In Bed With...Collection

“They’ve all contributed to giving me the best part of my life. Of course, I care about them. They’re good people. With the kindest of hearts.”

“All the more reason for you to stay on then.”

Maggie wasn’t sure of that. It could be prolonging hopes that were better cut dead so they didn’t obscure the realities to be faced.

“We’ll see,” she said noncommittally.

The reasons Beau was giving were centred on him—his comfort—not on any feelings for her. The hope that had danced through her bloodstream a few minutes ago, fell limply by the wayside. She ate the fruit without thinking about it, without even tasting it.

Sedgewick returned. The fried green tomatoes were served. Beau was suitably complimentary about the Louisiana dish. Maggie made agreeable murmurs and washed the glug in her mouth down with coffee. Nothing more of any importance was said.

After breakfast, Maggie excused herself to see to the roses Mr. Polly had left with Mrs. Featherfield.

“I’ll be in the library,” Beau said pointedly.

Where the fax machine was, Maggie thought, and found herself trembling. She clenched her hands, stiffened her spine and sternly told herself she would cope with everything better once she knew the test result.

In the end, she didn’t join Beau in the library, waiting for the news. She simply couldn’t bear to be with him. Having arranged the perfect Double Delight blooms in a vase, she carried it up to her suite, placed it on her dressing table, then wandered around the bedroom that had once seemed like a place fit for a princess.

It still was, but it no longer made her feel like a princess. The rosewood antique furniture was beautiful, gleaming with a perfect polish and set off with ornate brass handles. The pink silk canopy above the bed was splendidly draped, adding its richness to the rose print bedspread. Deeply sashed pink curtains dressed the French doors, falling into luxurious pools on a floor thickly carpeted in the palest of green. She loved it all. She had been very happy here. Yet now she felt outside it.

She stopped in front of the cheval mirror and stared at her reflection. Vivian’s re-imaged Maggie Stowe looked back at her. Strange how the outer shell could almost make one believe the inner self had been changed, too, but it wasn’t really so. Right now this image superimposed a lot of other Maggie Stowes but they still existed in her heart.

There was the unpolished, uncultured young woman Vivian had met. Maggie could still see her peering through the added gloss and style...a streetwise survivor who’d learnt most of the games people played and how to duck or slide past them. Life wasn’t easy without paper qualifications. Exploitation was not uncommon in the casual job market, especially when the employee had no family to back her up and no easy recourse to the law. Maggie never let herself get caught in webs like that. Just a touch of it and she moved on.

The mirror shimmered as her vision reached further into the past...to the fear-filled girl/woman who’d found safe refuge with Zabini’s Circus as she struggled to come to terms with a world teeming with all sorts of different people and different places and different ways of life. Impossible to have envisaged what she’d meet once she left the restricted world of the compound.

Her mind flicked at the suppressed memories of that earlier life...the discipline, the subservience, the constant demand to respect the good teachings, the secret growth of resistance, rebellion, and the need to keep it hidden until she was old enough, grown up enough to escape.

You with the red curls, cast your eyes down, girl!

Maggie saw herself at six, a thin child, all eyes and hair. She couldn’t hide her hair. Confining it in a plait had made it less obvious. But she’d learnt the lesson of casting her eyes down because it hid her thoughts and feelings.

She’d learnt the wisdom in the kind advice from her first housemother who had probably recognised a rebellious spirit...best to bow the head, best to obey, best to keep in line, best not to bring any notice to herself. That way she could live in her mind, in the dream worlds she kept to herself.

She couldn’t remember when she’d begun to believe there had to be a bigger, better life outside the compound. The fence was to keep them protected from bad things, they were told. But the grown-ups came and went. They didn’t seem to mind going out there to whatever existed beyond the fence. When she was grown up enough she would go and find out for herself.

And she had.

Then she knew the fence hadn’t been about protection at all. It had been about power. And the compound had been a prison, although supposedly a benevolent one. She’d never let anything become a prison again. The sense of anything closing in on her set nerves jangling. Freedom had become an important value in her life. Or maybe it always had been...something genetic that not even the commune discipline could crush out of her.

Where had these genes come from? If her mother and father had ever lived in the compound, she’d never recognised them and they’d never acknowledged her. None of the grown-ups she’d seen had red hair, although she realised that was not conclusive. Who were they...the man and woman who had created the person she was?

The mirror didn’t give up those answers.

They were forever lost to Maggie.

