TV was on, the volume down low. Her father was asleep in his easy chair. A game show was on the tube; contestants jumped up and down as their names were called.

  Ruth didn’t offer Maggie tea, and Maggie didn’t ask for any. They both knew she would bring it to her whether she wanted it or not.

  “Lisa was here last weekend,” Ruth called from the kitchen. “She bought a new car. They say it won some kind of award last year. Nice car. Air and power windows.”

  Maggie had to press her lips together to keep from calling out, “Mom, all new cars have air conditioning and power windows.”

  “The MacGrogens next door are taking a bus tour to Maine.” Ice cubes popped out of a tray and rattled onto the kitchen counter. “They say it’s beautiful up there in the fall. Lots of leaves.”

  Maggie ground her teeth. How many times in her life had she heard Ruth tell her what they said? Maggie still didn’t know who they were.

  Maggie leaned on the pressed fiber TV cabinet and absently wondered if Jarrett’s company had written the directions for its assembly. She massaged her temples. It was hot in the house. Ruth had oscillating fans placed around the room, but all they seemed to do was push the hot air around.

  “Mom, why don’t you turn on the air conditioner?” Maggie had had central air installed several years earlier because her father’s emphysema was worse in the heat. Ruth rarely used it. Her father suffered in silence, as he always had.

  “It’s not so hot.” She came to the doorway with iced tea in two flowered glasses. “Besides, the electric is high enough.”

  Maggie looked to Jarrett for moral support. He smiled, and that smile gave her the courage to go on. She took the glasses of tea from her mother and passed one to Jarrett. She placed the other on the coffee table littered with women’s magazines. “Mom, I need to talk to you.”