Maggy's Child by Karen Robards Read Free Book Online

in his ancient car—Maggy was driving, though as she told him he didn’t deserve that she should go to so much bleeping trouble to save his ass—they had had the mother and father of a quarrel. If Nick hadn’t been so bloody and battered, Maggy would have slapped him silly herself. Mind your own damned business, she screamed at him. She could do what the hell she wanted with her life and her body! If she wanted to dance naked in the middle of the expressway at high noon, she would! His response, as he’d tilted his head back against the seat and tried to stanch the blood that poured from his nose, was to call her a stupid little fool and tell her to slow down.
    After that, the battle had raged at white-hot pitch for a good ten minutes.
    Then, because however angry she was at him she hated to see him hurt, Maggy had whipped the car into the parking lot of a closed-down warehouse, slammed the gearshift into park, and started wiping at his bloodied face with the feathered hem of her scarlet silk robe.
    He had knocked her hand away, grabbed her by her shoulders and kissed her, bloody nose and all. His kiss—the first time he had ever kissed her in a way that was not entirely brotherly—had rocked her world on its axis.
    For an instant, no longer, the memory burned to life in her mind. But she wouldn’t let herself remember. She couldn’t. That kiss had happened long ago, another lifetime ago, to another girl. A girl who no longer existed.
    Now, staring down at the picture of herself dancing before an audience of blurry male faces, Maggy felt the image sear relentlessly into her brain. There she was,beautiful at seventeen, with her high young breasts with their rouged nipples—courtesy of the same girl who provided the pot and the fancy hairstyle—bared for all the world to see, along with her narrow rib cage and small round belly button and flaring hips and the tiny triangle of black sequins that covered her sex. Poised on six-inch-high heels, with her long, slender legs clad in sheer black stockings to the thigh, she appeared to be flaunting her nakedness. She looked somnolent, sexy, as though she were loving every minute of her own performance.
    “Remember, Magdalena?” Nick’s soft voice flayed her.
    She glanced up at him wildly. “No, I don’t remember! I don’t ever want to remember!”
    Whirling, she began to run back the way she had come.
    He was upon her in an instant, catching her around the waist with one arm and clamping a hand over her mouth with the other as though he feared she might scream. She would have, too, uncaring at the moment of the consequences of being found alone in the woods with Nick of all people. She struggled and kicked as he lifted her clear up off her feet and carried her away from the path through the underbrush until at last she regained some control and stopped struggling in his arms. Then, in the lee of a just-greening wild-cherry tree, he set her upright again.
    “Don’t scream,” he said, his hand still covering her mouth. Held tight against him, her breasts flattened by his chest, her thighs plastered against his, Maggy registered anew the size and strength of him—Nick was six feet two, and while he had weighed in the vicinity of 180 as a youth, she suspected he was now 200 or more well-muscled pounds—and made a negative movement with her head.
    He rather cautiously removed his hand from her mouth.
    “Is that why you came back? To blackmail me?” shedemanded in a shrill voice, shoving against his chest in a futile bid to free herself. “I have plenty of money now, right? So how much do you want?”
    One of his arms was still clamped around her waist, and Maggy felt it harden. Her head tilted back in time to catch the narrowing of his mouth and the icing-over of his eyes. Her words had angered him, she saw at a glance, and she was fiercely glad. She wanted him angry. No, she wanted him to hurt, as he was hurting her.
    For a moment he said nothing, just looked