A Mother For His Child. Lilian Darcy
and unsubtle. The determination that he should never, ever guess that she wasn’t nearly as immune to him as she pretended to be.
For heaven’s sake, she thought in sudden panic, why hadn’t she just invented another commitment when he’d called last week? She had been Alison’s college room-mate. Both of them had been bright and ambitious, and both of them had scorned the frequent feminine tendency to hide the fact. They’d been close all through four years of premed studies and four years of medical school, but their internships had taken them in different directions. Contact over the past few years had dwindled to an annual Christmas card.
She knew that Alison and Will were divorced. Sad. They’d seemed like the perfect couple, with Alison’s classic, cool blonde beauty and Will’s dark good looks. Beyond Maggie’s disappointment that yet another modern marriage had failed to stay the distance, however, it meant that she and Will had no reason at all for any further connection. Why had he called? And why had she accepted?
Ah, yes, why had he called? Will wondered. That was what Maggie—now the cool, intimidating Dr Lawless—had to be thinking. He could feel it in the stiffness of her body as she walked beside him, and he’d heard it in that cynical, and perhaps exultant laugh of hers when he’d apologised for being late.
She’d always loved catching him out. She watched for opportunities, and never let one pass. She had never believed in his sincerity. Basically, she’d never understood him at all, and he knew this was partly…mostly…his own fault. She’d unsettled him for nearly eight years of regular contact. He’d deliberately played up to her poor opinion of his worth, and at the same time he’d experienced an unparalleled sense of impotence whenever they’d rubbed up against each other.
Metaphorically, of course.
The back of his neck prickled as he realised what a sexually suggestive phrasing he’d just used in his thoughts, and he wrenched them back to the question of why he’d called her, why he’d proposed dinner and why he’d proposed dinner here.
He had an interview scheduled for Monday morning at another family practice in the region, but it was located in a city centre, and that wasn’t what he was ideally looking for. In her annual Christmas card to himself and Alison several years ago, Maggie had written with enthusiasm about her own practice on the shore of the northern reaches of Lake George in the Adirondack mountains, several hours’ drive north of New York City.
She’d penned a vivid sketch of the spacious wooden house with an attached suite of professional rooms. She’d spoken with love about the wide windows looking onto the lake, the surrounding grandeur of tall trees and spreading grass, and the summer flowers which painted accents of colour. In fall, the mountains flamed a hundred different colours as the leaves changed, she’d said. In winter, the long, island-dotted lake was frozen solid enough to support a car. It was a beautiful part of the country.
She’d talked about the private boat dock, the motor launch, the canoe and the little sailboat.
‘Mark and I are just like the characters in The Wind in the Willows,’ she’d written in her bold hand. ‘Eight months of the year, we spend half our free time simply messing about in boats.’
Her description had stuck in his mind, even then, when he hadn’t yet been looking for something such as she’d described. Over the past year, his need to get away from Arizona, a long way from Arizona, had grown acute—more than enough to overcome his reluctance at subjecting himself to fearless, opinionated, maddening Maggie Lawless once again. He’d remembered the one night when their connection hadn’t generated sparks of hostility but sparks of something very different.
And he’d—stupidly, he now saw—clung to that memory and made too much of it. He’d joined it to his need to find a new place to live and work far from where he now was, a place like the one Maggie had described so glowingly in her card, and he’d taken the bull by the horns and called her.
Picnic Point would suit his needs a lot better than Wayans Falls, and infinitely better than Arizona, for several reasons. He was a good doctor. That wasn’t arrogance. It was simply a fact. He wouldn’t be asking her for a favour.
But, hell, Wayans Falls and Picnic Point weren’t his only options. He could have kept looking, found something in Vermont or Maine. Flying east from Arizona for a series of exploratory trips and professional interviews wouldn’t be convenient, but it would be worth it to find the right place.
Why had he pinned his hopes on maddening Maggie? And why had he thought he could bulldoze her into considering his proposition by making it with style and finesse in this glamorous setting? He should have remembered that she was the last woman on earth to be impressed by such a move.
He dropped back a pace as they were ushered to a table overlooking the terrace garden and the lake beyond. He let his hand slide from her elbow—she clearly didn’t want it there—and studied her rear view.
Did cool-headed, intellectual, difficult Dr Lawless have the slightest idea what she looked like from this angle? He doubted it. He knew from several conversations with Alison years ago that Maggie didn’t consider herself to be a particularly attractive woman.
She was dead wrong, and his visceral awareness of the fact had tortured him persistently for a long time. For a start, she had the best back view he’d ever seen on a woman. Neat, square shoulders, perfect shoulder blades, glossy dark hair that bounced when she walked…and, oh, that walk…oh, that very female and very sinuously curved behind!
They sat down, and the walk and the behind and the creamy scoop of skin above the low, curved back of her close-fitting black top were all lost to sight. They were facing each other now, only she had her head tipped forward and, distracted from her equally magnificent front view, he suddenly saw that her eyes were swimming with tears. Had she been crying the whole time he’d been ogling her?
It didn’t matter. She was crying now. She stopped trying to hide the fact after just a few seconds, picked up the peach-coloured cloth napkin and shook out its overly elaborate folds with clumsy impatience. Her strong jaw jutted.
‘I hope this mascara’s waterproof,’ she muttered.
‘You OK?’
He would have reached out to cover her hand with his, but was saved from enacting what she would undoubtedly have considered a slimy gesture by the fact that she was using both hands to dab the napkin against her eyes.
‘I’m sorry,’ she gasped.
‘Good gosh, don’t apologise!’
‘I came here with Mark once. They put us at this same table.’
Oh, lord, of course! It was Mark!
‘I was saddened to hear of his death, Maggie,’ he told her at once, his voice dropping. ‘I know Alison wrote to you. We would have come for the funeral, only she was so close to her due date, it wasn’t safe for her to travel so far.’
She nodded. ‘I knew that, Will. I’m fine. Just let me…’ She waved a hand vaguely, then rested it on the table as she gathered herself together. ‘He was ill for quite a while, and we both had a chance to get used to it. We laid up some good memories. Like fine wine, he said. He was a lot older than me—twenty-five years—so we always…took it in our stride…that I’d be the one left.’
‘But not so soon?’ Will suggested gently.
‘Not so soon,’ she agreed, looking up at last. Her eyes were pink-rimmed, but her mouth was steady again. Smooth and full-lipped, and no longer pinched. ‘We had a good marriage. Short, but good. He always said it would lay a good foundation for whatever came after, and so far that’s held true. I’m pretty content most of the time.’
He noticed she didn’t say ‘happy’. Then noticed that his hand was right where he’d resolved not to place it—on top of hers, stroking it gently with his fingertips.
She noticed it, too. Laughed. Apologised. Pulled it away. She looked…angry. She was good at that. A pair of dark, delicately arched brows descended