Maggy's Child
Maggy's Child
Robards, Karen
Random House Publishing Group (2011)
“I’M GLAD YOU’RE BACK, NICK,” MAGGY SAID SUDDENLY IN A LOW VOICE. “I’VE MISSED YOU.”
“I’ve missed you, too, Maggy May,” he said.
The name, which she suspected he used deliberately, made her wince. She would have turned and walked away, but there was nowhere to go. She was stuck, stuck with him and the memories he deliberately invoked. Memories of the night they had become more than best friends, more than family to each other. The night they’d become lovers.…
She searched his eyes to see if he remembered, and saw that he did. His gaze held her immobile, reminding her silently of just how much they had shared. He never touched her. Yet Maggy felt as though every part of their bodies were in contact. They stood unmoving, a pair of small dark human silhouettes suspended against the pale stone of the cliff, for an instant out of time.
While their souls embraced.
Without words or touch or anything except the memories in her eyes, Maggy finally welcomed Nick home.
The critics love
KAREN ROBARDS
“Splendid … among the best!”*
and her wonderful bestselling novel
ONE SUMMER
“
ONE SUMMER
HAS IT ALL … a contemporary whodunit throbbing with sex and fantasy and—ah, dear reader—satisfaction. It is Robards’s singular skill of combining intrigue with ecstasy that gives her romances their edge.”
—
Lexington Herald-Leader
(Ky.)
“SIZZLING. SPINE TINGLING. EDGE-OF-YOUR-SEAT GRIPPING. Everything a mystery-romance is supposed to be … enough romance to smolder the paper [and] … a murder mystery to keep you turning the pages.”
—
Affaire de Coeur*
“A deeply moving tale … Sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes steamy, but always first-rate entertainment.”
—Rendezvous
“HARD TO PUT DOWN … ENTERTAINING … RIVETING … Fans of Sandra Brown and Nora Roberts will love it. Highly recommended!”
—Library Journal
“A spectacular romantic suspense tale … This poignantly moving novel is Ms. Robards at her best!”
—Harriet Klausner,
Popular Fiction News
“If
ONE SUMMER
is the hope of things to come, then look out, Mary Higgins Clark. Bold and sensational,
ONE SUMMER
IS A COVER-TO-COVER THRILL!”
—
The Grand Prairie News
(Tex.)
“A HIGHLY SENSUAL TALE OF FORBIDDEN LOVE.”
—
Romantic Times
“
ONE SUMMER
is a wonderful change of pace … We go from whodunit to hot and steamy and back to whodunit, and it’s great. The plot is well crafted, and only a mystery buff will be able to figure out the ending before it comes. It is a definite must and should be one of those settle-down-by-the-fire-for-a-long-night-of-reading books.”
—
Louisville Courier-Journal
(Ky.)
“RIVETING … Robards uses likable characters and an uncomplicated plot with just enough evil thrown in … to create a fun read.”
—
The Orlando Sentinel
(Fla.)
“Another romance novel from Robards, who always delivers a quality product. I’ve been a fan for years. Always a good read, always great escapist romantic fiction. This novel combines the elements of a crime mystery with Robards’s usual juicy romance … Romance and mystery buffs will want to read this tale. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.”
—Pastiche
Published by
Dell Publishing
a division of
Random House, Inc.
1540 Broadway
New York, New York 10036
Copyright © 1994 by Karen Robards
Excerpt from The Last Victim © 2012 by Karen Robards
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Delacorte Press, New York, New York.
The trademark Dell
®
is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
This book contains an excerpt from The Last Victim by Karen Robards. This excerpt has been set for this edition only, and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80138-8
v3.1_r2
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
“R
emember
Tia
Gloria saying that a body’s sins always come home to roost? She was right: here I am.”
The voice in her ear was husky, amused—and devastatingly familiar. For an instant it seemed to Maggy Forrest that the world stopped spinning on its axis. The solid oak of the bar against which she leaned, the infectious twang of live country music, the dark, smoky atmosphere of the nightclub itself all seemed to disappear.
Nothing was left in the whole world but Nick’s voice in her ear.
