was sure.
Chapter Three
Maguire was quite a piece of work, Carolina mused. She needed to understand him, but figuring the man out was no easy task. Some of the puzzle pieces were definitely jagged fits. He was tough. He took charge and wanted everything his own way, and wasn’t big on democracy in a household. He spelled “high-maintenance guy” in any language.
On the surface, he wasn’t a man she’d normally like, much less be attracted to.
Carolina turned the page on her book. The office/library—no surprise—had whole shelves of books on birth defects related to brain function. Tommy had been one of those. And the room, like everything else in the lodge, was fabulous … three walls of fruit-wood bookshelves, a semicircular desk, little ladders to get to the top of the bookshelves, a couch and chair to sit in—and an old-fashioned fainting couch. The fainting couch was in a thick, suedey kind of fabric, and Carolina had taken one look and claimed it the minute she walked in here.
Nobody was getting her off that couch. Not Maguire. Not the army. No one or nothing. She was in love, and that was that.
In the meantime, dusk had already fallen. The day had passed amazingly fast—Maguire did some kind of work, but he’d left her upstairs with a pile of packages to sort through. Clothes. Not hers, but her size, nothing formal or fancy, just jeans and sweatshirts and socks, that kind of thing. And she’d napped. How on earth she could need more rest was beyond her, but apparently her body wanted to zone out every few hours, and there was nothing she could do about it.
Late afternoon, Maguire had pawed through the freezer, and come through with a gourmet French stew that just needed unthawing and heating to be savored. While he’d done that, she’d made her lists, but after dinner, she’d taken great pleasure in doing the dishes—primarily to give Maguire another fit. Apparently she wasn’t supposed to do a thing for herself.
And after all that, they’d both settled in. She’d pounced on her fainting couch with a book on special ed kids, while Maguire had taken the long couch, cocked his stocking feet on the trunk coffee table and was penciling through her lists. Initially he’d done so quietly, but Maguire being Maguire, eventually had to get a pen, a legal pad, to make notes and comments, and eventually he started muttering to himself. Probably because he still thought she couldn’t hear.
“Lobster. Crab. Lobster. Scallops. Hmm. I’m sensing a common theme on your food list. Salmon from Alaska, only really from Alaska. Fresh sweet corn straight from a farmer’s field. Blueberries right off a bush … for Pete’s sake. Has no one ever fed you, girl …?”
He jotted some more scribbles on his legal pad. The last she’d peeked—less than a minute ago—no one had a prayer of reading his writing, including him.
“.Grape leaves. Stuffed, you know, the way the real Greeks do it. Actually, I don’t know, tiger, but I get it that you want authentic. If you’re going to be this easy to please, though, we’re not going to have any fun. This isn’t even challenging. And yeah, I know you can’t hear me. But it’s interesting, having a one-way conversation with a woman who can’t talk back. Kind of every guy’s favorite fantasy … well. Favorite fantasy separate from sex, of course …”
She could hear. Seeing Tommy’s photo had jolted something that morning … but not consistently. Her hearing, the volume of it, had gone in and out for hours now. It was only since dinner that she’d been able to hear anything consistently.
Once he’d hurled himself on the couch with her lists and started muttering, though, she’d heard every word.
She could have confessed that her hearing was back. She intended to come clean, eventually. Even little lies had always bugged her. But since she was distinctly at the most vulnerable disadvantage in this twosome, Carolina figured it was fair to find out what she could—any way she could. And there was an extraordinarily terrific side benefit to her deceit.
His voice.
Hearing the sound of his voice was like a powerful, free turn-on pill, with no risk and no side effects—beyond a tickle of her hormones. The pitch was low, not a bass, but definitely a low tenor, with a roll and timbre to his accent that put a shiver down her spine now and then. Sexy. He was just so altogether hopelessly, helplessly sexy. Those lethally blue eyes. Those all-guy bones of his, the overall look of him, the way he thought, the way he moved. It all came through in his voice. I am man, hear me roar.
It was that kind of voice. A baby-you’re-gonna-love-how-I-kiss voice. A you-can’t-imagine-how-much-trouble-I-can-get-you-into kind of voice.
It was mighty stupid, she knew, to travel even for a minute down that silly road. As sporadically as her hearing was returning, her memory seemed to be resurfacing the same way. Everything wasn’t clear. But she’d recalled enough to make her want to curl up in a closet again, go back to where she’d become so agitated she couldn’t keep food down, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t rest, couldn’t escape. Anywhere.
So maybe it was irresponsible and downright dumb to dwell on Maguire’s voice … but temporarily, it felt like self-preservation. Just listening to him allowed her to push her real life away for a little longer. It was hard to feel too guilty. Nothing was waiting for her in real life but more unsolvable problems and anxiety.
“Okay,” Maguire mumbled. “Moving away from the food list and onto the major life wishes list. And right off the bat, cookie, I can see this list has more potential to be challenging …” He was still obviously talking to himself. He hadn’t lifted his head from the legal pad. “You want to have dinner in a tree house. A real tree house. Hmm. You want fifteen pairs of Italian shoes. No surprise there—the shopping gene was bound to surface sooner or later. You want to sleep in a castle. A real castle. You’d like a weekend at a spa. Now you’re talking. You want to ride in an old MG, like a ‘53, one of those ‘darling ones’ with running boards and all. You want … well, hey. Are you actually listening to this monologue, Carolina?”
Maguire had abruptly looked up. Looked straight at her.
He’d caught her. There was nothing she could do but fess up, so she nodded. “My hearing’s coming back. I can’t make it stay, but I’ve been listening to you talk. And I can hear my own voice. My hearing just seems to fade in and out. It’s not consistent. I don’t understand it.”
“I do. The doctors all explained it the same way. You stopped hearing because your life had become an overwhelming pressure cooker. Remove the pressure, and there was every reason to believe you’d get your hearing back again.”
“But nothing’s changed.” Anxiety nipped at her nerves, then took a serious raw bite. “The pressure and problems are all there, all real. In fact, I have to go home. I have to get up. I have to—”
When she made a move to push off the couch, he interrupted. His voice was quiet, calm. “I’ve got a deal for you.”
“I’m not a make-a-deal kind of person, Maguire. There is no deal. As crazy as it sounds, I haven’t minded being kidnapped, but now … it’s all coming back. I don’t have time to mess around. I have to go home—”
“Hold it, hold it. This is a deal that’s going to work for you. I promise. You want to know how I happened to bring you here, don’t you? So I’ll fill in all the missing information. All you have to do is give me a chance to do that.”
She hesitated. She did want to understand—fiercely—how
