Maggy's Child: A Novel

Maggy's Child: A Novel

by Karen Robards
Maggy's Child: A Novel

Maggy's Child: A Novel

by Karen Robards

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Overview

She was Mrs. Lyle Forrest now, the coolly elegant wife of Louisville's most prominent publisher, the slum girl whose dreams -- and nightmares -- came true the night she married the multimillionaire old enough to be her father. For twelve years Maggy played the role of beautiful, devoted wife, the burnished jewel in Lyle's crown, mother of the child he adored. She did it for David, the son who could never know the price she paid to protect him, would never see her scars...

Suddenly Maggy's hard-won control shattered when Nick King came back to claim her. It was twelve years since they'd parted, twelve years of fear and loathing at the hands of Lyle Forrest. She couldn't afford to remember the soul-searing passion she'd known so long ago in the arms of the only man she'd ever loved. She must think of David, her son, Lyle's most potent weapon, and not of the man she could never forget, Nick, who's returned to set her free...

A riveting novel of love, lust, and savagery in Kentucky's bluegrass country--a spellbinding story of a mother's sacrifice, a dynasty's power, and one man's passion to reclaim the woman who was born to be his.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780307801388
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 07/27/2011
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 416
Sales rank: 111,988
File size: 3 MB

About the Author

Karen Robards is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of forty-seven full-length books and one novella. The mother of three boys, she lives in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky.

Read an Excerpt

“Remember Tia Gloria saying that a body’s sins always come home to roost? She was right: here I am.”
 
The voice in her ear was husky, amused—and devastatingly familiar. For an instant it seemed to Maggy Forrest that the world stopped spinning on its axis. The solid oak of the bar against which she leaned, the infectious twang of live country music, the dark, smoky atmosphere of the nightclub itself all seemed to disappear.
 
Nothing was left in the whole world but Nick’s voice in her ear.
 
One hand clenched around the cool brass bar rail as she turned slowly to face him. There was no mistake: Her mind was not playing tricks on her. On an instinctive level she had known it even before she turned around, before her conscious mind registered the thick crop of rough black curls and the broad-shouldered football player’s physique.
 
“Nick.”
 
“He was as tall as she remembered, and as handsome, too. Sinfully handsome, she had always thought, though with his tough pugilist’s face he shouldn’t have been. His features were too rawly aggressive, his jaw and cheekbones too broad, his lips too thin for true masculine beauty. His nose still listed slightly to the left, the victim of one too many street fights in his teenage years. Above the crooked nose, his hazel-green eyes gleamed down at her. Heavy-lidded and usually seeming almost sleepy, they were the key to the devastating effect he had on the opposite sex, she had decided long ago. Nick had always looked as though he knew everything there was to know about women, and once Maggy had been no more immune than any other member of her gender to that.
 
“Hello, Magdalena.”
 
Even the smile was unchanged, sexy and wicked and tender all at the same time. She’d once been the biggest fool in the world for that smile.
 
“Ah, Nick. Twelve years seemed to vanish as she stared up at him. She forgot that he was thirty-two now and she herself was almost thirty as a rush of memories swamped her: Nick showing up with a bag of groceries when there was nothing left to eat in the tiny apartment she had shared with her father; Nick helping to drag her drunken father home when, time after time, he passed out on the street; Nick siphoning gas from a stranger’s car so that she could drive to work in the old wreck he had managed to get running for her when she turned sixteen; Nick waiting up for her when she sneaked out at night, warning off the importunate males who were always sniffing around her. Nick always protecting her. He had been the one solid thing in her world as she had grown up. She had always, always, loved Nick best.
 
Nick. At the realization that it really was he standing there before her, pure involuntary joy shone out of Maggy’s eyes and curved her lips into a smile. Then the reality of the situation hit her, and with it came an icy wave of horror: Nick was back. Her arms, which had lifted instinctively to hug him, dropped. Her smile wavered, then firmed again. But in its new incarnation it wasn’t the same smile.
 
He had never in his life missed a trick, and he didn’t now.
 
“Not glad to see me?” His smile widened, and took on a cat-with-a-mouse quality. “Why, Magdalena! You’re hurting my feelings.”
 
“Of course I’m glad to see you. It’s been—ages.” It was her social voice, the one that had been drummed into her by a vocal coach in the months after she married Lyle, and it made his eyes narrow.
 
“Twelve years. And to think you’ve managed to stay married to Lyle Forrest all that time. Wifey number three bats a home run! I hear you gave him a son.”
 
Oh, God. Maggy felt as if a huge hand had closed around her chest, crushing it, keeping her from drawing air into her lungs. Grimly, she battled the sensation.
 
“We have a son, yes.”
 
“I saw him.”
 
“You saw him?” Maggy couldn’t have felt more shocked if he had hit her over the head with a baseball bat.
 
“This afternoon. At Windermere. I came calling, but you weren’t home.”
 
