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“Where’d you hear that?” he asked, pouring water into the cup and handing it to her.
“Thank you. From my father! He told me when he was trying to get me to come home.” She looked at him with sudden suspicion as she sipped from the cup. “Or, didn’t it happen? I didn’t want to go home and he might have been…”
“Ah…well, I’m not sure. My father’s always trying to protect me, too. I know he’s been worried about your dad, so it’s entirely possible.” That was partly true. His father was always worried about his friend, who, at sixty-four, took off on nebulous missions for the State Department as though he was still a man in his prime. He just wasn’t sure he was worried about Elliott’s heart.
Duffy was suddenly distracted from that puzzle when he became aware of a subtle tension in the air. The intimacy of their embrace in the middle of the bed, hardly necessary now that she was composed again seemed to be generating it.
He knew she was aware of it, too, when her eyes met his in confused surprise. Using her hands on the mattress for leverage, she pushed herself slightly away from him. He noticed for the first time the tailored white silk nightshirt she wore—and the length of slender leg it revealed.
“I…I’m going to try to get time off,” she said a little distractedly, “sometime in July.”
He stood, going to the window and pushing her draperies back. The sun was low, long shadows falling across the park. The beautiful setting made him inexplicably homesick.
“Why don’t you just come home with me?” he suggested.
She blinked, surprised by the suggestion. “I can’t do that,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m the lead in a play,” she replied, her eyes a little desperate. “Because all my credit cards are in a gully somewhere in the Pyrenees. Because…”
“I can’t imagine your boss refusing you a couple of weeks R and R after what you’ve been through. And I’ll spring for your airfare and lend you some money until you get the credit cards straightened out.”
“I can’t leave the country without my passport.” She looked satisfied with that excuse. Even proud of it. “I’ve misplaced it in the shuffle of bags and reporters and hurry.”
He spotted her things apparently thrown carelessly on a chair when she’d changed for bed last night and saw her passport pinned to her bra strap. He hooked the lacy lavender thing in one finger and held it up, the book dangling.
“I’ll make reservations for two, then,” he said. “Give your father some peace of mind and you a probably much-needed rest.”
That surprised look she’d given him a moment ago registered a little longer, then turned to annoyance. She pushed herself to her feet with a sudden, imperious expression, intended, he was sure, to put him in his place.
“Look, Duffy,” she said, tossing her hair. He guessed she probably did that onstage. It was very effective. “I’m so grateful you came all this way to see to my safety. But that’s accomplished. I’m free now and our long friendship notwithstanding, your services are terminated.”
“Now, don’t get in a huff because I caught you in a fib,” he said. “I understand why you don’t want to go home, but that isn’t healthy. And if you’re going to get on with your life, you have to get serious about dealing with reality.”
“What do you know about dealing with reality?” she demanded, anger igniting in her eyes. “You own a penthouse apartment in Manhattan, and your business has offices in five countries. Your failures and your grief are still ahead of you.”
He arched an eyebrow at the deliberate ploy to gain the upper hand.
“Not so,” he corrected amiably. “I know about loss, if not death, and, being a bodyguard, I know that hiding doesn’t defeat your enemy. It just holds him off until the next time he finds you.” Then he smiled. “And while you might have been able to order me around when I was eight, things have changed considerably. Part of the deal when your father hired me was that I take you home. So the job isn’t done until I deliver you to Arlington.”
“I’m not ready to go yet.”
He spread both arms in a gesture of patience. “Then do what has to be done and I’ll wait.”
The room suddenly exploded in heavy perfume and rolling Rs when a very short, very hefty woman hurried in, moving a little like a tank in a blue dress with white polka dots and white tennis shoes. Her permed hair was a brassy shade of red.
“Madame Lawton!” the woman exclaimed. She’d apparently been crying and continued to sob as she rolled into the room and wrapped a very surprised Maggie in her embrace.
Maggie disappeared for a moment, and all Duffy heard was a thin, high-pitched, “Eponine! I thought you were on vacation!”
“Mais oui, but I heard the news!” Eponine said, taking a tissue from her pocket and dabbing her eyes with it. “I knew you would need me! Are you all right? Did they savage you?”
