packed her bags—Louis Vuitton this time—and run away from home again. In terms of distance, it really wasn’t that much farther than she’d run all those years ago, but Sullivan’s Island was light-years away from Charleston in terms of demands on her shattered psyche. She could sit on this porch, swatting lazily at mosquitoes, and never once have to make a decision that she’d come to regret the way she regretted her decision to get engaged to Warren.
She could eat tomato sandwiches on white bread slathered with Miracle Whip for breakfast and an entire pint of peach ice cream for lunch. She could play the radio at top volume and dance around the living room at any hour of the day or night, if she could summon the energy for it. She could go for a swim without waiting a whole hour after eating, and she could track sand through the house, if she felt like it.
In fact, she’d been doing all that for a while now and, she was forced to admit, it was getting on her nerves. She was a social creature. She liked people. She missed her art gallery in Charleston. She was almost ready to start seeing her friends again, at least in small doses.
But she’d made up her mind that she wasn’t going home until she’d come to grips with why the devil she’d been so determined to marry Warren in the first place. There had to be a reason she’d talked herself into being in love with a man who was the complete opposite of every other male she’d ever dated in her life. When she was willing to give Warren credit for anything, she conceded that he’d only saved them both a lot of misery. So why had the broken engagement sent her packing?
It wasn’t the humiliation. Not entirely, anyway. Maggie had never given two figs what anyone thought of her, unlike her mother, who obsessed about everyone’s opinion and had been horrified by her daughter’s broken engagement.
It certainly wasn’t a broken heart. Her ego might have been a little bruised, but her heart had been just fine. In fact, in a very short time she’d found herself breathing a sigh of relief. Not that she intended to admit that to Warren. Let the man squirm.
So, if it wasn’t her heart or her pride that had been wounded, what was it? Maybe nothing more than watching a last desperate dream crash at her feet, leaving her with no more dreams, no more options.
On that disturbing note, Maggie dragged herself out of the rocker and went inside to retrieve another pint of ice cream—chocolate-chocolate chip this time—from the freezer. At this rate she’d be the size of a blimp by the time she decided to go back to Charleston. She shrugged off the possibility and dipped her spoon into the decadent treat. If she never intended to date again, what difference did it make if she was the size of a truck? Or a blimp?
She flipped on the radio and found an oldies station. She preferred country, but wallowing in love-gone-wrong songs at this particular moment in her life struck her as overkill.
She was dancing her way back toward the porch when she spotted three people on the other side of the screen door. Unfortunately, even in the dark, she knew exactly who they were—her best friend, Dinah Davis Beaufort, Dinah’s new husband, Cordell, and the traitorous Warren.
If she’d had the energy, she would have bolted for the back door. As it was, she resigned herself to greeting them like the proper Southern belle she’d been raised to be. She could hear her mother’s words echoing in her head. Company, even unwanted company, was always to be welcomed politely.
But even as she forced a smile and opened the door, she also vowed that the next time she ran away from home, she was going to choose someplace on the other side of the world where absolutely no one could find her.
As interventions went, this one pretty much sucked. Not that Maggie knew a whole lot about interventions, never having been addicted to much of anything—with the possible exception of truly lousy choices in men. She was fairly certain, though, that having only three people sitting before her with anxious expressions—one of them the very man responsible for her current state of mind—was not the way this sort of thing ought to work.
Then, again, Warren should know. He’d probably done hundreds of them for his alcohol- or drug-addicted clients. Hell, maybe he’d even done a few for women he’d dumped, like Maggie. Maybe that was how he’d built up his practice, the louse.
“Magnolia Forsythe, are you listening to a word we’re saying?” Dinah Davis Beaufort demanded impatiently, a worried frown etched on her otherwise perfect face.
Dinah and Maggie had been friends forever. It was one reason, possibly the only reason, Maggie didn’t summon the energy to slap Dinah for using her much-hated given name. Magnolia, for goodness’ sakes! What had her parents been thinking?
Maggie regarded her best friend—her former best friend, she decided in that instant—with a scowl. “No.” She didn’t want to hear anything these three had to say. Every one of them had played a role in sending her into this depression. She doubted they had any advice that would drag her out of it.
“I told you she was going to hate this,” Cordell Beaufort said.
Of everyone there, Cord looked the most relaxed, the most normal, Maggie concluded. In fact, he had the audacity to give her a wink. Because Maggie’s futile attempt to seduce him before Dinah’s return to town last year from a foreign assignment was another reason she was in this dark state of mind, she ignored the wink and concentrated on identifying all the escape routes from this room. Not that a woman should have to flee her own damn living room to get any peace. She ought to be able to kick the well-meaning intruders out, but—her mother’s stern admonitions be damned—she’d tried that not five minutes after their arrival and not a one of them had budged. Perhaps she ought to consider telling them whatever they wanted to hear so they’d go away.
“I don’t care if she does hate it,” Dinah said, her expression grim. “We have to convince her to stop moping around in this house. Look at her. She hasn’t even combed her hair or put on makeup.” She surveyed Maggie with a practiced eye. “And what is that she’s wearing? It looks as if she chopped off her jeans with gardening shears.”
“I’m at the beach, for heaven’s sake! And stop talking about me as if I’ve left the room,” Maggie snapped.
Dinah ignored Maggie and went right on addressing Cord. “It’s not healthy. She needs to come home. She needs to get out and do something. This project of ours is perfect.”
“In your opinion,” Cord chided. “Maggie might not agree.”
Dinah frowned. “Well, if she doesn’t want to help us with that, then she at least ought to remember that she has a business to run, a life to live.”
Maggie felt the last thread holding her temper in check snap. “What life is that?” Maggie inquired. “The one I had before Warren here decided I wasn’t his type and dumped me two weeks before our wedding? Or the humiliating one I have now, facing all my friends and trying to explain how I got it so wrong? Or perhaps you’re referring to my pitiful and unsuccessful attempt to seduce Cord before you waltzed back into town from overseas and claimed him for yourself?”
Of all of them, only Warren had the grace to look chagrined. “Maggie, you know it would never have worked with us,” he explained with great patience, just as he had on the night he’d first broken the news that the wedding was off. “I’m just the one who had the courage to say it.”
“Well, you picked a damn fine time to figure it out,” she said, despite the fact that she’d long since conceded to herself that he’d done exactly the right thing. “What kind of psychologist are you that you couldn’t recognize something like
