Maggy's Child (10 page)

So he understood why she had married Lyle Forrest. Hell, back then if some rich old woman had wanted to carry him off to a better life, who was to say that he would not have done the same thing?

But times had changed. He was no longer a dirt-poor kid, stealing cars and breaking into houses and shoplifting and doing any other damn thing he could to provide for himself and his mother and brother as well as Magdalena and her father. He’d made it, financially. Maybe some of the tactics he’d used to pull himself up by his bootstraps had been a little shady, but his business interests were legit now. No grand jury could touch him.

But they were going to have a field day with old Lyle.

Divorce was easy. Magdalena would get one. Just as soon as he had persuaded her that she should.

It shouldn’t take long. She was his, just as she’d always been. She knew it, too. He had read it in her eyes, her face, her body from the first moment she set eyes on him again. All they had to do was look at each other, and the twelve years that had passed since they last met no longer existed.

He was even prepared to take her boy, Lyle Forrest’s seed though he was, and treat him as his own son. As Nick pondered this last, a glimmer of humor softened his mouth. If he knew anything of Magdalena Rose Garcia—and he had once known her very well indeed—there wouldn’t be any question of her running off with him and leaving her son behind. Those she loved, she loved totally.

The way she had once loved him.

No, the way she still loved him, and would love him for the rest of their lives. She was afraid to face it, but sooner or later she would. This time around he was not taking no for an answer. Whatever it took.

Nick reached into his pocket for the pack of cigarettes that he was never without these days, tapped one out, lit it, and inhaled a lungful of smoke as he watched Magdalena approach.

M
aggy felt her knees go weak. Her lips parted and her eyes widened with disbelieving horror as she registered that it really, truly, was he at her birthday party, in the same room as Lyle, whom she could see out of the corner of her eye not twenty feet away, talking to a business associate and his wife.

Lyle was going to be insane with rage when he caught sight of Nick.

Maggy shuddered.
Hail, Mary, full of grace
 … The prayer of her Catholic childhood rose unbidden to her lips as her eyes swung from Nick to Lyle and back.

“Happy birthday, pretty lady!”

The speaker was James Brean, president of the Bluegrass Bank and a close friend of Lyle’s. Maggy smiled automatically, accepting his kiss on her cheek with a graciousness born of practice, and spent several minutes chatting with him and his wife Ellen. What they talked about Maggy couldn’t afterward have said if her life depended on it.

Nick was watching her the whole time.

At last she managed to extricate herself with a murmur about mingling. With a kind of helpless compulsion, she moved toward Nick. His gaze had never left her, and now it reeled her in as surely as a hooked fish. Though the gathering was growing larger by the minute—perhaps two hundred guests now milled around the buffet table, laughing and gossiping as they cadged drinks from the
waiters moving among them with loaded silver trays—it would be almost impossible for Lyle to miss Nick. Lyle was ever the attentive host, and he always made a point of speaking to every guest at one of his parties. He loved pressing the flesh and mingling. That was just what he would do, and he would inevitably stumble across Nick.

Perhaps, she thought with scant hope, she could persuade Nick to leave.

“Happy birthday, Maggy!” Sarah said gaily as Maggy walked up to their group. Though Maggy originally had eyes for no one but Nick, this greeting recalled her to a sense of her surroundings. She managed a smile for Sarah.

“Thank you. It’s so nice of you all to come.” Maggy was surprised at how normal her voice sounded as her smile expanded to include the rest of the group.

“It’s nice of you to ask us,” replied the woman in the blue dinner suit whom she had noticed standing with Sarah earlier. What was her name? Before Maggy could call it to mind, the woman glanced down at Maggy’s bandaged left wrist, and her brows went up. “What happened, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Maggy managed a little laugh. “Oh, I fell over one of the dogs. It’s not serious, only a very minor sprain.”

The woman shook her head in commiseration. “I know how you must feel. I once tripped over our daughter’s cat and fell halfway down a flight of stairs. I twisted my knee, and had to spend the next three weeks on crutches.”

