Читать книгу Committed to the Baby онлайн | страница 3

Watery winter sunlight poured from the skylight onto the gleaming wood floors and glanced off the mirror hanging on the closest wall. A pedestal table held an empty cobalt vase—there’d been no flowers in this hall since Maggie left—and the silence in the house slammed down on top of them both.

Seconds ticked past, marked only by the tapping of Maggie’s shoe against the floor. Justice waited her out, knowing that she wouldn’t be able to be quiet for long. She never had been comfortable with silence. Maggie was the most talkative woman he’d ever known. Damned if he hadn’t missed that.

Three feet of empty space separated them and still, Justice felt the pull of her. His body was heavy and aching and everything in him clawed at him to reach out for her. To ease the pain of doing without her for far too long.

Yet he called on his own reserves of strength to keep from taking what he’d missed so badly.

“Where’s Mrs. Carey?” Maggie asked suddenly, her voice shattering the quiet.

“She’s on vacation.” Justice cursed inwardly, wishing to hell his housekeeper had picked some other time to take a cruise to Jamaica.

“Good for her,” Maggie said, then tipped her head to one side. “Glad to see me?”

Glad wasn’t the word he’d use. Stunned would be about right. When Maggie had left, she’d sworn that he would never see her again. And he hadn’t, not counting the nights she appeared in his dreams just to torment him.

“What are you doing here, Maggie?”

“Well, now, that’s the question, isn’t it?”

She turned away and walked slowly down the hall, bypassing the more formal living room before stepping into the great room. Justice followed, watching as she looked around the room as if reacquainting herself with the place.

She looked from the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on two walls to the river stone hearth, tall and wide enough for a man to stand in it upright. The log walls, with the white chinking between them that looked like horizontal striping. The plush chairs and sofas she’d bought for the room, gathered together into conversation areas, and the wide bank of windows that displayed an unimpeded view of the ranch’s expansive front yard. Ancient trees spread shade across most of the lawn, flowers in the neatly tended beds dipped and swayed with the ocean wind and from a distance came the muffled roar of the ranch tractor moving across the feed grain fields.