Maggy's Child (47 page)

Only the woman and kid should by rights have belonged to himself.

Nick scowled and poured himself another shot of brandy. The elegant crystal snifters were near at hand, and despite his upbringing he knew what they were for. But it gave him a perverse kind of pleasure to pour the fine brandy into the small shot glass, and chug it down.

Kind of an in-your-eye for ol’ Lyle.

He never heard her approach, but when he looked up, Magdalena was in the doorway frowning at him. He took a drag on his cigarette and met her gaze with deliberate insolence. She looked as though she was getting ready to yell at him for something, probably either the booze or the cigarettes.

But for the moment she said nothing, just crossed her arms over her bosom and cocked her head to one side and looked him up and down. He returned the compliment, his eyes sliding over her with almost more appreciation than resentment. She was clad in a quilted satin robe in a color that probably had a fancy name but that he called plain pale green, with a touch of matching green lace peeping out at the wrapped neckline that belonged to the gown beneath. She was barefoot, and her hair was swirled up on top of her head in an artless pile that left long, curling tendrils free to float about her ears, and her face was scrubbed clean of any makeup. Clearly she had just gotten out of the bath. She looked about sixteen, gorgeous, and grumpy. She made his loins ache.

“I want to talk to you,” she said at last, apparently having thought better of yelling at him.

“So talk.” To annoy her as much as for any other reason, he took a drag on his cigarette and poured himself another brandy.

Magdalena padded across the Oriental rug toward him.

“Are you
drinking
?” she said accusingly when she stood in front of him.

“Does it look like it?” he countered, gulping the brandy.

“Yes.”

“Then I must be.”

“Are you drunk?” She stood, arms akimbo, eyeing him with suspicion.

“I never get drunk.”

“You look drunk. You
smell
drunk.”

“Well, I’m not. And it’s the brandy that smells, not me.”

She appeared unconvinced, and when he poured himself another shot of brandy, she nipped over and grabbed the decanter, placing it back on the shelf out of his reach.

“Give that back,” he said, annoyed.

“No way.”

“Fine,” he said, gulping the tiny amount of liquid in his glass and standing up. “I’ll get it myself.”

To his surprise, Magdalena was in front of him, shoving him back down onto the couch with her hand in the center of his chest. To his greater surprise, she was able to do it. He must have drunk more than he thought.

“I want to talk to you,” she said determinedly, standing over him like a victorious warrior. He rubbed his chest, eyed her, and gave up his intention to try again to retrieve the brandy. If she could push him down, he didn’t need any more to drink.

“So talk,” he said, and put his cigarette in his mouth.

With an inarticulate cry of rage, Maggy snatched it from between his lips and ground it out in the ashtray.

“Stop it!” she said fiercely. “Just stop it, do you hear me? You are being a total asshole about this, and I have had enough. Do you want me to say I’m sorry? All right, I’m sorry! I
am
sorry about keeping David from you. Sorrier than I can ever begin to say. But I can’t take it back. It’s done, and I can’t take it back. So we have to go on from here. We have to build a family from where we are, and it’s not going to work if you stay angry with me over David.”

Her chocolate-brown eyes were very big and very passionate, flashing at him as they had a million times in the past. His girl, come back to him. The thought curled around his heart.

“Don’t you think I have a right to be mad?” he drawled, using his voice now that he had neither cigarette nor glass as a prop to annoy her.

“All right, yes, you do. But you’re going to have to get over it, or you’re going to poison what we have. David told me tonight that the reason he said that at the farm was because, just for a minute, he wished you were his dad.”

“
I am
his dad. That’s the whole point. That’s what you took away from me—and from David.”

Maggy glared at him for a minute. She looked mad enough to chew nails, and Nick discovered, to his own surprise, that the madder she got the more mellow he felt. He already knew that however she had wronged him, and she had, they were going to move beyond it. It wasn’t even a question of his forgiving her. It was a question of their belonging together, of the bond between them being so strong that there was no transgression on either of their parts heinous enough to break it. He would be mad at her for a little while, and then he would get over it and they would go on from there. Hadn’t it always been that way, between them?