She’d been at the hairdresser’s. The hand crushing her chest tightened its grip as she thought of Nick at Windermere without her. With David—and maybe even Lyle.
 
“You came calling?” It was ludicrous, the way she kept parroting everything he said, but she couldn’t seem to help it. She knew she was gaping at him, but she couldn’t seem to help that either. She’d always known, somewhere deep in the recesses of her mind, that she would see Nick again. But she wasn’t ready. Not now, not yet! He had caught her totally by surprise. Her defenses weren’t in place.
 
“You wouldn’t expect me to be in Louisville and not come calling, now would you?” His eyes mocked her. “With us being such old friends and all? The boy—David, is it?—looks just like you. You’ve done old Lyle proud.”
 
“Yes. Yes, I’m—we’re both, Lyle and I—we are very proud of David.” Maternal affection warmed her for an instant as she thought of her eleven-year-old son. Like her, he was tall and slender, fine-boned, auburn-haired, chocolate-eyed, with dark winged brows and a wide, mobile mouth that at the moment sported a set of nearly invisible braces, about which he was wildly self-conscious. In tennis whites or golf clothes, he looked so absurdly patrician that it was hard to believe that he had sprung from her own far from patrician loins.
 
Of course, Lyle claimed all the credit for the way David had turned out.
 
“You’ve done well for yourself, Magdalena. I’ll give you that.” Nick’s eyes ran over her. Maggy bethought herself of the nine-hundred-dollar black suede jeans she was wearing, of the real alligator belt and boots, of the ivory silk shirt, of the six-carat diamond on her finger, of the solid gold watch clasped around her wrist. The ensemble was deceptively simple to look at, but even without the jewelry it had cost more than she had once made in a year. When she’d been Magdalena Garcia. Before she’d married Lyle.
 
Of course, Nick had no way of knowing how expensive her clothes were, though he could hardly miss the ring, which sparkled with brilliant pinpoints of light even in the semidarkness. Maggy would have felt guilty at being caught by Nick with such material excess had the panic that now filled her left any room for a secondary emotion.
 
“What are you doing here?” That was the question. Maggy’s hands clenched and her mouth went dry as she waited for the answer.
 
Nick smiled that devastating smile at her. “Guess.”
 
Maggy’s gaze locked with his, and her breathing stopped. The possibilities were endless—and endlessly terrifying.
 
“There you are. We’ve been looking everywhere.” The light, sweet tones belonged to Lyle’s niece, Sarah Bates, who, with her best pal, Buffy McDermott, was pushing through the crowd of people to join Maggy at the bar. Maggy glanced at her friends with a mixture of relief and fear. On the whole she was glad to have her tête-à-tête with Nick interrupted—but what would Sarah and Buffy make of Nick? What would Nick say? Surely nothing personal, now that they were not alone.
 
Sarah, at twenty-seven, was two years younger than Maggy, though at the moment she appeared older despite the youthfully styled fringed-denim vest and skirt she wore. She was in the midst of an ugly divorce. As a consequence she was both painfully thin and flashily red-haired, neither of which became her. It was her almost desperate need to seek out amusement that had brought the three of them to this little-known country-western bar on the Indiana side of the riverfront.
 
“Ooh, nice!” Buffy drawled the words as she wedged in beside Sarah and turned to look Nick up and down. Her red-lipsticked mouth pouted provocatively as she glanced from Nick to Maggy and back. “Though I gotta tell ya, handsome, you’re wasting your time with Maggy here. She’s an old married lady. But I’m available.”
 
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Nick smiled at Buffy, a very different smile from the one he had bestowed on Maggy. This was a practiced, thousand-kilowatt smile that had once left girls gasping in its aftermath. Maggy had forgotten the effect of that smile on unwary recipients, but watching Buffy’s bedazzled response brought the memories rushing back. But then, she hadn’t really forgotten. She had purposefully banished Nick and everything about him from her mind.
 
That was the only way she had managed to survive.
 
“I’m Buffy McDermott,” Buffy said, holding out a slender, perfectly manicured hand with bright red nails. “And you’re new in town.” Slim and attractive with paper-white skin, chin-length black hair, and small features accentuated by skillfully applied makeup, Buffy was used to being admired by men. Tonight, in a red silk camisole beneath a black leather motorcycle jacket, a black leather mini, and heels, she was dressed to thrill.
 
Nick took her hand, laughed, and shook his head. “I’m Nick King. And I’m a Louisvillian born and bred. I’ve just been gone for a while.”
 
“Are you any relation to the Kings who used to live out in Mockingbird Valley?”
 
As Buffy spoke, Nick released her hand. Without ever taking her eyes from Nick’s, Buffy lifted her just-freed fingers to caress the soft white skin just above the neckline of her camisole. Maggy would have had to admire Buffy’s technique—if the woman hadn’t been aiming her efforts at Nick. As it was, she could only clench her teeth and remind herself that Nick was no longer hers.
 

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