One hand clenched around the cool brass bar rail as she turned slowly to face him. There was no mistake: Her mind was not playing tricks on her. On an instinctive level she had known it even before she turned around, before her conscious mind registered the thick crop of rough black curls and the broad-shouldered football player’s physique.
“Nick.”
He was as tall as she remembered, and as handsome, too. Sinfully handsome, she had always thought, though with his tough pugilist’s face he shouldn’t have been. His features were too rawly aggressive, his jaw and cheekbones too broad, his lips too thin for true masculine beauty. His nose still listed slightly to the left, the victim of one too many street fights in his teenage years. Above the crooked nose, his hazel-green eyes gleamed down at
her. Heavy-lidded and usually seeming almost sleepy, they were the key to the devastating effect he had on the opposite sex, she had decided long ago. Nick had always looked as though he knew everything there was to know about women, and once Maggy had been no more immune than any other member of her gender to
that
.
“Hello, Magdalena.”
Even the smile was unchanged, sexy and wicked and tender all at the same time. She’d once been the biggest fool in the world for that smile.
Ah, Nick. Twelve years seemed to vanish as she stared up at him. She forgot that he was thirty-two now and she herself was almost thirty as a rush of memories swamped her: Nick showing up with a bag of groceries when there was nothing left to eat in the tiny apartment she had shared with her father; Nick helping to drag her drunken father home when, time after time, he passed out on the street; Nick siphoning gas from a stranger’s car so that she could drive to work in the old wreck he had managed to get running for her when she turned sixteen; Nick waiting up for her when she sneaked out at night, warning off the importunate males who were always sniffing around her. Nick always protecting her. He had been the one solid thing in her world as she had grown up. She had always, always, loved Nick best.
Nick. At the realization that it really was he standing there before her, pure involuntary joy shone out of Maggy’s eyes and curved her lips into a smile. Then the reality of the situation hit her, and with it came an icy wave of horror: Nick was back. Her arms, which had lifted instinctively to hug him, dropped. Her smile wavered, then firmed again. But in its new incarnation it wasn’t the same smile.
He had never in his life missed a trick, and he didn’t now.
“Not glad to see me?” His smile widened, and took on
a cat-with-a-mouse quality. “Why, Magdalena! You’re hurting my feelings.”
“Of course I’m glad to see you. It’s been—ages.” It was her social voice, the one that had been drummed into her by a vocal coach in the months after she married Lyle, and it made his eyes narrow.
“Twelve years. And to think you’ve managed to stay married to Lyle Forrest all that time. Wifey number three bats a home run! I hear you gave him a son.”
Oh, God. Maggy felt as if a huge hand had closed around her chest, crushing it, keeping her from drawing air into her lungs. Grimly, she battled the sensation.
“We have a son, yes.”
“I saw him.”
“You
saw
him?” Maggy couldn’t have felt more shocked if he had hit her over the head with a baseball bat.
“This afternoon. At Windermere. I came calling, but you weren’t home.”
She’d been at the hairdresser’s. The hand crushing her chest tightened its grip as she thought of Nick at Windermere without her. With David—and maybe even Lyle.
“You came calling?” It was ludicrous, the way she kept parroting everything he said, but she couldn’t seem to help it. She knew she was gaping at him, but she couldn’t seem to help that either. She’d always known, somewhere deep in the recesses of her mind, that she would see Nick again. But she wasn’t ready. Not now, not yet! He had caught her totally by surprise. Her defenses weren’t in place.
“You wouldn’t expect me to be in Louisville and not come calling, now would you?” His eyes mocked her. “With us being such old friends and all? The boy—David, is it?—looks just like you. You’ve done old Lyle proud.”
“Yes. Yes, I’m—we’re both, Lyle and I—we are very proud of David.” Maternal affection warmed her for an
instant as she thought of her eleven-year-old son. Like her, he was tall and slender, fine-boned, auburn-haired, chocolate-eyed, with dark winged brows and a wide, mobile mouth that at the moment sported a set of nearly invisible braces, about which he was wildly self-conscious. In tennis whites or golf clothes, he looked so absurdly patrician that it was hard to believe that he had sprung from her own far from patrician loins.