“During which time she tried very hard to persuade our daughter that she was allergic to cats,” the man next to her added with a grin. “With no success, I might add.”

They all laughed politely.

“You know Mike Sullivan, don’t you? And his wife Joan?” Sarah, belatedly making introductions, seemed to notice nothing amiss in Maggy’s demeanor, for which Maggy was thankful. Living with Lyle had taught her the art of public dissembling to a fare-thee-well, apparently.

“Yes, of course. It’s good to see you again.” Maggy shook hands with the man and his wife, complimenting the woman on her suit’s lovely shade of blue as she did so. Joan Sullivan then admired Maggy’s dress and was thanked in return. Maggy’s face felt stiff with the effort of keeping a smile on it as she struggled to make conversation. Unlike Lyle, she was not at her best exchanging meaningless chitchat with near strangers, and her natural reticence was made even worse by the presence of the man at her side. She was heart-thumpingly conscious of Nick looming at her right elbow, watching her, not saying a word. It was all she could do to breathe, much less engage in social niceties without so much as looking at him, but she forced herself to soldier on. “How is Becky?”

Becky was the Sullivans’ ten-year-old daughter, presumably the owner of the cat, who attended the same exclusive private school as David. It was a stroke of luck that put the child’s name in Maggy’s mouth just when she needed it.

“Just fine,” Joan answered with a beaming smile. “And how is David? Is he going to camp this summer?”

The subsequent exchange could not have taken more than a minute or two, but it seemed like an eternity to Maggy. From the corner of her eye she saw that Lyle was on the move, and he could very well spot Nick at any moment. She desperately needed a chance to talk to Nick alone, to see if she could persuade him to leave.

“I hope you don’t mind me bringing a guest,” Buffy interjected when Joan paused to take a sip from the glass she was holding. As Buffy spoke she slid her hand in the crook of Nick’s arm and smiled slyly at Maggy. Maggy, her eyes drawn against her will to those possessive scarlet-tipped fingers, shook her head. What other response could she possibly have made?

“I didn’t think you would. After all, Nick
is
an old friend of yours. And when I told him that it was your
birthday party I was asking him to, he was positively eager to come.”

“Happy birthday, Magdalena,” Nick said smoothly as she looked at him at last. His eyes glinted at her over the cigarette he raised to his mouth, but his expression gave nothing away. Only she, who knew him so well, could read the mockery behind the mask.

“Why, Mr. King, I didn’t realize you knew the Forrests! How are you?” James Brean joined them, shaking hands with Nick and grabbing a glass of champagne from a passing tray at the same time. “How’s the nightclub business these days?”

“Prosperous,” Nick said, taking another drag from his cigarette. “We’re expanding. We’ve just bought the Little Brown Cow over in Indiana, and we’re looking at a couple of clubs on this side of the river.”

“Well, if our bank can be of any help, just let me know.”

“I bet you say that to all the rich folk,” Buffy purred, batting her eyes at James Brean even as her hold on Nick tightened possessively. Brean might not know when he was being pumped, but Maggy recognized the ploy: Buffy was still trying to determine Nick’s financial status, to see if he was worth pursuing as anything more than a toy-boy.

Maggy realized that she was more than a trifle curious on that point herself. Nick said he had bought the Little Brown Cow, but had he really? With whose money? His own? Not likely. When she’d known him, he’d never had a dime. Or, as seemed more plausible, was he running some kind of scam? He certainly looked well-to-do, and he sounded well-to-do, and he had the air of total self-confidence that she had learned came with being well-to-do, but then he had always had the ability to be the consummate con man when he wished. Nobody knew Nick better than she knew Nick, or at least better than she had once known Nick, and in her opinion he was perfectly
capable of acting out an elaborate lie if it was in his best interests to do so.

