Thea Devine (4 page)

“Fine. I leaned on Dennis and Sean Mapes instead. They liked Frank, but they like me more.” She waited to see how that played with him, and she wondered why she was goading him like this.

“Who doesn’t?” he said simply, and that infuriated her more.

“
Was
there something you were going to apologize for?” she asked sweetly, too sweetly, as something welled up inside her akin to a childish feeling of aggressiveness; she recognized it from a time long past in her life, and she clamped down on it violently, even while she remembered the exact moment she had first felt it. She had been with Sean and Logan both, and probably Annie at the
swimming hole. The boys—and they had been boys then, seventeen or eighteen maybe, had rigged a rope and had been having a high old time swinging out over the water and taunting her and Annie, who was a year or two older than she, that they were skittish girl cowards not to attempt to have the same fun. She wanted it desperately, that same male freedom to compete with rambunctious exuberance.

And she had done it, in spite of her skirts and the jeers of Logan and Sean and the fearful whining of Annie Mapes.

She had been all of eight, and she never forgot the sensation of the competition. She felt it now, and the tension between her and Logan strung out in the silence of the room. She reveled in it and did not know why.

“I don’t believe I have anything to apologize for,” Logan said slowly, his voice deepening with some other kind of emotion that had nothing to do with the surface conversation. “Except maybe one thing.”

“Only
one?
” Maggie chided. “What could that be, I wonder?”

“Oh you damned fool, Maggie. I should have come after you a damn lot sooner,” he said roughly as he abruptly stood up. “Well, I’m here now, Maggie, and nothing is going to stop me.”

“Stop you from what?” she asked perversely, not liking the way he purposefully moved across toward her.

“Oh, I think you know, Maggie,” he said, perching on the edge of her worktable.

But she didn’t know. Who was she to predict his feelings or even be able to sort out her own? Already she felt too much was happening in one day.

“I’ve come for you, Maggie,” he added quietly, when she didn’t say anything. “And this time, I’m not going to let you get away.”

Chapter Three

Surely she had not heard him right. “But I’m not planning to go anywhere,” she said reasonably, with a contrary note in her voice that sounded reckless in her ears.

“Well, isn’t that nice and convenient.”

“For what?” Oh Lord, she had to control her unruly words.

“For this,” and he leaned over and covered her treacherous mouth with his own, a move that was at once shocking and desired, as if it were culmination of some kind of battle she hadn’t known she was fighting.

She felt his hand cup her cheek and an unfamiliar heat and voluptuous wetness suffuse her body. Oh yes, she remembered that, only not with Logan Ramsey, never a hint of it with him. His mouth was so gentle on hers, so insistent, trying her, tasting her, inviting her … to what? Very slowly, he pulled away from her, savoring the texture of her lips, sliding his hand down her cheek and along the firm line of her jaw.

The touch of his long fingers thrilled her. It had been so long … but then, that was an impossible thought, and if the loving kiss went any further it would trespass into something forbidden, something she did not want to
pursue any further.

But she had been thinking about him so hard today, she couldn’t bear to end the caress. It was part of his ability to sense when she needed him: she was willing to believe she had needed his kiss today and that he had come just as he always had done.

He said, “Five years ago I thought I had come to town to court you, Maggie. At the very moment Frank Colleran settled in Colville. He dazzled you and your father. I decided I wanted you a week too late, a month too late, I’ll never know, Maggie, but I came too late. That’s what I do know. And now you’re out of mourning and I have a second chance and I swear by God this time I’m going to win you. I don’t expect it to happen in a day, maybe not even a year, but I do expect it to happen—in spite of you, Maggie.”

“No.” The word, a reaction of pure fear, echoed like a gunshot in the room.

“Or don’t you know what your kiss did to me and what it was doing to you,” he persisted.

“I won’t.”

“Won’t what, Maggie?”

Even she didn’t know; she only sensed that she did not want anything to proceed beyond this point in this room with him. She couldn’t lose him. She wanted him exactly the way he had always been, and it scared her that he wanted to be her lover. But she had had enough of that.
That
she did not need ever again.

“I’m very happy the way I am now,” she said finally and with great difficulty. “And with the way we have always been.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Believe it. I don’t need another husband and I surely don’t want anything else. I like my life just the way it is, Logan.”

“I don’t like mine,” he retorted grittily. “I need you,
and I have always needed you, and I won’t give up.”

“I won’t give in.”

“I lived in hell for the last five years, Maggie. I can wait.”

His certainty was like a wall between them. Everything was changed now. He wanted something she could never give him, something she had never known.

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

He stood up and looked down at her. “No you don’t.”