“Of course not,” Maggie replied. “I’m perfectly all right. There was no reason for you to spoil your trip.”
“Oh, but I could not leave you alo—” She stopped abruptly when she noticed Duffy standing bare-chested at the foot of the bed. She looked confused at first, then, after a head-to-toe scan, apparently decided the situation was not all that complicated.
“Oh, monsieur, I’m so sorry. Madame, please forgive me.” She put her fingertips to her mouth and turned in an embarrassed circle.
“No, no, no!” Maggie emphatically denied the woman’s assumption. Eponine took a step back in surprise at her vehemence. Duffy stood his ground. “It isn’t that at all. This is an old friend of mine from home,” she said with a glance at Duffy that suggested the term friend hung in the balance.
Eponine gave Duffy a sidelong glance that spoke volumes. “Friends are the most dangerous threat to a woman’s peace of mind because they become lovers so easily.”
Maggie shook her head. “He’s almost ten years younger than I am.”
Eponine drew a dreamy breath. “Ah, madame. That is even more merveilleux.”
“It’s eight years,” Duffy corrected, “and I’ll wager I’m far more experienced. You settled down with a family while I’ve never been married.”
Annoyed that she was losing control of the situation, Maggie said irritably, “Well, what does that have to do with anything?”
“I didn’t think it had anything to do with it,” Duffy replied, “but it seemed important to you.”
“Are you hungry?” she asked in that same impatient tone.
“Yes.”
“Eponine, you may stay to fix dinner for which I’ll add an extra day on to your vacation, then you must get back to your daughter.”
Eponine winked at Duffy. “Oui, madame.”
WHILE EPONINE PUTTERED in the kitchen and Duffy went off to make phone calls, Maggie took another shower, desperate to clear her addled brain.
Her life was growing more out of control by the moment. For years she’d been experiencing this hole in the center of her world that refused to heal, then she was kidnapped like some cabin boy in a novel, held at gunpoint, rescued by the boy she used to baby-sit more than twenty years ago, and now her maid thought they were having an affair. Her and Duffy March!
And he was turning out to be a surprise. The sweet, cooperative, well-behaved little boy who’d hung on her every word was now a stubborn, autocratic, know-it-all, who seemed to forget she had a mind of her own.
She was drying her hair when there was a loud rap on her half-open bathroom door. Duffy peered around it and handed her the phone. “Picked up this call for you. David Styron?”
She gave him a cool glance and took the phone. “Thank you. David?”
“Yes, Mags.” The large voice that could be heard from the back of the balcony boomed over the phone. Maggie had to hold it slightly away from her ear. “Glen tells me that you and Baldy are both well, but in need of a break after your ordeal. The devil’s negotiated you a month’s break—with pay—starting today.”
“What?” She turned to Duffy, suspecting his hand in this, but he was gone.
“What?”
“That’s right, my love. A whole month off. You must go to Cap Ferrat or someplace equally decadent and do nothing. But don’t get too tanned now, will you, or Nancy will have trouble making you up.”
“But, David, a month seems—”
“Long, yes I know. But Glen was insistent. He and Prissie are going to Bimini. And you mustn’t worry, Sukie Darwin was really quite good as Lady Bellows last night. She’s learned a lot watching you.”
Maggie didn’t know whether to be happy or upset. The fact that one’s understudy had been “really quite good” was good and bad news. She was very much aware that the theater was filled with younger and probably more talented women who could replace her in a moment. But it was startling to hear it confirmed.
“Don’t worry about a thing,” David insisted. “Just rest and recover, and come back to us in time for the London Women’s Charity night at the end of July. They’ve bought out the house and they’ll want to see you.”
Okay, that restored a modicum of her confidence.
“Thank you, David.”
“Take care, Mags.”
Damn. Now she had to go home. She closed her eyes against images of the three-story house, narrow and tall and happily ensconced in its downtown environment right next door to the Marches’ place.
Her mother had always been home, but Duffy’s mother had been a lawyer in her husband’s firm, and they’d been gone a lot of the time. The bank account Maggie had built up watching Duffy for them had paid all her incidental expenses her first year of college.
Then she’d been discovered by a film agent in her second year. He’d come to watch his daughter perform in The Rainmaker and had been impressed with Maggie’s portrayal of Lizzie. He’d offered to represent her, found her a bit part in a small film that was being shot in London.
