Maddie's Love-Child

‘Is it because of what happened to your mother?’

‘You mean do I have some deep-seated Freudian aversion to marriage and commitment because Mama was loved and left by a married man, leaving poor little ol’ me behind?’

‘Something like that.’

Maddie laughed, tossing her long black curls from her shoulders. She really was a very striking woman, Carolyn thought. And far more complex than anyone realised. In a way, she felt some pity for the pompous Spencer. And any other man Maddie sank her teeth into.

‘What a perfectly interesting thought!’ Maddie exclaimed, her smile dazzling white behind her lushly scarlet lips. ‘It never occurred to me, but you could be right, I suppose. I never try to psychoanalyse myself. I am what I am, and to hell with anyone who doesn’t approve of me, which includes Spencer. The last thing I need in my life is some hypocrite of a man who wants to make me over into what he thinks is suitable to his narrow-minded stuffy life-style.’

‘Good Lord, Maddie! I didn’t realise you hated men so much!’

Maddie blinked, startled by her friend’s remark. ‘But I don’t!’ she denied. ‘I simply adore men!’

‘Do you, Maddie? Do you really?’

‘Of course I do,’ she insisted, though not meeting Carolyn’s eyes as she looped a stray curl behind her left ear. ‘Don’t be silly. I can’t stand not having a man in my life.’

‘Then why don’t you want to ever marry one?’

Maddie looked up, deflecting her friend’s serious question with a naughty grin. ‘Because I like men, darling heart, not a single man..I can’t think of anything more boring than having to sleep with the same man every night for the rest of my life. Actually, I can’t think of anything more boring than marriage in general!’

‘Are you saying my life is going to be boring?’

‘You and Vaughan are the exceptions to the rule.’

‘What about my mother and Julian? They’re blissfully happy.’

‘Chips off the same block,’ Maddie returned, smiling fondly as she thought of Carolyn’s still beautiful mother and her husband.

Isabel and Julian.

Such romantic names for such a romantic couple.

Maddie had met them the previous year when Julian, a successful businessman from Sydney, decided to semi-retire on the South Coast and commissioned Vaughan and herself to design, build and furnish a special surprise home for his new bride. Maddie had become good friends with Carolyn when Julian had asked his stepdaughter to oversee the decor while he was overseas on his honeymoon with Isabel. It was during this time that Carolyn and Vaughan fell madly in love, marrying within a few short weeks.

Now, twelve months later, they had this gorgeous little baby.

Maddie leant over and clucked the baby’s chin, goo-gooing at it as she’d never goo-gooed before. There was no longer any doubt in her mind. A baby she was going to have. And soon, before the years ticked away and she was too old. She could well afford it, which to Maddie’s mind was the only negative against bringing up a baby on her own. What did a child need a father for, anyway? She’d never had a father around and she was as happy and normal as could be!

‘You’re not really going to have a baby out of wedlock, are you?’ Carolyn asked worriedly.

Maddie chuckled. ‘Trust you to use a term. like that! I’ve never heard anything so old-fashioned in my life!’

‘What’s old-fashioned?’ Vaughan said as he walked in and strode over to the bed. ‘Hello, my precious darlings.’

He bent to kiss his wife and baby daughter, the tenderness and love on his face moving Maddie. She’d always known Vaughan was a warm, caring man underneath his outward machismo, but to witness the intensity of his feelings on display for all to see brought a lump to her throat and a tinge of envy to her heart.

‘Well?’ Vaughan straightened to throw Maddie a questioning glance. ‘What’s so old-fashioned?’

‘Your wife thinks I should be married before I have a baby,’ came her dryly amused reply.

Vaughan looked more shocked than in the thirteen years she had known him. ‘Good God,’ he blurted out. ‘You’re pregnant?’

‘No, of course not, you silly man. But seeing your lovely baby girl has sunk a deep well into previously untapped maternal instinct. Yet when I expressed my wish to have a baby, your dear wife insisted I marry Spencer first.’

Vaughan grimaced. ‘Good God, not him. Find someone else, for pity’s sake. He might be a top solicitor, but he’s the most arrogant bastard I’ve ever met.’

‘See?’ Maddie pulled a face at Carolyn, who pulled another right back. Both women started to giggle and the baby to cry.

‘Here, give her to me,’ Vaughan suggested, scooping up his daughter and walking around the room with her, whereupon she immediately stopped crying. ‘Speaking of arrogant bastards—’ he directed the words at Maddie ‘—you’ll never guess who rang me this morning.’

‘If I’d never guess,’ Maddie countered, ‘then perhaps you should save me the trouble of trying and just tell me.’

‘Miles MacMillan,’ he announced. ‘You probably don’t remember him, either of you, but he was at Julian’s house-warming party round about this time last year. The night we got engaged, Carolyn. He’s British and was out here at the time to plan the opening of a Sydney branch of his family’s finance company. Julian was having dealings with him.

‘Anyway, apparently he’s come back for another six-month stint in Australia and wants to buy a weekender within easy commuting distance of Sydney. Since he’d already seen the South Coast area and liked it, he contacted Julian, who told him about that house I’d nearly finished building at Stanwell Park—the one where the owner went bankrupt, bringing things to a halt. He’s driving down to have a look at it this afternoon, and if he likes it, he’s going to buy it.’

‘I don’t remember him at all,’ Carolyn admitted. ‘There again ... I did have my mind on other things that night.’ And she winked at her husband.

‘Wicked woman,’ he rebuked, but softly, lovingly.

‘I remember him only too well,’ Maddie said sharply, and Carolyn and Vaughan’s heads whipped round to stare at her.

‘No, I did not seduce him,’ she added.

Though it wasn’t for want of trying....

‘But he’s not the sort of man one easily forgets,’ she went on. ‘If one’s eyes were not already full of stars, that is.’ Her droll tone belied the squirming in her stomach as her mind flashed back to that night.

Miles MacMillan....

Vaughan was right when he called him an arrogant bastard, though Maddie doubted he was a bastard in the literal sense of the word. Not like herself. Miles MacMillan was blue-blooded through and through. If asked, he could undeniably trace his British ancestry right back to the dim dark ages, and there would not be a single entry from the wrong side of the blanket.

None in writing, anyway.

He was upper class through and through. Upper class, upper crust and up himself!

That said, he was also the most maddeningly attractive man Maddie had ever seen, Tall, dark and handsome, with superb bone structure, a squared jawline with a Cary Grant dimple, steely grey eyes and a perversely sensual mouth totally at odds with his coolly controlled air of haughty superiority.

Maddie had found him downright irresistible from the moment she’d spotted him across Julian’s living room, standing all alone, dressed in an impossibly stuffy pin-striped suit, not a hair out of place on his dark, well-shaped head, his aristocratically chiselled nose high in the air.

When she’d swanned toward him in her semi-transparent black chiffon dress, he hadn’t been able to take his eyes off her. Understandable, considering her seeming lack of underwear—the skin-coloured teddy she was wearing did give the illusion of nakedness underneath.

Maddie had foolishly believed he’d been hers for the taking that night, especially once she found out he wasn’t married.

How wrong she was!

Oh, yes, he’d been interested, in a sexual sense. She’d been too long on the end of male desire not to recognise the signs. But as much as he’d been aroused by her, he’d also been faintly repelled, she decided later, his ambivalence towards her making him run hot and cold all night. She wondered afterwards if he’d been unable to make up his mind whether to risk his reputation—or perhaps his soul?—by responding to such a shameless creature’s advances.