“You’re determined to sulk, aren’t you?” she said finally, impaling him with one final glare and then turning away in disgust. “Sulk, then. See if I care.”

She was stomping from the room when he got to his feet.

“Magdalena,” he said very softly. “Come back here.”

“Go to hell,” she spat out without looking around.

“Magdalena.” There was a suggestion of a laugh in his voice. She stuck her middle finger skyward in a very eloquent nonverbal response, and with a twitch of her satin skirts disappeared from sight.

“Come back here, you little witch,” Nick muttered, nettled. He went after her and discovered that he wasn’t quite as steady on his feet as he might have wished.

“Magdalena.” She was already halfway down the hall and moving away fast. When she ignored him, Nick broke into a trot, and then a run. She must have heard the soft thud of his feet against the Oriental runner, because
she gave a quick glance over her shoulder, picked up the trailing skirt of her robe, and dashed for the stairs. She made it almost to the top before he caught her, scooping her up in his arms and taking the remaining steps two at a time. She was soft, warm, surprisingly heavy, and the clean, soapy smell of her could have been the most powerful aphrodisiac in the world if it was judged by the effect it had on him.

“Put me down!”

“Hush,” he said. “You’ll wake the kid.”

Then, to make sure she obeyed, he kissed her. She kept her lips clamped together in silent resistance for just a second or two. Then she surrendered with a little mewling sound that sent shivers down his spine and curled her arms around his neck and kissed him back.

“I love you,” he whispered against her mouth as he bore her into her darkened bedroom and nudged the door shut with his shoulder. “Love you, love you, love you.”

He laid her on her bed and sank down beside her, and for a very long time neither of them said anything at all.

T
he sudden burst of light woke Maggy. She blinked groggily, needing a moment to orient herself. She was in her own bed, and Nick was snoring beside her …

Who had turned on the lamp by her bed?

“Get up, you bitch,” a familiar voice growled, and then horror brought Maggy wide awake as her arm was grabbed and she was dragged from her bed by Lyle.

She stared into her husband’s pale blue eyes for one hideous instant of recognition before her gaze slid down to the steel-blue pistol in his hand. He was dressed in unfamiliar clothes: dark brown corduroy pants, too loose and too short, and a tan turtleneck. Undistinguished clothes that Lyle would never have chosen for himself. Absurdly, she wondered where he had obtained them.

He made an indecipherable sound, and she looked again at his face: it was working with a terrifying passion that Maggy recognized as hate.

A cold feeling of dread threatened to overwhelm her.

There were three men in the room besides Lyle. Two strangers, and Ham. All armed with guns. Ham. Was he in this, too? The thought was terrifying. She knew better than anyone what kind of brutality Lyle and Ham, working in tandem, were capable of.

One of the strangers had his gun shoved against Nick’s ear, and held Nick’s arm twisted up behind his back. Nick, his bare back brown against the pale pink sheets
that were twisted around his body, lay on his stomach, silent, motionless. His very stillness told Maggy that he was awake and aware. In the cage beside the bed, Horatio ruffled his feathers and muttered to himself, sidling uneasily on his perch, his orange eyes rapidly dilating and shrinking, dilating and shrinking as he surveyed the unaccustomed post-midnight action in the room. His attention caught by the parrot’s movements, Lyle glanced quickly around. Then, seeing that the disturbance came from nothing more threatening than a bird, Lyle turned his gaze back to Maggy.

“Thought I was dead, didn’t you? You were wrong,” Lyle said with gloating satisfaction, his mouth curling in a sneer as his eyes ran over her. There was a tinge of purple in his face now, and his mouth was ugly. “You little whore. I ought to shoot you on the spot.”

Only then did Maggy realize she was naked.