There she’d met Harry Paget, a banker, and when the film wrapped, she’d stayed to marry him and trade the screen for the stage. She’d never regretted it.
Morgan and Alan had been born eleven months apart when she was in her middle twenties. When they were babies, they’d traveled with her everywhere, and when they were old enough to go to school, the theater had allowed her to spend afternoons with them before her performances.
Life had been good. The boys had been tall and blond like their father, with his tendency to take themselves seriously yet laugh at everything else. She’d found her husband and her boys endlessly fascinating.
Her parents had loved them, too, and when her mother died five years ago, her father had stayed with them for a month, trying to figure out how to go on.
Now that she’d experienced the same loss, she couldn’t imagine how he’d managed.
She looked at herself in the mirror and saw Lady Bellows, the role she’d played for the past eighteen months. She wore designer suits, though at the moment it was a pale-orange peignoir set, wore her hair in a chignon and held her chin in the air. Her staff adored her, but her butler feared her sexual appeal.
Good. She would hide in character as long as she was able.
She walked into the kitchen to find Duffy and Eponine sharing a bottle of wine and a plate of broiled shrimp. They were laughing together, and she was surprised to feel a twinge of jealousy. Not for the alliance they seemed to have formed, she told herself, but for the laughter.
“Seems I’ve been given a month’s leave from the play,” she said, taking a chair opposite Duffy and smiling blandly at him as she reached for a shrimp. Eponine poured wine into the empty glass at her place. “You wouldn’t know anything about that?”
He met her gaze with innocence in his. “Now, how could I have accomplished that while drinking wine with Eponine?”
“I don’t know,” she replied, then nipped the shrimp in two.
“Though you did manage to find me in a remote spot in the Pyrenees. You appear to be a resourceful man.”
“But I had the French army on my side then.”
She glanced at her housekeeper, who also returned her a look of suspicious innocence. “Eponine has a lot in common with the French army.”
“So, this means we’ll be flying back together?” he asked.
She admitted defeat, if only to herself. She had to see her father, and putting it off until July would have served no purpose anyway.
“I’m not sure I’ll be able to pay my way,” she reminded him. “I’ll go to the bank in the morning, but with all my credit cards missing, and most of my assets in stocks and real estate, I may not be able to get much cash.”
“You can owe me,” he said with a grin.
That was precisely what she didn’t want to do.
Chapter Three
The flight to the States the following afternoon seemed interminable, and was made even longer by the knowledge that she had only seventeen dollars in a purse she hated. According to the bank manager she’d spoken to that morning, her accounts had been frozen because Eduard had escaped capture and had apparently used one of her credit cards somewhere in Spain. In an effort to track him down, they wanted to stop any other activity on her accounts. They regretted the inconvenience. Not enough, she was sure.
She’d spent the next two hours scouring clothing and old purses for money left in pockets or coin compartments. Then, to add insult to injury, she had to put what she found in a brown leather pouch purse she’d never liked because everything sank to the bottom in it. Someday she was going to pummel Eduard herself for tossing her favorite ergonomic bag into a crevasse.
“I can’t believe it,” she grumbled, not for the first time. “Twenty-two years an actress, high-yield stocks and bonds, carefully acquired real estate, and I have seventeen dollars to my name.”
That sounded like a pouty princess talking—or possibly, Lady Bellows. Good. She wasn’t having to reach to stay in character.
Duffy wasn’t sure what that was all about—residual stress from her ordeal, maybe. As a girl, she’d never been one to flaunt her beauty, her intelligence, her family’s comfortable situation or her popularity. She’d been very real and able to lower herself to the level of a child who needed her friendship.
“I’ll give you my American Express,” he offered, “if you’re reluctant to take money from your father.”
She rolled her eyes. “Why would I be more willing to take money from you than from him?”
“Because we broke the ice when I bought your ticket,” he replied, knowing he was annoying her. He suspected that her life, her determination to live it onstage, was wobbling, and he was going to do all he could to topple it. “It’ll be easier the second time.” He was going to give her a week with her father in Arlington, then he was going to invite them to Lamplight Harbor to visit. He wanted her to see where he lived, get to know his boys, relax.
