Maggy's Child (20 page)

He stopped then, his eyes still fastened on her face. Maggy could hardly look at him, so awful did she feel. She could see his rage so clearly, feel his anguish as if she had experienced it herself.…

In a way, she supposed she had.

“Did you ever think of me,
querida
, when you took off on your honeymoon with that rich old guy?” Old anger hardened his voice. The name, the pet name that her father used to call her and that Nick had gleaned from him years before, was a weapon that he used on purpose to wound. And Maggy knew that if Nick was deliberately
trying to hurt her, he must be in pain himself. Dreadful pain.

“Oh, Nick.” Maggy couldn’t help it. Her heart broke for him, and for herself. Tears sprang to her eyes. “Of course I did. All the time. Even when I—tried not to.”

“You tried not to.” Sarcasm edged the words. “For a long time, I tried not to think about you, too, but in the end I couldn’t think of anything else.”

“There was David …” Her voice was almost pleading.

“Ah, yes. David. David, who was certainly begat in the biblical way. Tell me something, Magdalena: how did it feel to screw old Lyle when you were crazy in love with me?”

Maggy felt as if he had punched her in the stomach. Her eyes went wide, and she felt the color drain from her cheeks. She could only stare at him speechlessly.

“Was the sex good for you, at first? Did you like it? I used to almost go crazy, wondering.”

“Stop it, Nick!”

“All right,” he said, his voice rough and low. “As you said, it’s all water under the bridge now, anyway. I’ve had a few chicks since you, too, baby—but I could never get you out from under my skin. I don’t think you ever got me out from under yours, either. Did you? Not in twelve years. What does that tell you? That we belong together. You belong to me. We’ve wasted twelve years. Let’s not waste any more.”

“It’s too late for us, Nick.” Her quiet rebuttal made his eyes harden on her face. He stared at her without speaking for a moment. Maggy could not hold his gaze. Instead she glanced away, across the dark water toward the barge that was within half a mile now, between
The Lady Dancer
and the Indiana shoreline.

“Do you still sleep with him?” The question came at her out of nowhere, ripping her composure like a stray bullet.

“What?” Her head whipped around so that she was looking at him again.

“Do you still sleep with him? Lyle?” Nick’s face betrayed no emotion. Only his eyes were a bright, glittering green.

“I—no.” She shifted her gaze to the river again. It was safer to watch the progress of the barge.

“No? Since when?”

“Not—for years.” Maggy took a deep breath, and fought to keep her voice steady. “Look, can we drop the subject?”

“No.” The word was brutal. “I didn’t think you slept with him, Magdalena. You don’t have the look of a woman who’s been well-loved. You don’t sleep with anybody else, do you? No boyfriends?”

“No!”

“Ah.” There was a satisfied quality to the sound. Maggy glanced at him then, to find that he was smiling at her rather grimly. “Remember what it was like? With us?”

“Nick, I told you, I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Too bad,
querida. I
want to, so we’re talking about it anyway. Are you telling me that you’re prepared to spend the rest of your life without ever feeling that way again? Without ever feeling your blood boil and your skin steam and your body burn until it bursts? You were so passionate. I remember how you used to love what I did to you. How you used to beg me: ‘Don’t stop, Nick! Don’t stop! Please—’ ”

“Damn you, will you let it drop!” Her words were fierce as her whole body quivered, partly in outrage—and partly in reluctant remembrance.

“ ‘—please don’t stop!’ And how you’d wrap your arms around my neck and your legs around my waist and hang on as if you were never going to let me go.…”

Maggy slapped him. She let go of the tiller and leapt to her feet and slapped him, all in a movement so quick that
he didn’t even have time to duck. At her action the boat heeled violently. Water sloshed over the side in an icy wave, soaking her shoes and the bottoms of her pant legs. She lost her balance, teetering wildly. Nick caught her arm just as she would have pitched overboard and yanked her back. She landed in his lap.

“The passion’s still there,
querida
. You can feel it again—with me.”

He kissed her. Hard. Her head sank back against his shoulder, pushed there by the force of his mouth. His tongue slid past her lips to fill her mouth, then plunged in and out, in and out, while his arms around her tightened like iron bands, holding her in place for his kiss. He tasted of toothpaste, and more faintly of champagne—that was the last rational thought that ricocheted through her stunned brain. His hand was suddenly on her breast, squeezing, kneading. Even through the layers of leather and cotton that separated his flesh from hers she could feel that hand. Her breast swelled beneath it, tightening, hardening. Her body quaked to shivering life. Taken by surprise, she responsed by pure instinct. Maggy’s back arched, and she moaned against his mouth.

Her arms went around his neck. And she kissed him back.

His hand abandoned the front of her leather jacket to delve down into the zippered opening, seeking closer contact with her breast. She was ready for his touch, aching for it, quivering for it. His hand covered her breast with only the thin cotton of her turtleneck and bra between his fingers and her flesh. He pressed, squeezed, kneaded while she kissed him back with a hunger that had been waiting inside her forever.

He rolled her nipple between his thumb and forefinger, and then his hand left her again. Still kissing her, he shifted her so that she lay back along the plank seat with him looming above her. She could feel the hardness of the wood against her back and bottom. He reached under the
flap of her jacket for the fastening of her jeans. The snap was easy, but he fumbled with the tab on the zipper.

His jeans-clad knee slid between hers, parting her thighs. For a moment she was willing, eager even, and her clutching hands and hungry mouth proved it. Then, without warning, the memories came flooding back, as vividly horrible as if they were a first-run movie playing in her head. Not of Nick, but of the other, the night when Lyle had taught her what fear truly meant. Hideous memories, that she now did not doubt would scar her for life.

