Читать книгу In Bed With...Collection - Emma Darcy - Страница 54

CHAPTER TWELVE

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.

Pumped up to fight for the outcome he wanted, Beau tossed the fax sheet on the bed and followed her out to the balcony. She was standing against the balustrade, as far away from him as she could get. Her gaze was aimed at the far north shore of the harbour, above and beyond the artfully landscaped gardens of Rosecliff, as though her immediate surroundings—however beautiful—were part and parcel of what she needed to get away from.

“How can you call Rosecliff a prison?”

The question shot from his mouth as he stepped up to the balustrade, turning to scrutinise her profile and discern whatever he could from her expression. He had to start with something and hopefully she’d give him enough signals to find a path to an understanding between them.

She rigidly ignored him. Or rigidly held herself in.

“You could have all this...” He waved at the grounds below them, property that would be coveted by anyone. “...If you married me.”

She closed her eyes. Her fingers curled more tightly over the curved top of the balustrade. Her body wavered slightly. Beau waited, not prepared to rush into any judgment. He’d already made too many mistakes with Maggie Stowe.

“It’s people who make a prison, not a property,” she answered, as though dragging the words from some deep place inside her.

People? What people?

She turned her head and looked at him, her eyes burning with unshakable conviction and an accusation that reduced his material argument to ashes in the wind. “It’s the people in charge of the compound. The people in power. They make the prison.”

Him? How could she equate him with a prison?

He stared at the searing knowledge in her eyes and his stomach curled. This wasn’t some theoretical philosophy. She had lived through what she was saying and it was still very real to her, traumatically real. He’d wanted to learn what drove Maggie Stowe and here it was...an experience so soul-scarring she couldn’t move past it, not even with all the running she’d done over the years.

She turned her gaze back to the far horizon. “I won’t live like that,” she said with fierce determination. “I won’t let my child be subjected to it. I’ll keep us both safe. And free.”

Her voice shook with the emphasis she gave to freedom. Beau found himself intensely moved by it. He understood the desire for freedom, empathised with it, but he knew intuitively this was more than desire. It was need...deep-rooted need.

His mind flicked to Mrs. Zabini’s statement. Not a runaway, he thought, an escapee from a prison. Though it couldn’t have been a government institution... nothing criminal. The investigators hired by Lionel Armstrong would have turned up any official records of her. Maybe the prison had been some private orphanage. A big foster family, she’d told Mrs. Zabini. Yet surely those also came under the jurisdiction of the social welfare arm of government.

She’d used the word, compound. Beau had an instant vision of high, secure fences. Illegal immigrants were kept in a compound until their cases could be evaluated. But once again, that was government business. How had Maggie remained outside the official net until she was—Mrs. Zabini’s guess—sixteen?

Whatever the answer, that wasn’t his immediate problem and he doubted she’d tell him anyway. She was equating him with the people in charge, the people in power. He had to change that view of him and do it convincingly or she would disappear from his life. The issue was not material advantages to her.

Acceptance, approval, liking, respect... those values overrode everything else in Maggie Stowe’s mind. That was decisively brought home to him now. If he couldn’t answer them...

He took a deep breath. The sense of being on the edge of a precipice was very strong. One careless step and he was gone. He’d wanted action with Maggie...any action. He’d had no idea the ground was so perilous.

A trapped animal will always turn on its captor, he thought. He had to soothe, win her trust, move them both back to a safe place where they could negotiate with each other.

“Why do you see marriage to me as a prison, Maggie?’ he asked quietly, careful to keep any judgmental note out of his voice.

She shivered. “You’re only thinking of what you want, Beau.”

It was a flat statement, uncoloured by the emotions he suspected were still ripping through her. The truth of it was undeniable.

“I want what would be best for all three of us, Maggie, not only myself,” he countered softly.

“I haven’t given you the right to judge what’s best for me. And I’ll fight you over judging for my child, as well.” She turned to him, eyes blazing in challenge. “No one will ever take from me the right to be my own person and make my own judgments.”

He frowned. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”

“Yes, you did. Why else would you want marriage if not to lock me and our child into your life where you’ll be in legal charge of us?”

“I just wanted to be in a position where I could take care of both of you,” he argued, sincere in this belief of himself.

“You wouldn’t respect my wishes. You don’t care about my feelings.”

Another flat statement. He struggled against it. He did care. He felt a tumult of caring right now. But he could see she wouldn’t believe it. “I have tried to show you differently this past week,” he said, searching for some way to appease the hurt he’d given.

She shook her head. There was a twist of irony on her lips as she answered, “There’s a difference between being civilised and actually accepting a person in your heart. Liking them. Wishing them well. You think I don’t know it?”

He’d done his best to stand back from the attraction he felt, seeking the truth about her. He hadn’t wanted to be any more stupid than he had been. But he couldn’t offer those reasons as excuses for his manner towards her.

Her eyes mocked his dilemma. “From the very start you didn’t trust me, Beau. You still don’t. That’s why you want to lock me in.”

It was terribly disconcerting that she saw him so clearly, saw what he himself hadn’t quite grasped until she laid it out to him. She shamed him with her truths. All his actions had been motivated by what he wanted while she had been the hub of endlessly rotating wheels of suspicion.

“Maggie, is the pregnancy a prison? I mean...not thinking about its tie to me. Apart from that...” He hated asking this question but he had to, in fairness to her, aware that he had driven the course to these consequences and wanting to remove the trapped feeling she had to have. “...Do you want to have the child?”

“Yes. Yes, I do,” she answered decisively, without even a slight hesitation.

Beau breathed a huge sigh of relief. “So do I.”

She slanted him a look, checking if he meant it.

He tried an appealing smile. “I know it’s not the most propitious circumstances, Maggie, but I can’t help feeling excited about it.”

She frowned. “You don’t mind about me being the mother?”

“I can’t imagine anyone better.”

It bewildered her. “But you don’t like me.”

With a devastating jolt, Beau realised this was the crux of her flight from his proposal of marriage. Without liking, there couldn’t be respect or approval or acceptance. Her logic could not be faulted. And he was guilty of doubting her fitness as the mother of his child. But he’d learnt so much more about her since then.

“That’s not true, Maggie,” he said with passionate insistence. “You blew my mind the day I arrived home and I’ve been struggling to get it together ever since. I now believe a woman who could make my discerning grandfather so happy and so proud of her, is a woman well worth knowing. And I believe a woman who inspires so much caring from our live-in staff has to have a very caring heart herself.”

He saw her face tightening, felt her resistance to what he was saying, and in sheer desperation, cried, “Maggie, I swear to you, I no longer see in you anything not to like.”

He knew, the moment the words were out, he’d emphasised a negative instead of a positive. He saw the recoil in her eyes, the bleak dismissal of this line of pursuit even before she spoke.

“I guess it suits you to say such things, now that I have something you want.”

It was a judgment he deserved, but it hurt. The rejection of his earnest endeavours to alter her impression of him hurt, too. He realised he’d delivered too many hurts himself, striking at vulnerabilities he hadn’t known existed, hadn’t stopped to look for them behind his grandfather’s creation.

Blinded by prejudice.

Too many prejudices.

Where was his salvation now?

Despair dragged at his determination. He’d dug his own grave and made the walls too high for him to climb out of it. Or maybe he was using the wrong approach. He had to keep trying, no matter what.

“What do you want to do, Maggie?’ he asked, humbled by her painfully accurate reading of the situation. ”What would make you feel...right?”