“Logan—”

“Maggie—” He wanted to shake her for her stubbornness. But of course it was too soon. All he could focus on was the way the light reflected in her dark hair and the shadow of her thick lashes on her flushed cheek. The taste of her lips. The ache in him that had always always desired her.

“Maggie!”

Another voice, deep and vaguely familiar, called from above, and a moment later a well-dressed stranger appeared in the doorway from the inner hall. “Maggie, there you are. Mother … Hello …” he pulled up short as he caught sight of Logan. “I’m sorry.”

“No need,” Maggie said curtly. “This is Logan Ramsey, an old friend. Logan, this is Frank’s brother, Reese.”

Reese extended his hand and Logan took it warily. Reese didn’t recognize him, he thought as they shook with a kind of taut cordiality. Reese dismissed him the moment they acknowledged each other and waited politely for him to leave.

He looked at Maggie and she nodded imperceptibly. As he took his hat, he reflected that his gut instinct had not failed him: he had come for Maggie not a moment too soon.

* * *

“I think we should get to know each other better, Maggie,” Reese said without preliminaries, hoisting himself onto the very edge of the desk that Logan had vacated. “You look just like a skittery mare, for God’s sake. I’m not going to eat you.”

Maggie sent him a crooked little smile. He was so right. He wasn’t going to do anything to her. She was just a little shaken by Logan’s sudden reappearance.

“Yes, I think we should,” she said easily, folding away the papers she had been working on and turning to look at him. “What do you suggest?”

“Mother suggests that she have dinner sent in and you and I go to the hotel.”

“That’s fine.” Why not? It would be far easier to keep Reese at bay than Logan, who knew her better than she knew herself. “I’ll just tidy up a little.” Truth to tell, she did not need any tidying up anywhere but in her confused emotions. It would be almost restful to shift her attention to Reese, about whom she had no deep feeling other than a vague distrust. He might reveal something in a relaxed atmosphere over dinner. He might tell her more than he thought by a word or gesture during the course of the conversation.

Or else, she thought a little later as they were seated by the hotel hostess whom Maggie had known for many years, or else Reese Colleran was a very clever man, prepared to deal with her on a level that did not preclude deceit.

He was utterly charming, and that shocked her after her initial impression of him. He could discuss any subject at length, including his fabled whereabouts, which had been bemoaned by his mother all these years. He laughed off Frank’s old imprecations and dismissed them as boyhood jealousy for a peripatetic life that Frank knew he could never emulate.

“Oh, he was always the serious one, Maggie; everyone
just knew he was going to do big business.”

“It’s rather amazing he wound up here then, don’t you think?” she asked.

Reese shrugged. “Maybe he saw opportunities no one else did,” he said lightly.

“Well, the town newspaper is not exactly the
San Francisco Daily Examiner
.”

Reese threw her a startled look. “It’s curious you should say that,” he said slowly. “You know of course we come from San Francisco, but I wonder if you know that before the war, Frank was engaged to marry the daughter of the scion of another newspaper dynasty. The
Herald
it was, but it folded just about the time Frank came west.”

“I didn’t know,” Maggie said, keeping her voice neutral. Why should she have known? The Frank she knew had begun and ended in Colville. It was as if his personality had been invented the moment he set foot in Colville—she remembered it well—and bought the land where he built later that year the Colleran ranch.

She could even visualize the notice in the paper and remember the first time she had seen him, city slicker to the core, complete with neat dark suit, celluloid collar, and coordinated tie. He had come up from Denver, inoffensive and dynamic all at the same time, and everyone had been fooled by the clothes and the polite West Coast manners.

He was slicker than they knew, she thought, but she had known nothing of another woman in his life before he came to Colville. He never talked about it, although when Mother Colleran had come to live with them after their marriage, she became aware of faint hints that Frank could have had more, could have been more, hints she always ignored because it had been Frank’s choice to come to Colville and Frank’s decision to take over the reins of the Colville
Morning Call
after her father died.

And Frank’s determination to exclude
her
, she thought
bitterly. What had he given up for that? What had he gained?

“Her name was Priscilla.”

“He never talked about his life in San Francisco.”

“He had one. Father struck gold, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“And bought businesses and struck more gold. In fact, he was Priscilla’s father’s rival; he was the one who took over the
Herald
, actually. You don’t want to hear this.”

“I do. I knew nothing of any of this. Of course, everyone knew Frank had money the way he bought up land when he first came to town. He never talked about anything to do with his life in San Francisco.”

“Probably didn’t want to remember it. The old man was always so disgusted with the both of us. It’s probably why we both left. I went sooner.”