“No!” she screamed, the sound swallowed by his mouth, and began to fight.

The warning blast of a barge horn rent the night.

“Jesus!” Nick lifted his head, let her go, and grabbed for the tiller.
The Lady Dancer
made a sharp 90-degree turn that sent Maggy tumbling off the seat.

She struck her injured wrist on the edge of the seat, and it hurt. The discomfort zapped her back to the present quicker than anything else could have done. The horn blasted again, indignantly. As
The Lady Dancer
spun away from the sudden threat, the running lights of the barge swept past Maggy’s line of vision, and then were out of sight.

“I’m sorry, baby. Are you all right?” With danger past, Nick reached down a hand to pull her up. Maggy ignored it, scrambling to get her feet beneath her. She crouched there in the bottom of the boat, rubbing her bandaged wrist, glaring up at him. Her face was utterly white in the darkness of the night.

“D
on’t you ever, ever touch me that way again.” Her voice was as hard and brittle as a pane of glass. His brows knit.

“Not if you don’t want me to,” he said after a minute. His eyes were keen on her face. “Did you hurt your wrist?”

“No.”

Maggy let her injured arm drop to her side. She hesitated, her gaze fixed warily on him as the last of her panic dissipated. Ignoring the hand he offered her, she slid back into her seat. She reached for the tiller, then drew back her hand when it would have brushed his. With the part of her mind that was functioning rationally, she knew this was Nick, and that Nick would never hurt her. But the memories, freshly awakened, were too strong, too potent, to be dismissed by mere knowledge. Buried for years in her subconscious, never willingly acknowledged by her with so much as a conscious thought, they nevertheless lived on. The sexuality of Nick’s kiss had resurrected them. Suddenly they loomed, atavistic and threatening, in the forefront of her mind.

If she had to touch Nick, or any man, just at that moment, she thought she would be sick.

“I’ve got it,” she said, her manner brusque. He relinquished the tiller without comment. She refused to look at him as she placed her hand where his had been, though
she knew that he was watching her. Instead she confined her gaze to the Indiana shoreline as she brought the boat around. She needed time to calm her shattered senses, time to banish the terrifying dinosaurs from her past back to the swamp of forgetfulness. Time to remember that the man beside her was Nick …

But there was no time. Nick was looking at her curiously. She could feel his gaze even though her face was averted. He would want an explanation—and she could not talk about what had happened all those years ago if her life depended on it.

Her shiver had nothing at all to do with the chill of the night air. Thank goodness
Tia
Gloria’s house was just around the bend in the river, and they were approaching the bend.

“Magdalena …” For one of the few times since Maggy had known him, Nick sounded almost hesitant.

“Leave it alone. Please.” Her reply was rigid.

“I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did. We both know that. The question is, why?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” Her words were fierce. She glanced at him finally, anger in her gaze, to find him studying her like a scientist examining a specimen. How long would it take him to come up with something perilously near the truth? she wondered. He had always been too smart for his own good. And hers.

The expression on his face enabled her to get herself under control. She was not ready for what would happen if he were to suspect what had caused her to be the way she was about sex.

“I just don’t like being mauled, is all. Caveman technique does nothing for me,” she added with a haughty lift of her chin.

“I see.” Nick’s reply was bland, but his eyes weren’t. They were bright with speculation.

Uncomfortable, she shifted her gaze back to the water.
The Lady Dancer
chugged around the bend in the river, and
Tia
Gloria’s house was finally in sight.

It was a funny-looking little house, set not twenty feet back from the river. A living room, kitchen, and bath occupied the first level, and two tiny bedrooms took up the second. All five rooms were wedged into a structure that was as asymmetrical as it was possible for a dwelling to be and still remain standing. From the outside, the second floor appeared larger than the first. The windows were a variety of shapes—round, octagonal, triangular, square—set haphazardly into the walls, as if the designer had stood over the blueprints, tossed paper shapes representing the windows up in the air, and placed the actual windows wherever the paper facsimiles landed. The house itself was built of wood that had never been painted and had thus weathered, over the years, to a silvery shade of gray. The pitch of the wood-shingle roof was dizzyingly steep, and a black metal stovepipe, unevenly joined at the seams, jutted from it at a crazy angle. The house was perched about twelve feet above the ground on a quartet of telephone-pole stilts to keep out the water should the river ever rise, which it did about once a year. Maggy had dubbed it “the Crooked House” the first time she set eyes on it, because it reminded her of a nursery rhyme that she had loved when she was little:

There was a crooked man
who walked a crooked mile
and found a crooked sixpence
beside a crooked stile
.
He bought a crooked cat
who caught a crooked mouse
and they all lived together
in a little crooked house
.

“There it is,” she said to Nick, pointing.

“That?” As the boat chugged toward the shoreline,
Nick looked up at the dark shape of the birdhouselike structure that she indicated. Silhouetted against the shifting canvas of the night sky, the house rose above the scrub trees just beyond the muddy beach, and his eyes widened.

“We call it the Crooked House.” She recited the nursery rhyme for his edification.

“Name fits.”

“
Papi
loved it.”

Nick chuckled suddenly. “I bet. He always did like anything out of the ordinary. And he loved the river. From up there, he must have had a hell of a view.” He sobered, and cast her a sideways glance. “I would have come home for his funeral, but I didn’t hear about it until a couple of months too late.”

There was no accusation in his voice, but nevertheless Maggy felt heat rise to her cheeks. She should have notified Nick, who had been considered family by Jorge. But she hadn’t known where he was, and even if she had, she probably wouldn’t have had the courage to contact him. The obstacle that was Lyle had seemed insurmountable.