Then he was going to do his damnedest to seduce her.
She closed her eyes against his candor and shook her head. “I’m going to be happy to say goodbye to you when we reach Kennedy,” she said. “You were much sweeter as a boy than you are as a man.”
“A man has too much to do to be sweet,” he countered. “And sweetness is generally not a favorable trait in a bodyguard, anyway.”
She smiled reluctantly at that, then leaned back in her seat and studied him as though she was seeing the child and not the man. He didn’t particularly like that. But having her attention in any way was a plus.
“You must have gotten over the asthma,” she said. “All your efforts at bodybuilding certainly paid off.”
He watched her eyes scan his shoulders, but inclined his head modestly and pretended not to notice. “Thank you. I stayed with it, then learned a lot in the Army. I did outgrow the asthma and am now disgustingly healthy.”
“And a little overconfident.”
“A bodyguard—like a cop—has to have presence. This time you wouldn’t have to save me from the burning vaporizer. I could rescue you.”
Her eyes widened and she turned toward him with a slight smile at that memory, forgetting that he annoyed her.
“I’d forgotten that!” she said, her eyes losing focus as she thought back.
He’d been eight years old and just getting over a cold, so his asthma had been very active. His parents were at a dinner meeting with a client, and his mother had placed a vaporizer at his bedside to ease his breathing.
Maggie had been in the kitchen downstairs, preparing dinner, when a short in the vaporizer had caused it to catch fire. It had ignited the decorative quilt that hung over his bed, and he’d barely found the air in his lungs to shout Maggie’s name.
She’d appeared in an instant, hesitated only a second before unplugging the vaporizer, draping it with his blanket, and carrying the now smoking device into the bathroom where she dropped it in the tub and poured water on it. Then she ran back to yank the burning quilt off the wall and submerged it in the bathtub, too.
He always looked back on that as the moment he fell in love with her. She’d then put him in his parents’ bed, brought him dinner, then cleaned up the mess while he ate.
“Of course, I killed the vaporizer, your blanket and that beautiful quilt,” she remembered with a nostalgic smile.
“Maybe, but my father paid you with a hundred-dollar bill that night. You averted what might have been a real disaster.”
She nodded, accepting praise with a light laugh. “If I hadn’t saved you, you couldn’t have grown up to be such a smart aleck.”
“There, see. I knew it was all your fault.”
The flight attendant arrived with a cell phone. “Miss Lawton?”
Maggie blinked in surprise. “Yes.”
“The airport radioed the pilot with a call from your father. We have him on the pilot’s cell phone.”
She listened, looking surprised, then disappointed.
“What?” she exclaimed. “What about your heart? What about…?” She stopped abruptly, apparently forced to listen again.
“Dad, I’m sorry, too,” she said finally, “but I’ll be fine at the house. I don’t want to…no, I know you worry, but you shouldn’t. I’m fine. I can’t impose on him like that.”
She said placatingly, “Okay, fine. I’ll put him on. But I’m telling you now, I’m staying in Arlington.” She put her hand over the mouthpiece and fixed Duffy with a fierce expression. “My father’s been called overseas—some problem setting up a new government—and he wants me to go home with you rather than stay alone in Arlington. I’m not doing that. You will tell him that you’re very busy and you don’t have time to entertain a houseguest. Have I made myself clear?”
“Very,” he said amiably and took the phone she held out. “Hi, Elliott.”
“Duff!” Elliott said, his voice urgent. “I’m so sorry to do this to you, but I’ve been called overseas. They’re sending a chopper for me in twenty minutes. Would you mind very much taking Maggie home with you? I don’t want her to be alone.”
“I wouldn’t mind at all,” he replied.
Her expression darkened, though she obviously wasn’t sure what he and her father were saying. She threatened him with a pointing finger to his chest. “No!” she whispered. “Say, no!”
“Yes, of course,” he said into her glower. “I’ll be happy to take her home with me. Don’t worry. Just do your job and know that she’ll be safe and sound.”
Maggie put both hands to her face and fell back into her chair.
Duffy hung up the phone and handed it back to the flight attendant with a smug “Thank you!”