“Get her dressed.” Ham spoke over his shoulder, his tone that of the man in charge.

They were dragging Nick from the bed as Lyle took her into her dressing room and watched as she dressed. Panties, bra, jeans, sweater, all pulled on under Lyle’s glittering gaze. She slid her feet into a pair of rubber-soled espadrilles, then turned to face her husband. He smiled at her, a thin smile that chilled her to her bone marrow.

“Is he good in bed?” Lyle asked. Maggy, unable to hide the fact that she was terrified, didn’t reply. Lyle reached over and viciously pinched the tip of her breast. She winced and couldn’t hold back a cry.

“Magdalena!” Nick’s sharp response was punctuated by the thunk of a blow. Maggy whitened in fear, not needing Lyle’s gesture with the pistol to send her hurrying into the other room.

Nick was dressed now, too, in the clothes he had been wearing when he had taken her to bed: jeans, sweatshirt, socks. His hands were cuffed behind his back, and a trickle of blood ran down his forehead where he’d been
hit, apparently with a pistol. His gaze locked with hers for one shrieking instant. Maggy knew that he realized as well as she did that what they faced was nothing less than a battle for their lives.

“I didn’t think you were dead.” Nick said it quite calmly to Lyle. “You jumped out of the car before it went over, didn’t you? I started thinking that if Magdalena could do it, you could too. The light was out at that curve, and it was raining and dark as pitch. When you saw you couldn’t get away, you had to think fast, didn’t you? Good plan, good execution—but you screwed it up by coming back.”

Lyle laughed, the sound unpleasant. “I never went away, you fool. I’ve been here in the house all the time, right under your stupid nose. In the attic mostly, though I’ve given in to the urge to visit my son once or twice at night. I would have left weeks ago,
if you
hadn’t moved in. Can you imagine how I felt, sitting in the attic of my own house, while you were downstairs night after night with
my
wife? I was waiting for you to get careless. I knew it would happen, and tonight it did. I called Ham—he’s known where I was, of course—and told him tonight’s the night. We’re getting out of here, and you and my lovely wife are going to die.”

The nightmares, Maggy thought with sickening recognition. David’s nightmares, of his father coming back from the dead to touch his face. They hadn’t been dreams at all. Her blood curdled at the idea that Lyle had been hiding in the house all this time, watching and waiting, biding his time.

“Where are your shoes?” Ham spoke to Nick as he prodded him out from behind the bed at gunpoint. The two other men, obviously flunkies, kept their pistols trained on Nick, too.

“Downstairs.” Nick looked at Ham directly. Even with his hands cuffed behind his back and blood trickling down his forehead, even in his stocking feet with his hair
wildly mussed, Nick looked far more dangerous than Ham. Ham, with his compact body and dapper moustache, his bespoke suit and thousand-dollar shoes, was every inch the gentleman confronting a ruffian. Except for the fact that it was Ham who held the gun.

“You’re John Y., aren’t you? The man who owns Colonel Sanders,” Nick said to Ham.

Ham’s eyes flickered and sliced to Lyle.

“
I
didn’t tell him,” Lyle said testily.

“He didn’t have to tell me.” For a man with three pistols pointed at his head, Nick sounded awfully calm. “I heard weeks ago that there was somebody besides Forrest, somebody bigger. The main man. The dude in charge. They call you John Y. on the street. You put up the money, didn’t you? At first, to get him started. And when you saw the kind of bucks that were being generated, you stayed in. Only a handful of people know you’re involved.”

“Shut up.” Ham moved behind Nick and prodded him in the back with the gun. “Get moving. We’re going downstairs to get your shoes. It won’t do to have the body found without shoes.”

Lyle laughed again. Catching Maggy by the arm, he pulled her out of the bedroom in Nick’s wake. Maggy felt abject fear as she immediately was reminded of Lyle’s strength. As she and Nick were forced along the upper hallway, she was tinglingly aware of the silence all around them—the silence of a huge, empty house.