It all came back to that one burning question: What was he doing in Louisville? He had not turned up like a bad penny on her doorstep just to give her the pictures and tape, she knew. Her deepest instinct told her that he was up to no good. But no good for whom? If he meant to fool Brean, or the entire banking establishment for that matter, into thinking he was a legitimate businessman with the wherewithal to buy nightclubs, it was no skin off her teeth. If he was, by some stretch of the imagination, a legitimate businessman with said wherewithal, that was no skin off her teeth either. She wished him well.

As long as he left her, and hers, alone.

But would he? Maggy’s stomach started to churn as she faced the truth: If he meant to leave her alone, he would not have turned up at her party tonight.

What did he want from her? Maybe nothing more than an introduction to her well-connected friends. Maybe. And maybe not.

“Not all of them.” Brean grinned at Buffy. “Just the ones I think my bank can make money on.”

“At least you’re honest,” Joan Sullivan said with a laugh, while Ellen Brean poked her husband reprovingly, and Buffy looked up at Nick with a beguiling smile.

From the front of the room, the sound of a fork being clinked against a champagne glass drew all eyes. Maggy, too, glanced around, to find that Lyle was standing in front of the buffet table, fork and glass in hand,
smiling
widely as he got the assembly’s undivided attention.

“We have a beautiful birthday cake up here,” he announced, “which I for one am dying to tuck into. We can’t do that until we wish my wife happy birthday, so let’s get her up here, shall we? Maggy, darling, where are you?”

Lyle’s eyes swept the room even as Maggy started forward. They found her—“Ah, there she is! Get up here,
Maggy!”—then went beyond her, where they fixed and widened. On Nick. Maggy knew it without even having to look around. In that moment of thundering silence, she could feel the tension charging over her head between the locked gazes of the two men like arcing, sparking electricity.

It was a shock to glance around at the smiling, expectant faces of the guests who were waiting for her to reach Lyle’s side and realize that she was probably the only one besides the two principals who was aware of their silent, sizzling exchange. Unable to help herself, Maggy glanced over her shoulder at last. She was just in time to watch as Nick lifted his glass and smiled—a slow, insolent, challenging smile—at Lyle. Swiftly Maggy looked back at her husband, and was only one of two-hundred-plus witnesses as all the color drained from Lyle’s face and he took a small, unbalanced step backward to fetch up hard against the buffet table.

“Lyle, are you all right?” Ham was the first to reach him, catching his brother-in-law’s arm and peering worriedly into his face. A dozen others crowded in behind Ham, including Lucy, who shoved her way to her brother’s side.

Maggy joined the clucking circle just in time to see Lyle shake off Ham’s hand and stand upright again.

“I’m fine,” he said with a touch of irritation. “Don’t be an old woman, Ham. I just felt a little strange for a second, is all. Probably I need to eat.”

“Well, sit down, man, for God’s sake.” Ham looked genuinely concerned.

“I tell you, I’m fine. Where’s Maggy?”

“I’m right here.” Maggy squeezed past Lucy so that Lyle could see her. His gaze held hers for an instant, and she shuddered inwardly at what she read in his pale blue eyes. She would face an awful retribution later for Nick’s presence here tonight, she knew.

She felt suddenly chilled to her bone marrow. Then
Lyle reached out and caught her elbow, pulling her to his side as he turned her to face the crowd. Maggy smiled automatically at the sea of faces before her, though dread iced her veins. She had seen that particular expression on Lyle’s face only once before, not quite a year after David’s birth, when she still hadn’t known what kind of monster lurked beneath her husband’s elegant exterior. She had learned, that night, in terror and degradation, to know the true man, and had never forgotten the lesson.

Now, as Lyle slid his arm around her waist, squeezing her close against him, Maggy offered no protest, though she shuddered somewhere deep inside. Yet all the while she beamed never-endingly at their guests. God forbid they should know that anything was amiss! Keeping up appearances could have been the Forrest family credo, and by now she was as indoctrinated in that as the rest of them.