“You’ll like Lamplight Harbor.” He held up Maggie’s seat belt as the light went on.
“I’m going to Arlington,” she said, lowering her hands to put her belt together with an angry snap.
“With what?” he asked. “I’m holding your ticket.”
She threatened him with a look. “I’m going, anyway.”
“How are you going to get there?”
“Rent a car.” She wasn’t seeing the problem.
“And what are you going to pay for it with?”
“With…” she began, then remembered that all she had was seventeen dollars and no credit cards. That wasn’t going to get her a car.
She straightened in her seat and firmed her lips. She looked magnificent but not as confident as she probably imagined. “You’re going to rent it for me. Or let me have my ticket.”
He smiled. “Guess again, Lady Bellows.” When she looked surprised that he knew the name of her current role, he explained, “Eponine told me you’ve played her for so many performances that you take on some of her qualities when you’re stressed.”
“Look,” she said, clearly clutching her temper in both hands, “I came to the States to see my father, not to visit Lightbulb…what is it?”
“Lamplight Harbor,” he provided.
“Lamplight Harbor,” she repeated, “so that you can get some kind of payback for all the years you had to do what I said, by bullying me. I’m forty years old, Duffy,” she said with a sigh as though it were eighty. “And while some women love the forceful male, I’ve never been a fan. So, please. Lend me money to rent a car.”
“I have no intention of bullying you,” he said. “The deal I made with your father was to deliver you safely, and I…”
“I’m not a girl!” she said a little too loudly. Several nearby passengers turned to look at her. She lowered her voice. “I’m an adult woman,” she said. “Almost middle-aged. No one has to deliver me from one man’s hands to another’s!”
He caught the hand with which she gestured emphatically. “You’re thirty-nine,” he corrected, “not forty. That’s hardly middle-aged, and your father wants to know you’re being looked after, not because he thinks you’re not capable of caring for yourself, but because he loves you and you’ll always be his little girl. So let a man with heart trouble have a little peace about the situation.”
That last statement distracted her as he’d hoped it would. “He does have heart trouble?” she asked worriedly.
“I’m not sure,” he replied, “but do we want to risk worrying him further when he’s in a tight spot as it is?”
She finally fell against her seat back with a groan. “If you hadn’t butted into my life,” she said, “I could be in my bathtub right now, listening to Russell Watson and planning to go to Le Caprice for dinner.”
“What were you going to buy dinner with?”
“Oh, shut up.”
HE CANCELED MAGGIE’S TICKET for the connecting flight to Virginia, then pushed the luggage cart toward the little blue American-made sedan rental at the end of an aisle. She carried his cappuccino and her caramel latte. He always preferred to drive home from New York, enjoying the beauty and peace and quiet. It gave him time to readjust from his work life to his life as a parent.
“I thought you intended to stay only for a week,” he said, indicating her three large bags and train case. “There must be enough clothes in there for a four-hour fashion show.”
“Ha, ha,” she said, holding the cart handle while he unlocked the trunk. “Nice clothes is one of the perks of being in the public eye. Designers court you.”
“Well, they’ll certainly be able to find you. I’ll probably have to rent a horse trailer to get it all home.”
“Or to hold all the horse stuff you’re shoveling.”
He gave her a challenging look over his shoulder as he rearranged her bags several times before making them fit. The cart empty, she handed him the drinks, then pushed it toward a cart rack at a midway point in the aisle and hurried back to the car.
In the front seat he placed their drinks in a caddy between the seats, then backed out of the lot and onto the road that would lead them to northbound traffic.
“How far?” she asked when they were firmly ensconced in rush hour traffic.
“A little over four hundred miles,” he replied.
“So, we’re not going to make it tonight.”
“No. I thought we’d stay over in New Hampshire.”
She didn’t applaud the plan, but she didn’t dispute it, either, so Duffy just drove. She fell asleep outside of Connecticut and he watched the traffic as he reached behind him for his jacket to drop it across her.
She looked troubled, even in sleep, he thought, and hoped he had what it took to pull her out of the past and into a future with him. He’d thought he would have to play it cool, give her time, invite her and her father to his home. But Elliott’s sudden mission had been a fateful intervention forcing her into his path. He had to take advantage of it.