Her mind slowly swam up through the layers of the past, back to the reflection in front of her...Vivian’s sculpture from the material she’d been, the material she still was within the different shaping. It had been Vivian who had held her together like this. Without him... it was getting harder to hold on to it, to keep believing it was real.

The faithful four—Sedgewick, Mrs. Featherfield, Wallace, Mr. Polly—were trying to hold on to it, but it wasn’t the same without Vivian. Beau didn’t believe in her. That was the crux of it. He didn’t see what his grandfather had seen and Vivian’s Maggie Stowe was beginning to lose her reality.

She moved away from the mirror and sat down on the edge of the bed, wrapped in a sense of hiatus as she waited for the news which would form decisions and directions for her. Eventually a knock came on the door and Beau called out to her. His voice echoed through her head, forcing a set of instructions to form.

Get up.

She pushed herself onto her feet.

Go and open the door to him.

Her legs were shaky. She felt sick, dizzy. The news he was bringing to her carried such enormous import. She sat down again, trembling.

Another knock. Another call. It had to be answered. She took a deep breath, trying to ease the fierce grip of tension. Words still had to be forced.

“Come in.”

The old training suddenly slid out and took over. She sat very still, her fingers interlaced on her lap, head bent, eyes cast down, mental shield up. No one could get at her that way. She could take in what she needed to and leave out the rest.

She heard Beau come in and close the door behind him. It didn’t occur to her it might be inappropriate to invite him into her bedroom. In her mind she wasn’t really anywhere...just waiting.

He didn’t say anything. She felt his eyes on her, scrutinising, assessing, felt his approach, the energy of him coming closer and closer, saw his feet, pressing into the thick carpet in front of her. He held out a sheet of fax paper for her to read. It took several moments for her to focus her eyes on the typewritten message.

The test result was positive.

CHAPTER TWELVE (#ud535c0fb-8216-5cc4-a273-7d8e9771b73f)

BEAU could feel his heart thumping wildly as he waited for a reaction. The printed result had to snap Maggie out of whatever far place she had retreated to. He wanted to speak to her, yet his mind was such a jumble of thoughts and concerns, he was riven with uncertainty over what to say. Fact—proven fact—had a shattering effect on preconceived suppositions and her withdrawal from him wasn’t helping to put anything sensible together.

He’d stepped into this room with a sense of honourable purpose. The seemingly frozen image of her, sitting in a pose of passive submission, had instantly unsettled him. There was something terribly wrong about it. The vibrant vitality he associated with her wasn’t simply guarded. It had receded. He felt as though he was looking at an uninhabited shell.

The urge to pick her up and shake life back into her was almost irresistible. His mind cautioned that any touching might trigger an extremely adverse response. His body desperately wanted to heat hers to a sizzling awareness of what they had shared while creating the result he now held out to her.

“I think we should get married, Maggie.”

Her head jerked up, her vivid blue eyes wide and whirling with shock.

Beau was shocked, too. It wasn’t what he had planned to say. He didn’t know where the words had come from. They’d spilled off his lips before he could think better of them.

“No!” She leapt up, suddenly, explosively invigorated, colour shooting into her face, a bright flash of recoil in her eyes as she palmed him aside in her agitated move away from him. “No!” Her head shook in vehement denial. She walked in an erratic course around the room. “No, I can’t! I can’t!” she cried, then made a beeline for the French doors, clearly driven towards escape.

“Why not?” Beau demanded aggressively, any common sense completely smashed by her extreme reaction. Never mind that he’d only meant to suggest marriage as a possibility to consider. Wasn’t he one of the most eligible bachelors around? He was in a position to virtually offer her the world on a silver platter. Why the hell wasn’t she seeing that and evaluating the advantages?

She paused, her hands curled around the knobs of the doors. She didn’t turn back to him. Her shoulders heaved. Tension screamed from her. “It would be...a prison,” she said, the dark revulsion in her voice slicing straight into his heart.

A prison? Beau was stunned speechless. The concept of marriage to him being a prison was horrifying enough, but the way she’d said it...as though it would be an unbearable torture!

The doors were opened and she was out on the balcony before he could raise a protest. Escaping from him, as though his offer had conjured up something monstrous. Beau’s insides twisted into knots. This wasn’t right. It was no more right than the way she had been sitting when he’d come in.

He stared down at the paper in his hand. Maggie Stowe was pregnant with his child. Whatever was disturbing her so deeply had to be resolved. He couldn’t let her move on from him, dropping out of sight and out of contact. His whole being revolted against that eventuality. He had to reach out to her, into her, and somehow hold her to him.