The abrupt question made her freeze with shock. He knew the answer to that as well as she did herself.
‘Perhaps because there’s never been any need until now,’ she told him as lightly as she could. ‘The girls’ need, by the way, and not mine,’ she added pointedly, putting down her pad and standing up. ‘When will they be back?’
‘Soon. Tell me something…is Susie expecting you?’
‘She asked for my help,’ Maggie told him evasively.
‘And on the strength of that you dropped everything and came haring up here?’ He looked quite deliberately at her left hand and then said softly, ‘And what about the current man in your life? Doesn’t he…?’
‘There is no man!’ she cried out, interrupting him, her face flushed and hot, her eyes bright with pain. ‘Do you really think that after…’
She saw the way he was looked at her and stopped abruptly, painfully aware of how much she had been about to give away, and said shakily instead, ‘And even if there were, I’m a free agent and perfectly entitled to make my own arrangements.’
‘And that’s the way you like it, is it? Your freedom means more to you than commitment? You prefer having a lover to a husband?’
He was looking at her ringless finger, and a wave of hot, corrosive bitterness swept through her.
‘Just because you’re about to get married, Marcus, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the rest of the world must follow suit. I haven’t congratulated you yet, by the way,’ she added, turning away from him and picking up her pencils, desperately striving for the right note of casual indifference. ‘I’m sure you’ll be very happy together. Next June, you’re getting married? It’s a pity you can’t bring the date forward, or am I right in thinking that Isobel would still insist on sending the girls to boarding-school? I take it the pair of you do intend to live here.’
She turned to look at him then and told herself that she was pleased to see the look of grim anger darkening his eyes. He didn’t like her questioning him about his plans. Well, she was an adult herself now, and as fully entitled to question him as he was her.
‘Why?’ he asked her shortly.
She shrugged delicately, chewing on her bottom lip before giving him an acid smile.
‘Well, this house was left to the three of us, Susie, Sara and myself, by our grandfather, wasn’t it?’ she asked, deliberately stressing the possessive ‘our’ which openly excluded him for that relationship.
‘Are you trying to accusing me of stealing your inheritance, by any chance?’ he demanded bitingly, taking her off guard by the directness of his question. The light slanting in through the window seemed to emphasise the hard, jutting angle of his cheekbones, lending his features a dangerous male cruelty. She badly wished she had never introduced such a dangerous subject, but it was too late to back down now.
‘Hardly that,’ she told him quietly, ‘but this is the girls’ home.’
‘And yours?’ he questioned, and an unwelcome hard lump rose in her throat at the words, because what he said was no longer true. This wasn’t her home. She reached out blindly and curled her fingers round the polished wood of one of the bedposts. It felt reassuringly warm and soothing, making her aware of how cold her hands were. A sure warning of increasing tension, if she actually needed one. She had known from the moment Marcus walked into her room that her frail stock of resilience would all too easily be drained by his presence.
‘No,’ she told him sombrely, without looking at him. ‘Not my home…’ And then she looked up at him and surprised such a look of pain in his eyes that for a moment she was blinded by it, held in thrall to it and unable to drag her gaze away.
‘Maggie, for heaven’s sake,’ he said harshly, crossing the room and circling her arm with his good hand.
Through the silk of her blouse she could feel the rough calluses on his fingers. Calluses caused by hard outdoor work, by riding…by the life he lived. His touch was so overwhelmingly familiar that for a moment she thought she was going to faint with the intensity of emotion it aroused inside her.
‘Let me go,’ she demanded thickly, gritting her teeth to stop them chattering together as she fought to suppress the welling sensation of aching delight wrought by his touch.
He released her as though her skin was fire, stepping back from her awkwardly, hard spots of dark colour burning his cheekbones.
‘Once you wouldn’t have said that,’ he taunted her angrily.
Before she could gather her resources to defend herself, a car drew up outside. Marcus limped over to the window and said over his shoulder, ‘It’s the girls.’
‘I’d like to have the opportunity to talk to Susie on my own,’ she told him shakily, thankful that he had his back to her and could not see the effect he had had on her.
‘I’m their guardian, not their gaoler, but remember one thing, Maggie, they’re in my care. Not yours.’
Was he warning her that he wasn’t going to allow her to interfere in his decisions? Well, he had that right. She couldn’t deny it, but apart from that one occasion he had never been an unkind man, and she could not honestly think he would want his half-sisters to be unhappy. Manlike, he had probably allowed Isobel to convince him that boarding-school was the best solution because it removed the problem of their care from his shoulders.
Maggie gave a faint sigh as he moved over to the door and held it open for her. It was pointless making any assumptions until she had had the opportunity to talk properly to Susie.
* * *
‘AND SO YOU SEE, we can’t possibly go to boarding-school. It would be horrid there, and Sara couldn’t do her riding, and…’