“I see.” She saw nothing. Frank left someone named Priscilla and a possible position in any of his father’s businesses, not the least of which was an apparently prestigious newspaper, to come west, stake out a ranch, and run a small town newspaper whose circulation probably equaled the number on staff of the newspaper his father owned.

“The soup,” Reese announced, with some degree of satisfaction in his voice.

The soup. She wasn’t hungry, but she felt a little less wary of Reese because of his candid revelations. She picked up her spoon and lifted the fragrant hot liquid to her lips.

They ate in silence through the entrée, the usual hotel fare: a choice of beef, chicken, and lamb, with vegetables, gravies, fried potatoes, olives, relishes, and biscuits.

Over dessert, a creamy lemon custard, apple pie, and coffee, Reese said, “This dinner was really quite tolerable. You know Maggie, I wouldn’t mind moving here if my presence at the flat really bothers you.”

His sudden offer disarmed her. Wouldn’t it be easy if she were the one to make the decision. And what did he hope to gain by making the offer? His expression was open, all good natured and full of good humor, as though there were a conspiracy between them now to shut out his mother.

He was really very likable, she thought, even as she shook her head. “No, that’s between you and your mother, Reese. I’m afraid I’m going to be very busy in the coming weeks and it really makes no difference to me.”

“I wish it did,” Reese said regretfully.

“But I have no time for anything else except the newspaper now,” Maggie responded, smiling to soften the harshness of her words. He wasn’t intimating anything more personal than this anyway, she told herself. She wondered if she had the backbone to ask him exactly what he planned to do in Colville, since he seemed to be settling in so completely. “It’s all I ever wanted to do,” she added wistfully, more to herself than him, but he heard, and it told him volumes about her.

“And what keeps you so busy on the paper?” he asked offhandedly, even though he knew: his mother had told him every last detail.

“Everything,” she said simply.

“Indispensible Maggie,” he said with a heartwarming little grin. “No help at all?”

“Are you looking for a job?”

“It’s not a bad idea….”

“Well, it might be except that I’m really as fully staffed as I can afford to be right now. We have A.J. and Jean Vilroy, our job printer and artist, and Arch Warfield, our star reporter. And me. I edit and set type. I did it for my father and I never got it out of my system. A.J. handles everything else, and Jean does layouts and wedding announcements. I buy preprinted advertising supplements and newsprint from Denver, and we do four
pages of local news on a two-part fold. The whole town subscribes, we have a couple of the older men delivering papers on a route that goes down to Denver, and we send out some weeklies by mail to surrounding communities. It’s hardly a business or a life that could make you rich, Reese. I never did understand Frank’s ardor, given his background. But I grew up here; I was practically raised in the newsroom by my father after my mother died and father had made a disaster out of a ranching venture. After that, we moved back to town and he bought into the paper. That’s all I ever knew.

“But Frank—and you—your father must have groomed you to run an empire if what you tell me about him is true. And yet both of you wound up in Colville.” She didn’t finish the thought. It sounded nonsensical even as the words formed in her mind.

“I came to see Mother, of course,” he said instantly, filling the space where she would have said the words. It made sense too, except that she knew what Mother Colleran had said: he had been sent for, and he might never have come of his own volition.

She let it pass, however. There was time enough to find out the hidden truths they were all concealing. She didn’t have the energy for it tonight.

“Of course,” she agreed quickly. “Well then, you must spend as much time with her as possible.”

“I hope,” he said guilessly, “to spend some time with you as well.”

“We are spending time right now, and very delightful time, too, I might add. I don’t know when I have felt more relaxed.” Actually she felt nerveless, tired, drained. But he was neither bad nor so arrogant as she had thought initially. His smile was warm. It encompassed her as he toasted her with his coffee cup and said,

“Imagine if I had never come to visit Mother.”

“But you would have, one time or another.”

He didn’t allow her to distract him. “I might never have met you, Maggie. And I think that would have been a damned shame.”

“Nice to meet you, too.” What else could she say? She had just spent two hours with him and she knew just as little about him as when she had sat down. No, she knew he could be charming and forthcoming to some extent. She felt less leery of him, but no less suspicious of his reasons for obeying his mother’s summons. And she knew she could like him, every bit as much as she had liked Frank initially, and it scared her that she was that susceptible to both men of the Colleran family.

“Maggie…”

The odd note in his voice pulled her from her introspection. Her head tilted slightly as she looked up at him, and he noticed for the first time how really flawless her features were. Every angle flattered her, every component of her face finely modeled and in perfect alignment with every other feature. And when she smiled, her smile reached all the way to her unusual gray eyes. Her smile was perfection too.